Life drawing session at rixlab with one of our favorite models
Rixlab is the public ecosystem of the Rix Jennings studio. Our 2 hour life drawing sessions accommodate a small group of artists with unobstructed views of the model stand, excellent lighting and individual adjustable tables in an intimate studio environment. We do life drawing workshops and individual coaching sessions that integrate traditional masters’ techniques with innovative approaches developed during 40 years of art school , university and studio teaching. We also do a series of papermaking workshops including Western and Eastern techniques. Rixlab notes is a free monthly email newsletter / blog about drawing and other related ideas sent to our mailing list.
rixlab update info:
August 2024:
Life Drawing Labs are the 2nd and 4th Sundays on a subscription basis. The subscriptions are 3 months and 6 months and are $15 per session. There are openings for individual session substitutes. If you are interested to find out more and to be included on the list, email me.
There are several new workshops now in preparation. Here is a brief prompt for them:
“Making Artist Charcoal, Pastels and Carbon Crayons” This is one of the workshops I have done focusing on making our own materials, this time on crayon type media. Commercial pastels, chalks, stick media may refine the specific qualities using industrial equipment, but artists have always been able to make their own basic materials: we have just for the most part forgotten that art.
“Drawing Without Seeing” This may seem a contradiction, and in fact the workshop is not entirely done blind! But the truth is that vision is so dominant in our culture that we often sever it from the touch, the movement… in more accurate terms, the kinesthetics and haptics that represent the body where the eyes seem to have come to represent the mind. This is a transformative experience for nearly everyone.
“Permission, Play and Process.” When we say we want to learn to draw, what we often mean is that we want to learn to draw like somebody else. Often it means we want to draw “realistically,” something that looks official, credible, that will impress others. Maybe we have some specific artist in mind, Michelangelo or Rembrandt. But instead of chasing after somebody else’s drawing, why not experience that drawing is our birthright as creative, expressive, worthy human beings and go straight for that. This will be based on drawing from the figure.
There are also papermaking workshops:
≈ for modified Japanese sheet forming. This approach uses traditional kozo fiber and the elegant nagashizuki formation of many layers, but a modified mould or sugeta and a western pressing and drying technique that allows us to complete the process in the two-day workshop. Participants will learn the beautiful formation of thin, strong Japanese Washi.
≈ for heavy printmaking paper. It is possible to make heavy, high quality cotton and abaca artists paper specifically for these applications, and in this hands-on workshop we will go all the way from making pulp to sheet forming, pressing, sizing and drying over a weekend.
If you are interested in these workshops at my Houston studio, please inquire by email or using the contact page in this website so I can put you on the mailing list for further information as these workshops take shape.
Take note of the growing collection of rixlab resources on this page below the rixlab notes section. These include DIY instructions for useful tools, audio clips and meaningful documents.
rixlab notes is the free monthly email newsletter on topics of drawing, painting, papermaking and related ideas and includes updates on workshops and events at rixlab. Below are some samples of recent editions to read or download directly. You can request past issues using the index pdf for titles and #s and request free issues or subscribe to receive new issues each month by email using the contact form.
#72 MAKING JOURNALS I have been making my own journals and folios for drawings for several years so I can tailor them to specific needs such as size and paper surface and also so I can bind folders for individual loose drawings into book form for the folios shown on the landing page of this website. This edition of the notes is an overview of the process and I do journal making workshops for small groups.
#76 WHY ARE SCULPTORS' DRAWINGS SPECIAL? Merit Oppenheim is primarily known for her objects and sculptures, but her work at the Menil includes drawings and these follow on with last month’s topic of “bad” drawing. It also extends our idea in another direction. Sculptors’ drawings offer us a special insight. They are often notations, which seems wonderfully unselfconscious. They exemplify something germinal and essential about drawing itself: it is an attempt to do something that can’t quite be done. We are always drawing something we can’t see even when there is ostensibly something in front of us. We are never just recording. And for sculptors, there is not even the pretense of making a picture. Instead there is the urge to unwrap the idea of a form and reach inside its embodiment. To the extent that drawing is not in their comfort zone, this very discomfort and the dissonance of the task gives sculptors’ drawings a particular traction. Austin Kleon reminded me of Henri de Toulouse- Lautrec’s famous Zen-like exclamation quoted by Henri Matisse: “At last I don’t know how to draw!” How much we struggle to learn and suddenly we pass Toulouse-Lautrec going the opposite way. I am in the midst of a new body of drawing and I find the more I do, the harder it is to climb out of the aesthetic groove I have worn, the harder it is to hold on to the germ of truth and freedom I started with. And of course, holding on is exactly the issue. I think it is a razor’s edge, the narrow path we negotiate between clawing our way up toward some kind of competence and the wise voice of letting go, daring us to draw by the seat of our pants. So much of what we have to do to reclaim our own confidence is to find permission wherever we can. My own search for permission led me this week from a visit to the Menil, to thinking about sculptors’ drawing, to Austin Kleon’s Keep Going in which he quotes from Sol LeWitt’s letter to sculptor Eva Hesse, to looking up that particular correspondence in depth, while at the same time writing about sculptor’s drawings and coming all the way back to permission.
