Dan Thompson, The Planar Head, Modeling The Nose in Clay

by Michela Mansuino

Level Three student

One of the most beautiful drawings of the nose, and something many artists aspire to, is that of Stephen Rogers Peck, from his "Atlas of Human Anatomy." After modeling this in clay and drawing it from life, I think about the nose in a very different way. I see it structurally in my mind's eye and see it organically in front of me. And, it's all thanks to our instructor, Dan Thompson.

To help us, Dan started with a giant nose. This has a straight mast in the center, representing the columella.

 

To this structure, then, two strips of clay are added, representing the wings of the nostrils - the alar. Dan uses toothpicks to hold it all in place.

 

Two more strips are added, representing the alar cartilage.

 

 

Four small cones are added, filling the negative spaces in between these strips.

 

Dan demonstrates the attachments one more time on his planar head. He starts by adding clay around the base of the nose like this:

 

 

He works the clay into place, making a platform on which the nose will be built.

 

On top of this shaped platform, Dan adds a slab of clay, a triangular wedge, which represents the "mast" of the nose, or the columella.

 

To the mast, then, Dan adds the two strips of clay that represent the wings of the nostrils.

 

Emanating from the tear duct, traveling down the length of the nose and tucking under the wings, are the two strips representing the alar cartilage. Notice how these strips start by twisting and then meet at the tip of the nose before they dive under the wings.

 

The negative spaces are then filled with four small cones.

 

This what my own planar head looked like when I attached the slab  representing the mast of the nose.

 

When I added the strips representing the wings and the alar or wing, I had attached them too low. See here how Dan corrected my attachment on the right, making the wing much higher in relation to the tip of the nose, where the alar meets in front and creates the "ball" of the nose.

 

I also started to attach the "sling of the muzzle. This is a thin strip of clay going on either side of the face, starting at the tear duct and wrapping around and under the jaw, making "the canopy of the jaw."

 

 

 

 Thanks to Dan Thompson, I know I see the nose much better now.

 

Tha Planar Head with Dan Thompson: The Ear as a Structural Door

by Michela Mansuino

Level Three student

The most underrated form on the head and one that gets far too little attention in most portraits is the human ear. It could be thought of as a door - with a beach ball holding it open. The concha (inner ear) being an immense, concave ball. In surer terms, the ear could be thought of as a rotated, extended panel on the lateral plane of the head.


We started our adventure into the modeling the human ear by rolling out two slabs of clay into rectangles approximately the size of what the nose should be. The slab should be a little thick, something you can remove clay from.

We lined the panels on our sculptures and attached them, lining them up with the cheekbone staple we had modeled the week before. We compared it to our skull.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once the panels were in place, we scooped out a bit in the center, like a giant sink, and gave it depth, then we added clay to the back. Here Dan demonstrates the depth of the "sink" in a giant ear.

In the back we added clay.

 

 

 

For the helix, we rolled out a big coil and kept it thick, but the coil also had a flat part. The coil then went around and dove into the concha, just as the Lincoln Tunnel dives into Manhattan.

 

 

 

Here I have the "doors" on my planar head in place and with the "sink" pushed in.

 

 

 

Here I have the coil of the helix in place and diving into the concha.

 

 

 

A diagram of how the shapes should be thought of conceptually.

 

 

 

The concept abstract.

 

 

 

The giant ear Dan built to demonstrate the concept.

 

 

 

Sculpting the forms from observation and focusing on depth. Here is Dan's planar head with the ear in place.

 

 

 

 

Notice how the tragus and antitragus are twin forms. The tragus is a form that could be thought of as two twisting cones according to Dan.

 

 

 

Here you can see the twisting cones of the tragus in an anatomy book.

 

 

 

 

From now on I will expect to see more refined ear and cheekbone shapes in the portraits I paint.

 

 

Nelson Shanks painted beautiful ears in his many portraits, like this one, which is extremely revealing for the subject. (Detail of the portrait of Pope Paul the II, by Nelson Shanks)

 

Look out for my next blog on the Planar Head on "The Nose"

 

The Planar Head with Dan Thompson

by Michela Mansuino
Third-year Student

It's 6:45 a.m. Wednesday and I'm radiantly happy as I climb out of bed realizing that Dan Thompson is probably, at this very minute, already driving down from New York to teach his now notoriously famous class at Studio Incamminati - THE PLANAR HEAD IN CLAY

 

I don't know how he does it, driving down to Philly, a three-hour trip, teaching for seven hours at Studio Incamminati, and then driving all the way back to New York - 13 hours of non stop energy... I find myself saying a prayer under my breath that he is okay as I drink my coffee and get ready to be the monitor for the class. 

