Art Books

commons.wikipedia.org

While visiting family in Idaho over Christmas, my uncle Roland mentioned to me that he had some art books he wanted to get out of boxes and back into the classroom. He said, about the art classes he teaches (and has taught for as along as I can remember): "We're no longer a research institution." Siena has a good library, and through Connect NY we have access to the libraries of 17 other schools, but some books are just better to have on hand in the classroom. The Idahoan in me prefers to have squirreled away a stash of books off-grid.

I'm pretty excited about the books. Some of them I remember leafing through when I was a student in Roland's classes. Charles le Clair's The Art of Watercolor, Andrew Loomis's Drawing the Heads and Hands, and two catalogs of the paintings of Frank Frazetta and W. R. Leigh. Loomis' books in particular were very important to me in learning to draw the human body. Loomis presents the subject as a process of simplification and abstraction that is refined with observation. It is a very straight forward way to draw the body, but as with any abstract concept, has to be played around with and thoroughly internalized before it can be put into practice. I struggled with it for a while. It wasn't until I had learned a alternative method based on sighting and measurement, that Loomis's method really clicked. His process is essentially the way I draw today, and is the way I've conceived and drafted both paintings of St. Kateri Tekakwitha.

I'm very grateful to Roland Giampaoli for sharing these books with me and I look forward to using them in the classroom. They're instructive, but they're also inspiring to the imagination. They're better to have in the classroom than buried in a library. I just need to find a bookcase with glass doors so I can make them available in my classroom, without leaving them out in the open.