For three full days we will help you to draw in perspective. You will also learn to see the world better. By focusing on the few rules of perspective—demanding a fixed position and gaze—you will acquire the discipline to accurately draw on site. This is not a sight-size method—which is not, in fact, a Renaissance approach—since it requires constant back and forth reference from the drawing to the subject. If you look at centuries of artists drawing in front of a subject, you will see them working in two different orientations, the view and the canvas or page. Even in Velazquez’ Las Meninas the picture plane is not aligned with the artist’s canvas. The advantage of this truly Old Master approach is that you train your visual memory while you train your hand. Not only documenting the world in perspective, but remembering it, you are learning to become facile so that you can invent in perspective, which was always the goal. Not transcription, in other words, but perception.
After three days you'll have the principles in hand to apply to whatever perspectival subject you choose, whether in one or two-point. An ideal preparation, then, for an adventure of discovering the Italian Renaissance landscape, wherever you choose to go, in whatever medium you choose: cities, gardens, palaces, or churches, from Venice to Palermo, in pencil, watercolor, or oil. |