 

We begin with a homemade armature and around 30 lbs. of Chavant Professional Plastelline.

 

 

 

For future heads, I make a detailed study of the Home Depot parts and other materials needed to make the armature.

 

We start by going to our armature and begin massing in clay, the “light bulb” shape, thinking about the carrying angle of the head and how the pole of the armature will be offset by it.

The size of the ball and egg shape is calculated to be a bit bigger than the skull we are working from, which is life size, so as to have room to make the planes a little exaggerated. We exaggerate them in order to learn from them.

                                                                   Our skull

 

 

Dan Thompson lectures on the mother planes of the head, following drawings by John H. Vanderpoel, in his book "The Human Figure."

 

 

From these Vanderpoel drawings, Dan instructs us where to make our first cuts on the mass of clay we have shaped on our armatures.

 

These diagrams are a decoded version of the planar head, step by step. This is where we start.

 

 

 

 

Dan models the mother planes in this manner:

 

 

 

Once we have accomplished this on our sculptures, Dan moves on to demonstrate the carving out of the tilt line - he uses a "dough cutter"  to make the cuts. He recalls where he found the thing, having thought it had looked like an amputation tool from the Civil War. If you see a painting of a nude in the background, that's Kathleen Moore's black and white form study from another class, hanging on the wall. We surround ourselves with our best work so that we may learn from each other.

 

Intermittently, between carving the planes of the planar head in clay, we draw and paint from the model. We have done two other exercises to further re-enforce our structural understanding  of the planar head.  These are:

1. Drawing the head two ways, side by side, one intuitively and the other structurally.

 

2). Painting the head two ways, side by side, one intuitively and the other structurally.

 

After a what seems to be five minutes, the day is over and I look forward to next Wednesday.  I'm worried Dan has a long trip home still. It's all going to be alright, so look for my blog on Dan Thompson next month for the continuation of the planar head in clay.  We will be carving and attaching the staple of the jaw that is the cheekbone, and the ear.

 

Yours Truly, Michela

 

For my blog on Studio Incamminati, I would like to continue with the subject of our still life drawing class, level one.  These pictures were taken at the end of our first semester, in December, 2013.

Here, our instructor, Katya Held, is giving us a group critique in front of the still life and at our easel.

Our still life set ups look very different depending on which angle they are seen from.  When we set them up, we make sure they look good from four or five different views.  We spend time adjusting the light, which is fixed to a boom on a sturdy light stand. 

We always start with a thumbnail sketch to block in the basic value relationships.  The thumbnail is kept simple, done in five values.  In this picture, you can see student Jason Jenkins continually comparing his thumbnail to his larger drawing and his larger drawing to the actual still life in front of him.

Student Jason Jenkins' drawing after two days.

From a slightly different angle, Anna Sang Justice’s drawing after two days.

Student Lyn Snyder's view and composition after two days.

From across the room, and a very different view of the still life, student Dale Longstreth's drawing after two days.

Our group had a still life life that was completely different, but it looked good from various angles.

One of the biggest decisions is whether the composition will look better vertical or horizontal.

I drew two thumbnails from this angle before I decided I wanted to compose it in a vertical format.

You can see from student Wendy Wagner Campbell’s drawing, that the still life was made up of many elements that were the same in range of values, with only two white and one black.

My favorite was this view of the set up that student Hope La Salle had.  Hope has kept her five values consistent throughout the drawing.

I’ll end here with a bit of writing by John Henry Fuseli (1741 - 1825) Swiss, on composition, because it  has everything to do with making pictures. 

“COMPOSITION, in its stricter sense, is the dresser of invention, it superintends the disposition of materials.  Composition has physical and moral elements: those are

     perspective - unity

     light - propriety

     shade - perspecuity

Without unity it cannot span its subject.

Without propriety it cannot tell the story.

Without perspecuity it clouds the fact with confusion, destitute of light and shade it misses the effect, and heedless of perspective it cannot find a place”  Fuseli

Update=Repainting the steps with another layer of paint and adding more detail.

