BM Boot Camp

I mentioned in my last post that I had tried to “loosen up” in my approach to life drawing. But loosen up from what?

These drawings may provide some sense of how I used to gravitate to detail.

After I finished art college in 1983, I started to go to the British Museum to make very detailed drawings on the spot. It was a sort of “boot camp” for getting past the discomfort of people looking over my shoulder while I was working. The more a drawing neared completion, the more they looked. And I discovered that crass generalizations about particular nationalities have a grain of truth. Americans wanted to talk, Italians sat next to me (sometimes a very welcome distraction…) and English people – well they frequently pretended they hadn’t been looking in the first place.

The single portrait here is of a friend, Marie Thérèse, known as MT. That was genuinely her daily styling at the time. I worked from photographs of her, but Ramesses was drawn directly in the Egyptian Galleries – from life as it were!

Amenhotep III – red granite,

Wooden Statue from the Tomb of Ramesses IX,

Squatting Figure of Ry, High Priest of Amun,

Egyptian Sculpture Gallery,

Amenemhat III,

Four Statues of the Goddess Sakhmet,

Three Statues of Senwosret III,

Metope IV from the Parthenon Sculptures,

Ramasses II,

Bronze Figure of Ptah,

Colossal Statue of a Man from the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus,

Four Roman Marble Heads,

Two Statues of the Goddess Sakhmet,

Roman Bronze Statue of a Young Man,

Ramasses II & MT,