Noguchi and Drawing

First off, if you haven’t been to the Noguchi Museum, go. It’s a sublime space to spend time with a sublime artist. (Weekdays you can have it almost all to yourself.)

Second, go now. The current exhibit of animal drawings, is a rare glimpse into a different medium for the artist. Both their own, and evincing a sculptor’s sense of space and movement, they are worth seeing.

And third, if you can, go this coming Sunday. I’ll be there with FIG, leading two sessions of ARE (Aesthetic Relational Exercises). The idea behind ARE is to approach learning to draw as itself a work of art-making. It is not a question of learning-in-order-to-draw, but of drawing as a way of learning. This makes it both more accessible (by not starting out from a lack) and more engaging (by exploring at a more expansive level). At the most rigorous levels of feeling, we are all beginners. (And our own singular experts.)

This Sunday we will be looking, in the spirit of Noguchi, at expanding our own sense of the space our body expresses. Through movement and our sense of touch we will explore the dimensionality of our self-image, and then relate that to the act of making marks on a piece of paper. The intent is to not simply fill out our own self-representation but to understand something of our sense of ourselves as four dimensional expressions and the translation that we can make to the dimensions of the paper. This is both an infinitely complex challenge and an easy experience of finding and staying with relations and movement over time, allowing the solutions to emerge out of the experience.

If you’ve been to one of our Relational Drawing sessions, you will find this an interesting continuation. And if you haven’t, it should prove a beautiful introduction. There is limited registration, so show up early, sign up, and then explore the museum. We’ll get started at 4 & 5pm. Here’s more info.