In the process of finishing "Arches". Something I usually do at the beginning and end of the painting. I call it "threading". It is a superimposed grid which subdivides the rectangle in such a way as to make visible the eyes of the rectangle. Very useful and completely invisible albeit for in an architectural way. Juliette Aristides uses this method and you can read about it in her book "Classical Painting Atelier". I highly recommend her book.

I take a very personal approach to teaching.  Here I take time to show a student how to focus on the subject.

In my studio. The latest painting for Cesco's Osteria is called "Arches". I'd like to put it on a wall closest to the door, a wall that embraces the ramp where people walk through to get to the main dining halls. This wall can also be seen from the Co2 Lounge. "Arches" and "Pietrafitta Panorama" will both be seen from the Co2 Lounge.

While "Arches" is drying and while I have these half tones mixed up for the sky, I am going to address a very real problem in "The San Gimignano Sweep".  The problem was first called to my attention by a fellow artist, one with an exceptionally good eye {Jay Pigeon}.  He saw that the sky was not transitioning smoothly in value from light blues at the horizon to dark blues at the top.  

Here is a detail of what the threads look like while I paint in the right value in between the bands.

I am using a different compositional format for the "threading" of this 3 X 4 foot landscape painting. I learned about "banding" when I studied the Greek Vases from the Attic period {circa 600 BC}. Apparently, the vases were divided into fifths, fourths and thirds, are these proportions were repeated throughout the shape of the vessel and also the decoration of it.  I divide my landscapes like this, too.  Here I have threaded the upper two-thirds.  I have subdivided the one-fifth band twice as much because here the hue and value of the sky should transition more times since its position in space is the farthest. 

After threading the bands of sky in "The San Gimignao Sweep", I painted in transitioning values from light at the horizon to darker blues up top.  It made the painting look bigger some how.

This is a picture after one painting session I spent changing "The San Gimignano Sweep" to correct the composition, to keep the eye trapped inside the picture plane.  It started with the sanding out of the elements and then the painting in of the right value.  It is so important to know what to edit in a landscape, and what to add or subtract to make it work.

I spent the whole day yesterday at the National Gallery of Art, at the West Wing.  I was looking for answers.  What is it that makes those Constable landscapes so compelling?  What does Corot do to his landscapes to keep my eye trapped inside the picture?  How does Courbet get such a dramatic effect in his landscapes?  And after looking intensely at these masters I felt very inspired indeed.

Being under the influence, I pulled out my Bamboo digital pad and hooked it up to my Adobe Photoshop program and proceeded to "FIX" the things that bothered me in the "San Gimignano Sweep".

This is what I came up with and this is now what I have to change in the 3 X 4 foot painting.  I feel thoroughly motivated to work on it now.  I know what to do next.

Today {March 13th} was the first day I have been out Plein Air Painting since I was standing by the vineyards of Montagnana in September 2011.  Being outside on a day like today was easy because it was so warm and sunny and there was barely any wind.  Every day I will photograph my painting so you can see the progress.  This is how the painting looked at the end of the first day.

Today was day two of this year's plein air painting session of the Cherry Blossoms on the Tidal Basin. The weather was so spectacular that the water was almost still for most of the day.  It was so easy to paint the reflection of the monument in the water as it moved in slow ripples coming towards me in space and foreshortened.  A handful of blossoms opened on my tree and the rest kept getting bigger and fatter, ready to burst.  Ross Spears, the tree documentarist and filmmaker stopped by and explaned to me how the trees form these buds in June and they lie dormant till the Spring.  Then James from the Washington Post stopped by and took sixty pictures of me painting with the last rays of light hitting my canvas. I will have to buy the Post every day now to see if my picture will be there!!!!  A glorious day.

This is what my painting looked like after the second plein air day, {March 14th, 2012}. 

Day three on the Tidal Basin {March 15th, 2012}.  The weather was warm and sunny again.  But by 3:00 PM the wind arrived and the mood all changed.  The water got choppy so I concentrated on the trees and the blossoms, which were opening up all over.

This is what my painting looked like after the third day {March 15th, 2012}  Although I would really like to go tomorrow to paint {March 16th, Friday}, the weather forecast is calling for rain. Perhaps Saturday will be the sunny day when all the trees are blooming.

On Saturday, March 17th, the weather was sunny and warm.  The blossoms seemed to be popping open all over the place.  A nice fellow named Sloan, from George Washington University came by and interviewed as one one of his broadcasting assignments.  

This is what my painting looked like after the fourth day.

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