infuences

i was asked to write about my influences and how i developed the mark making i have now.  its a tough chalenge because i draw from everything around me, as my painting teacher Steve DiGiovanni would say even paintings you dont like offer something to be learned.   you can see his stuff at www.stevedigiovanni.com .  

my old drawing 2 teacher, Chris Durante showed me the beauty of showing where you have been in a drawing and got me working predominantly in pen for along time.  this built to spill poster by jay ryan is a good example of the beauty of showing where you have been.  this poster would not apeal to me as much if he had removed the leg that he redrew on the left side.  Chris also had a strong emphasis on loose gestural line work.  after class my friend Mauricio and i started a drawing group called the burn that also focused on loose gestural drawing.  the drawing rooms were often open so we always took advantage of that.  loud music filled the room as we would t

ake turns posing, sometimes we would stick our bodies through chairs to further confound the form and really force us to look at what we were doing.  other times we played a drawing equivalent of musical chairs where we would play a short song and draw each others portraits, when the song ended so did our drawings.  

my old figure drawing teacher larry morrelli turned me on to allot of great artists that would influence me.  http://www.fimp.net/larryex.html some of his older work can be found here.  he always said, draw with a sense of desperation, thats one thing that really stuck with me.  the constant search was another strong point of emphasis, the strugle to look, to see, and in effect, the strugle to find what is there.  another good larry saying is something along the lines of sometimes you have to destroy something in order to make it better, that one is not stated correctly i feel, but there is a point in drawings often, usualy preceeding the magic 15 miniutes where the drawing just gets worse and worse before everything starts snapping in to place.  another related quo

te is that its better to d

estroy a drawing for the chance of a beautifull drawing than just settle for an ok drawing.  Giacometti was one of the more influential people he turned me onto there were others and i am probably going to continue this post further.