As a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Art Department, I take my Beginning Drawing students to the Cast Collection Gallery often. I wanted to take the opportunity to make a posting here on the Musings blog to both highlight the great work of my students – many of whom are not Art Majors or Minors – as well as provide them with a forum to respond to their experience at the Cast Gallery. Obviously, an added benefit of sharing their works and words is to promote the value of the Museum of Art and Archeology here on campus; it really is a useful, dynamic presence here at Mizzou.
Above: my own demo drawing from this semester (Fall 2009).
I love taking my students to the Cast Gallery mostly because it provides them with a chance to really engage with a context of physical history that they may not often get. These plaster casts function not as mere objects. They are resonators through space and time, sublimely powerful in their innate ability to evoke the human presence of the past and showing keen-eyed students that real, living, breathing, feeling, believing, making, thinking, human beings do indeed reach out across the centuries. That fact of the physical artifact – and all the meaning it necessarily carries with it socio-politically, theologically, aesthetically, and on and on – is an undeniable reality. By focusing on these works, by spending time with them, rendering them in graphite on paper, students forge a real communion with that living past. It’s an exercise that I believe will stay with my students far beyond my class or their time at the University of Missouri. Their work in the Cast Gallery stands in sympathy with the truth folk singer Utah Phillips declares in his storytelling narratives when he shouts, “The past didn’t go anywhere, did it?”
It’s a remarkably important lesson to learn. Now let me present some of the work of my students and show a few images of them at work.
Above: drawing by Mallory Moser
Above: Mallory at work
Above: drawing by Amy Winschel
Above: students Melissa Hoefer, Briton Powe, and Katie Doerhoff at work
Above: drawing by Megan Earley
Above: student Dylan Bannecke at work
Above: drawing by Hayley Brockman
Above: student Robert McAnelly at work
So if you’ve worked at the Cast Gallery – past or present – feel free to post below about your experiences. What does it mean to you to work from the Casts?
Tags: Art Department, Cast Gallery, Drawing, Matthew Ballou
[...] the Cast Gallery of the Art and Architecture Department of the University of Missouri. I created a post on Art and Architecture’s Blog, Musings, explaining why I continue to take my students to work from the casts. Check it [...]
Drawing at the Cast Gallery was definitely one of the hardest compositions I have had to do so far in my art classes. Because I am also in an Ancient and Medieval Art History class, I had studied in the Cast Gallery before and had learned about the casts there as well as time period in which they are from. It was interesting to get a chance to create something I had already learned so much about.
Recreating Diskobolos, or the Discus Thrower, was extremely difficult for me. He was positioned to look like he was caught in mid motion which made it a challenge to draw due to the twist of the torso and odd way the head and neck were constructed. Another factor that made this particular piece difficult was the fact that the body was unproportional. Even though I had trouble with the construction lines and getting the actual placement of the body parts in the correct position, I did notice that my ability to use the shadows and highlights on the body got a lot better. After working on the shading of the body I was able to better see where the limbs were suppose to be placed and what measurement were incorrect. I then went back and fixed the areas that I had trouble with (some parts I had to rework multiple times). I liked that we were given 4 days to work on our compositions because I have realized that I tend to take a lot longer to reach totality than most.
Even though the Cast Gallery was a challenge, I can definately see that having to do this composition has helped me in later drawings that I have done in this class and others. My ability to ‘blur my eyes’ and see just the darks and lights without seeing a form has improved sense then.
The thing I enjoyed most about being at the Cast Gallery was that the sculptures are all the same color and it makes drawing in black and white a lot easier for me. I have a problem when drawing colors to decipher which one is actually darker with lighting and shading.
The main thing I tried to work on at the Cast Gallery was making sure my drawing was not too linear, I tried to work on shading objects in more rather than just drawing the outlines of them. I also feel like I improved my artwork at the Cast Gallery by achieving even shading.
The cast gallery was intimidating. With no where other than the floor to sit, we all had to crane our necks to be able to see our looming statues. The details in them were easy to see, but much harder to render on paper. However, the fact that making casts of statues is no longer allowed, and the fact that therefore we are still sitting among rare pieces was humbling. The lighting in the gallery remains pretty much the same, which is nice. Another difficult thing to capture was the way the lights would have different values, casting different shadows under hands, feet, and robes. We were in there for what? Two weeks? I felt like I came out a better drawer.
At first I was nervous to go to the cast gallery. I had been in there before and from what I remember the casts were built tall, and they were highly detailed. When we walking in there on the first day I just thought to myself how I wasn’t going to think too much about what I was drawing and just go with the flow. I found a comfortable place to sit, turned on my iPod, and started to draw the Discus Thrower. In the beginning it took me a while to get the legs right, but after that it seemed like I was on a roll. The lighting on the casts’ was very spaced out, and trying to show that seemed almost impossible, but I couldn’t think that way I just had to draw what I saw. Overall I feel like this was my best drawing. It seemed like everyone enjoyed being there and I wouldn’t mind going back there again even if it was on my own time.
