#drawing

Supposedly Marinetti's Futurist manifesto singled out exactly this kind of quiet, moonlit mood as something painters needed to get over — funny seeing the movement's own future star drawing it a few years earlier.

This is chalk on paper — the kind of sheet that was a step towards something else rather than the thing itself. He's said to have burned a lot of his own drawings late in life, supposedly so nobody would ever see the working-out behind the finished stuff. Ones like this got out anyway, and now they're framed and lit the same way the paintings are.

Sketches like this came out of a few months tagging along with a French mission to North Africa, according to Wikipedia — notebooks filled up on the trip, then the big painting worked out later, back home. One journey he kept mining for years afterwards.

Apparently this is one of a series where van Doesburg took a nude model and kept flattening her into blocks and lines, step by step, until almost nothing human was left — part of what pushed him toward the grid paintings De Stijl is known for.

I couldn't find much on this one beyond the title — it's a drawing, and the saint part looks almost like an excuse to draw the view behind him.

Apparently he wrote in mirror script his whole life, which is why the note wrapped around this looks backwards rather than just badly handwritten. This was a private study of human proportion, not made for anyone else to see — and it's said to be so fragile now that it rarely leaves storage.

Before he helped start De Stijl, van Doesburg apparently spent a stretch working through Cubism, breaking a room and a figure down into flat, overlapping planes like this one. It's one of the pieces people use to trace how he got from drawing people to painting nothing but lines and blocks.

This is one of several studies Michelangelo made while working out the Libyan Sibyl for the Sistine Chapel ceiling — the same sheet has more sketches on the back, including a small seated figure that never made it into the fresco. Apparently he drew from a male studio model even though the finished sibyl reads as a woman, which is why the anatomy here looks so unmistakably male.

From what I can find he was still teaching himself to draw when he made this — no training, just prints of an older painter's peasant scenes copied over and over until the figures came right. He kept going back to this same striding sower for years afterwards.

This is apparently a working sketch — Velázquez roughing out how a soldier's back and stance might sit before he committed anything to canvas for a much bigger scene.

Windmills like this show up again and again in Mondrian's early sketches — they say he treated the subject almost like a scale exercise, working the same dark, misty mood over and over before he gave up landscape for good.