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The Beauty of Line – Part 1: A Portrait of Angelo Verga
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I have been in Florence, Italy for the past few months to re-acquaint myself with the great works of the Italian Renaissance. It usually takes me about a week to settle into a new location; this involves stocking up on groceries and art supplies, discovering where everything is and trying to wrestle meaning out of the Byzantine intricacies and footnotes of Italian bus schedules. Soon though the urge to get back to the easel became overwhelming.
I had no model available to sit for me but an old, dusty art catalogue was amongst the meager offers of my apartment’s library. This was a catalogue in memorium of the Italian artist Angelo Verga. Verga was an artist of the 1960’s and 1970’s, his early and, then later, work was heavily influenced by the Italian Futurist movement of the
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1920’s. For me his best work was executed in the early 1960’s and very closely paralleled the work of the American minimalist artist Donald Judd. In the catalogue was a full page black & white photograph of the young Angelo Verga.
The problem with the photograph is that I felt its’ tonal concord would not translate well as a drawing. What works for a photograph more often than not does not lend itself to drawing or painting. This is a major drawback particularly with commissioned portraits. Quite often the client will present the artist with a flash-lit photograph that flattens out all of the form or the form will be indistinct and muddled.
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Trying to paint a commissioned portrait from such a photograph is a two-fold disaster: first, it is a Promethenian struggle – the painting will be much more difficult to execute and it will collapse in the end. In other words it will read as flat and uninspiring. Second, the client will very likely be disappointed in the result and if they’re not you are lucky. However, you will be left feeling that a better job could have been done.
Although academic teaching and practice tend to stress tonal construction a viable alternative is the line drawing. Linear drawing has a long and exemplary tradition – Raphael, Leonardo, Rubens, Modigliani, Matisse and Picasso, to name but a very few were masters of the line drawing.
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