Drawing in the cast gallery was exciting for me. This has been my first drawing class and so when I started the class I was really intimidated. But after a few weeks I was taught to site and measure and really “see” with my eyes instead of just looking. Then when we moved onto charcoal I learned how to use value and that was a turning point for me I think. I was able to really give my drawings dimension and I was finally impressed with my own work. After a few weeks of charcoal though we went to the cast gallery and we had to go back to using graphite for our drawings. I was hesitant to do this because I was really starting to catch onto the charcoal, using masses of value instead of lines and when we started drawing in the cast gallery again it was hard for me to start my drawing in that way.
It was a really good experience and challenge for me though. I chose to draw an very muscularly detailed statue so I didn’t exactly help my case. It was hard to get started drawing at the cast gallery but once I did I think I saw a major improvement from my previous drawings I had been doing in graphite. At first when I knew we had four class periods to spend in the cast gallery I was wondering how I was going to fill my time but by the last day I was wishing I had more time. It was really interesting to see how my drawing came along because I kept having to change the size of things and move pieces around but once I started shading and bringing value into my drawing it really started to change and I began to see how I could use masses of value with graphite in the same way as the charcoal which was really rewarding. I have always been intimidated by drawing the human figure too because it is so complex so drawing the cast gallery definitely got me out of my comfort zone in many ways.
The hardest part for me I think was getting the different values to match what I was actually seeing, especially because the background was lighter than my subject which was something I was not used to. Even though the cast was a whitish plaster, there were so many different shades and that was hard to grasp at first. It was really remarkable though because after spending those two weeks in the cast gallery and heading back into the classroom I could tell that it had really helped me and pushed me forward.
I think drawing in the cast gallery is a very unique experience because you’re surrounded by life size pieces, if not bigger, of famous artwork. Having to draw the casts meant that we had to inspect every aspect and inch of them which gives you a new level of appreciation for what the artist has created. Though it was hard to draw, I can’t imagine creating a statue to be that detailed and at such large sizes. No matter how many images I had seen of some of the casts or the actual sculptures, I was unable to really appreciate them until they were in my presence in 3D. Having to take those casts and transform them back into a two-dimensional piece of art that does it some kind of justice was quite the challenge.
The cast gallery was really interesting to see these casts of achient scupltures here on campus. Seeing them in the real light in front of me made then more intimidating from their size and quality of art. I first chose one dressed in a suit armor but decided to move to a differnt nude statue which turned out suprisingly well after restarting and working in more detail with the pencils over our time spent in the gallery. Overall, I enjoyed the time we spent there, becasue it was great a lerning expirence for sure. These casts were so much larger than boxes or tubes I had tried to proportialize in the past, which got me really frustrated but i eventually worked to see through my eyes.
When I first heard we were going to draw at the Cast Gallery, I thought I would never be able to come out of there with a composition I was proud of. I had been to the Cast Gallery previously for two different history classes (Greek and Art) and all I could remember was how detailed and grand every piece in it was. I chose Venus because of the beautiful contrast between her robed lower half and bare upper half, and got to work. To my amazement, after two weeks of struggle I actually loved my final drawing.
The hardest part for me was to get past the notion that the cast was white and therefore should be the value of the white paper underneath. Upon closer examination I realized that the entire composition in fact had some degree of value to it, and so every inch of my paper should have some graphite shading. Next, I tried to overcome my nerves by not staying in one area of my drawing for too long. Her robe had so much intricate detail that it overwhelmed me quite a bit, so I opted to work the whole drawing continuously rather than fully rendering any one specific area before moving on. The outcome ended up being a much richer and truer depiction than I had ever previously created.
Being able to work in the Cast Gallery provided exactly what I think I needed to really push my skills at this time. It was a challenge for sure, but it is such a welcoming and peaceful space that nothing really seems too difficult while you are actually sitting there. I have a newfound respect for the casts too, now that I have gone past merely admiring them and have actually interacted with them on a more personal level.
When I learned we would be spending the next couple weeks in the cast gallery I was excited because I thought a change of scenery and a change of pace would be nice. I also enjoyed the thought of drawing a statue, rather than a still life. When we arrived at the cast gallery I chose to draw the Venus de Milo. I chose her because she is such an iconic figure around the world. Though I enjoyed drawing at the cast gallery, I did find parts of it to be challenging. My biggest challenge was probably getting the figure’s facial details correct. I also think that drawing with graphite is more challenging than charcoal, and since we were required to do this in graphite it posed a little problem for me. This is the first drawing class I have ever taken and it has truly been a wonderful experience. I must say that I was very nervous when I first started this course, but after several weeks I began to feel much more comfortable, and my drawing class has become a good, comfortable environment for me to work in. I feel like I have really learned a lot and I can tell my skill has improved. Aside from my personal artistic skills improving, I have employed a much greater appreciation for art as a whole, not even just drawing.