Guest Artist | Carolyn Reed Barritt
Three years ago, I felt like I had hit a plateau with my drawing skills. I wasn't satisfied with the evolution of my work and decided to go in search of a teacher who might help to push me a bit more. I did a little digging and found Carolyn Reed Barrit and, she lives 10 minutes from my house! It was meant to be.!
Once a week, I spend an hour focusing on drawing. Carolyn has taught me the importance of taking time to study my subject. This helps to understand the relationships between the features, the value changes, and the overall composition of the drawing.
Her techniques and philosophy on drawing have taught me to take a step back and analyze my drawing in a new way, and I love that she encourages my self-expression as an artist as well.
So, without further adieu…
When I first began taking lessons, you had me start at the beginning with your six basic concepts and skills using charcoal on paper. Why do you feel these first six lessons are essential for learning to draw in a realist manner?
Hi Renee! Thanks for including me in your guest artist series!
I believe in creating a plausible representational artwork; a person needs to understand how light affects objects, how an object is affected by its surroundings, and to learn a little about perspective. I think these things are important whether an artist wants to draw a still life, or a portrait, or landscape, etc..
In my beginning course, students work on drawing increasingly difficult still life setups that I carefully arrange and light. I talk a lot about really looking at the objects to understand how they exist in space and how everything is affected by its surroundings (other objects, the space around them, the background and foreground, light, etc.). We also work on understanding basic perspective in regards to both man-made and natural objects, and we work on flattening three-dimensional space, translating that to paper, and creating the illusion of three-dimensionality. (Which is mind-bending when you think about it.) All this is important for an artist whose ultimate goal is to work on doing still life or landscapes, or portraiture. It’s difficult to imply three-dimensionality, but it’s even more challenging to create something that feels truly life-like and three dimensional, especially when working from a reference photo.
That might not seem obvious; after all a photo of a person or a tree or a house is a captured image of a three-dimensional, real-life person or tree or house. But even though the subject in a photo is three-dimensional, the camera flattens everything to two dimensions. If you don’t re-interpret your reference photo and think of the person or tree or house as three-dimensional, you end up with an artwork that can feel very flat (another mind-bending thing). If interpreting photos is the artist’s goal and they want their artwork to feel flat (or they don’t care that it feels flat), that’s fine, but if their goal is to create a feeling of living three-dimensionality, then understanding how things exist in space, how light moves over things, how a person or tree or house looks in perspective, is important.
In addition to your in-person teaching, you have developed an online drawing course based on your Six Basic Drawing Concepts. Can you give us an overview of your course?
The on-demand Introduction to Drawing is a shortened version of my in-person course. I go over the same techniques and concepts, albeit in a shorter period of time. Because the lessons are intentionally short, it’s impossible to go over all the things I do in person, but I hope I’ve hit on the most important aspects of each lesson.
The on-demand course includes an additional lesson on mark-making. It’s more about using charcoal. I don’t separate mark-making out into separate lessons in-person — we work on technique and understanding the charcoal throughout all the lessons, but I couldn’t figure out a way to do that online.
In the videos, I encourage viewers to create their own still life setups to work from, but knowing that’s not always feasible, and people can work from the photo of my still life. Hopefully, the concepts come through regardless. These on-demand lessons can be streamed free on my website.
How important is a daily drawing practice?
Like anything else, the more you do something, the better you get at it. If your goal is to work in a realist manner, you have to build your skills, even if you eventually want to work very stylized, so spending a lot of time drawing and painting is important.
When I was working representationally, I was drawing in some capacity five days a week. I belonged to both a weekly, live model portrait group and a weekly live figure drawing group. I regularly did self-portraits, working from a mirror. I also spent a lot of time setting up and drawing still life. I worked on my skills as much as creating artworks. My artworks were planned and then precisely drawn or painted. There was little room for change after I had started working on a piece in earnest.
Now my practice is very different. My artwork is much more immediate, more intuitive. I tend to work intently for short periods, then spend a great deal of time staring at what I’ve done to figure out where the piece needs to go next before going back in and working physically again. My practice is as much contemplation as physical work. I find myself gaining skills while I’m creating, as a lot of what I do is experimental.