#79 FLUENCY AND THE BARCELONA DRAWING MANIFESTO. I have often said that drawing isn’t in the hand. But something is in the hand, in the arm, in the body. There is a sort of groove you finds that has to do with muscle memory and is one kind of fluency. It feels graceful, athletic even, confident that the stroke has traction as if magnetized. This comes from hours of drawing, though not necessarily 10K. We need some fluency, we need that physical-optical resonance of our instrument. The problem with fluency is habit. Fluency becomes a path of least resistance, natural to follow but then hard to escape. The issue is how not to follow it mindlessly but lead it or at least be abreast of it. The eye might show us what it wants to see, but I think less by giving us a fixed goal than by inviting and channeling our responses on the fly. There is some capacity in us that recognizes when something falls right or when it has become stale. We notice when our drawing surprises us and holds our own attention, and when it doesn’t. These are subtle things that have nothing to do with making pictures. Drawing lets us deal with these subtleties because it lies so close both to the conscious and unconscious mind and also to its own roots. It is never far from lines incised in rock or clay, from streaks or scars on skin, from gestures accompanying vocal utterance or used for shaping wood or stone, from signs and symbols and maps. However far we refine our drawing, the path back down to the very first roots is still there, as close as a sharp palm-sized stone or a charred stick. Fluency is hard won and hard to let go. But we can lose it pretty easily simply by neglect as our Covid experience reveals. The world interferes. Fear, anxiety, conflict, complication are seldom good for the spirit or for the art unless we find some spark of courage and resistance in them. And this is always a negotiation even in the best of times, because just when we arrive where we think we want to be, we see the thread we were following doesn’t stop there and if we stop, it leaves us behind. So we drag our skills and our understandings along behind and they are never more than barely enough. Robert Bly once said that the old stories didn’t actually end “happily ever after.” They were great ordeals with small redemptions. This isn’t to suggest depression. It is about gathering courage and not going to sleep, not letting comfort take over. It is about the spark of resilience we all have claim to. As I was writing this, thinking about resilience and spirit, I thought of the Drawing Manifesto I have kept close for years. Since it was no longer available via my old website, I added the pdf to my new website and did some research into the two people who wrote it in 1979.
#85 CHAOS AND THE ARC OF CREATION “The confusion is not my invention. We cannot listen to a conversation for five minutes without being acutely aware of the confusion. It is all around us and our only chance now is to let it in. The only chance of renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess. It is not a mess you can make sense of... What I am saying does not mean that there will henceforth be no form in art. It only means that there will be a new form; and that this form will be of such a type that it admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else. To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.” Samuel Beckett The creative process has always been an arc, in which the actual making is only part. The 3 part cosmology of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva tells us creation is inextricably joined to destruction and conservation. In the west we cite entropy, the gradient for all things to move toward lower states of order and we set against that the life force. It is natural for us as living beings and maybe particularly as artists to extoll the part of the process that is making, but it is not wise to pretend the other parts of the cycle don't exist. In our culture it seems especially uncomfortable to inhabit the disintegration part of the cycle or the periods of transition between cycles when creation seems absent. I think chaos and the creative cycle of art are closely linked. Beckett speaks to that and invites us to look unflinchingly into the mess, not to build a wall around it, or figure it out, nor surrender to it and become like the mess itself. He tells us we need to work in that space. I have been stuck lately, trying to escape the other parts of the cycle which then become like a great hole of absence between one creation and the next. But influences like Beckett ask me to look into that in-between that is not vacant at all, but a different presence. Instead of digging in my heels I have tried to let go, and I get some experience of fey freedom and energy that has been bound up by all the desperate holding on. I think that energy is a taste of what shamanic practice is about, not just outrageous appearance or drugs. Behind the performance there is the authentic seeking of patterns of meaning that are masked by the chaos and unseen in our routine or cynicism or despair. The struggle with the chaos we experience in the microcosm of our studio laboratory may be what art making is about after all, and I think it is our path to find a living relationship with the mess.
Downloadable PDF of all the rixlab notes since 2015. You can request any of these sent free by email using the contact form on this website.
some rixlab resources
The Barcelona Drawing Manifesto
Terry Barrett’s principles of interpretation
Michael Meade tells the story of Proteus and the problem of change
How to make a Claude glass
How to make an artists’ drybox
images from life drawing workshops
images from papermaking workshops