Bringing the Art to You Week #40 Untitled Chair from Series (A-Q) Seventeen Drawings - Drawing P & Drawing Q 1945-50 , ink on paper, approx. 12” x 10”. The essential drawing exercises most artists receive early on in art class are free-hand drawing exercises such as gesture drawing and contour drawing. In gesture drawing one is presented with a life model to learn to do studies capturing the pose and movement of the figure. In contour drawing, the aim is to outline the shape and volume of the subject matter, which can be a figure or an object, and to train your hand to copy your eye's movement. In blind contour drawings specifically, the idea is not to look at the paper at all but rather focus completely on the subject matter. The intent is to place your pen/pencil on the paper and begin to follow the contours of the subject with your eyes while your hand follows the same movement on the paper. all this without you taking your eyes off the subject. The beauty of contour drawings is that they can be done of virtually anyone or anything around, they do not require a studio setting. They also afford the artist a drawing experience that relies more on sensation than perception. Dusti Bongé, who never received formal training in an academic setting, and didn’t take studio classes until well into her career as an artist, nonetheless knew (of course) what exercises to do to continually hone her skills. Here we have two very nice blind contour studies Dusti did of a chair. You can see that she is following an almost continuous trajectory on the paper with her pen. She is tracing every nook and cranny in the frame and upholstery of the chair thereby giving us a real sense of the chair without offering some kind of exact depiction. It is clear that Dusti is drawing what she senses, instead of what she might think the subject is supposed to look like. And that is exactly the objective of contour drawing. Coming next week: Kinship: Dusti Bongé and Betty Parsons at Hollis Taggart Ocober 13, 2022 - November 12, 2022 And appearing just today in Garden & Gun Mississippi’s Modernist Painter Who Thought New York Had Nothing on Biloxi https://gardenandgun.com/articles/dusti-bonge/ Have you seen this work? Do you or someone you know have this work in their collection? If so, we would love to hear from you. We are continually working to maintain as complete a record as possible, and to determine the location of all of Dusti Bongé's work. If you have information on this, or other works, you can contact us at
[email protected] We appreciate receiving any referrals to the existence and whereabouts of artworks by Dusti Bongé. Thank you. You can now view some of these works on our website: https://www.dustibonge.org/missing-works.html Available in our store: The definitive volume on artist Dusti Bongé, by J. Richard Gruber Dusti Bongé, Art and Life: Biloxi, New Orleans, New York Hard bound, 12” x 9”, 350 pages, over 500 color and b&w illustrations Limited edition lithographs of two original Dusti Bongé drawings. Shrimp Boats & Factories, Back Bay Biloxi I and Shrimp Boats & Factories, Back Bay Biloxi II 12” x 16” drawing, 15” x 22” paper size https://www.dustibonge.org/store.html support us Our mission: to promote the artistic legacy of Dusti Bongé (1903-1993)