I also teach, so a typical week for me still entails my working on art in some capacity five days a week, but now I work on my own art for three days, and I teach classical drawing in private lessons for two days. I try to get into the studio on the weekends, but mostly my weekends are for errands, home-keeping, and all the other normal-life stuff we all need to do.
You are a very accomplished abstract artist, can you tell us a little about the medium you prefer and a little about your work.
Thank-you!
Mostly I use acrylic ink, gesso, and graphite on both paper and canvas, but I also incorporate acrylic paint, oil pastel, wax crayons, and oil stick into my paintings and drawings. I’m also aways experimenting with materials — for instance; I’m currently trying to work with blending calcium carbonate (crushed eggshells) into my paint to introduce more texture. I usually blend color directly on my substrate and do a lot of layering. Sometimes I scratch through the layers using the end of a paintbrush or the pointed end of a bone folder (or anything at hand that can scratch through the surface). I like to combine the focus of line work with fluidity of shape and form. I also work (slowly) on altered books, and (very slowly) on sculptures, which are mostly constructions of beadwork on found wood.
In your opinion, is it essential to understand the basic concepts of drawing to create more expressive or abstract work?
I’m not sure understanding the concepts of classical drawing is important for abstract art, but some knowledge of perspective and how people perceive things is very useful. In abstract work, I think it’s very important to understand composition, color theory, and, to some extent, depending on the artwork, atmospheric, and architectural perspective.
Because I don’t have anything representational in my artworks to anchor the piece in reality (like a person or a house, for instance) I have to rely on intriguing a viewer with composition, color, and balance. My art has to either tell a story or imply a feeling without anything recognizable to help get the viewer into that story or feeling.
I know abstract artists who are amazing classical drawers, and I know abstract artists who have never done any classical artwork at all. I also know classical artists who started their art journey by creating expressive and abstract art, and moved into representational art, and vise-versa. I think what’s essential is to be true to yourself, do the art that most expresses that, and to get there, however, you get there.
One last thing — I want to say something about my shift from representational art to expressive/abstract art as I know some people may wonder, “Why?” especially people after they see my older artwork. So the why: I was a marginally successful illustrator and representational artist who was in tons of exhibitions and regularly received awards. The awards were nice, and they seemed to affirm I was heading somewhere, but I was never personally satisfied with my art. I was constantly working to improve my skills in a never-ending search for perfection. I had no room for expression or growth past the skill. A few years ago, I was invited to create 30, small pen and ink work for a local fundraiser. I said yes with the caveat that because of the short deadline, I would have to force myself to work much more quickly and fluidly than was my norm. I told the sponsor that if I couldn’t pull it off, and if I didn’t like the result, they wouldn’t have anything of mine to sell. (There were many artists involved in this event, so it wouldn’t have been a disaster for me to withdraw.) Not thinking I could pull it off, freed me from seeking perfection; whatever I created didn’t really matter. I worked without reference photos, preliminary drawings, or any planning; I just let myself draw.
When I looked over all the work I had created, I saw interesting linework and expression that was totally lacking in my representation art. I picked out what I thought were the most interesting for the fundraiser, and almost all of them sold at the event (albeit each little artwork was only $40, so that helped, but it still felt really good). After that, I started to focus on working more and more expressively, more abstractly. It was very difficult at first, but it’s the path I’m still on, and my art is still evolving. Ironically, because I practice classical drawing for so many hours every week when I’m teaching and I don’t have the same anxiety about skill, I’m getting better and better at that too.
Sometimes every week is a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde thing for me, as it can be really difficult to transition from classical to abstract. I think a lot of us artists struggle with self-doubt and wonder whether or not we’re on the right path. I gave a lecture on all this a couple of years ago — it’s a topic a lot of people seem to think about. For me, it was an easily ignored, quiet whisper of a voice that said, ‘You do not love this. Change it.” One day, when that little voice started screaming, I finally listened.