Darrel pursuing Bargue’s Cours de dessin

Charles Bargue developed the Cours de dessin, one of the most influential classical drawing courses conceived in collaboration with Jean-Léon Gérôme. The course, published between 1866 and 1871 by Goupil & Cie, comprised 197 lithographs printed as individual sheets, was to guide students from plaster casts to the study of great master drawings and finally to drawing from the living model. The Charles Bargue Drawing Course is used by many academies and ateliers which focus of Classical Realism. Among the artists whose work is based on the study of Bargue’s plate work are Pablo Picasso^[1] and Vincent van Gogh, who copied the complete set in 1880/1881, and (at least a part of it) again in 1890.

I have been pursuing this approach for three semesters at a local Academy devoted to the practice, and very much enjoying the process.

 

Allen’s artist talk at Newbridge

Olga Schmuylovich hosts an Art Salon periodically and invited me to speak. My sister Hannah Simon participated to provide first-hand memories of the photographs I had used in the presentation, taken before I was born!  THanks, Olga, for this opportunity.

Darrel’s “Contemporary Memorials”

I am using elements of an old folk-art technique, to enhance obituaries from the New York Times.

In this technique, nocturnal scenes of gravestones drawn on a reflective surface represented other worldliness and the passing of life. A missing shoe, or a butterfly were hidden symbols of death.

I will create similar illustrations in flat black frames, drawn on sandpaper-like paper I make using reflective glass beads.

The original obituary will be included with the artwork in an envelope attached to the back. Newsprint is not meant to last. It yellows quickly with time and will dry and crumble.

Shown here are some of the obituaries that I have chosen to honor. With some, my reasons are personal. With others, well known personalities, I share with you their obituaries. They give us clues to a much richer life than what we, their public, knew of.

 

Allen’s “Edge Cases”

edge-case   Noun. (plural: edge cases)

A problem or situation that occurs only at an extreme (maximum or minimum) operating parameter.

 

Film photographers had a clear understanding of how film behaved when over-exposed or under-exposed. The edge-cases for film were simple, predictable, and the same in any camera.

Digital cameras are a different story. Each has an image-processing chip programmed to produce the “best” possible image, each in its own way. Worse, there’s no means to find out exactly what it’s doing.

For a selfie in sunlight, all digital cameras do what’s expected. It’s the edge-cases where we see the processor still struggling to produce a “best” image, and in that struggle, producing the unexpected.

When enlarged, or contrast enhanced, complex, even painterly rendering is revealed, constructed by the machine in ways likely not anticipated even by the system’s programmers.

In this way, the digital camera at its edges becomes, in its own right, a new medium.