How to draw an exquisite corpse

Tuesday, March 8, 2022

an Exquisite Corpse drawn by Jules (6), me, and Owen (9)

One of my all-time favorite drawing games with my kids is called Exquisite Corpse.

Put simply: two or more people draw a head/torso/legs without looking at each other’s drawings.

We made a silly video to show you how its done:

It’s probably worth pointing out that Exquisite Corpse actually started out with the Surrealist writers, as a kind of proto-MadLib such as:

The [adjective] [noun] [adverb] [verb] the [adjective] [noun].

This is where the name “Exquisite Corpse” came from:

Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau. (The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine.)

It’s fun because it’s a cooperative game, not a competitive one.

An exquisite corpse from the one time Saul Steinberg met Pablo Picasso

I’m now thinking it would be fairly easy to do an musical Exquisite Corpse in GarageBand: you’d pick a tempo and a key, one person could make a beat, then the next person could make a bassline without listening to the beat, and the next person could make a melody without listening to either. Then you could play it back and see what it sounds like. (I’m going to try this and I’ll let you know how it goes!)

What pictures of horses can teach us about art

Thursday, October 31, 2019

Here are two books about art and horses open on my kitchen table this morning.

The top spread is from Dr. Seuss’s The Horse Museum, which was produced from an undated, unfinished manuscript that Theodore Geisel’s widow found in a box. (In the 1950s, before his children’s books had become popular, Geisel had worked on a television series called Modern Art on Horseback.)

From Kirkus:

This posthumously published text recently discovered in Ted Geisel’s studio uses horse-focused art pieces to provide historical context to artistic movements. Showing art ranging from the Lascaux cave paintings to an untitled 1994 sculpture by Deborah Butterfield, Joyner’s playful illustrations surround the curated photographs of art pieces. By using horses as the departing point in the artistic journey, Seuss and Joyner are able to introduce diverse perspectives, artifacts, and media, including Harnessed Horse from the northern Wei dynasty, a Navajo pictorial blanket titled Oh, My Beautiful Horses, and photographs by Eadweard Muybridge.

My personal favorite part of the book is the appendix in the back which goes through each individual piece of art featured in the book and its creator’s relationship, if any, to horses.

I got to thinking how interesting it would be to go through the archives of my own favorite artists and compare horse pictures.

Here, for example, are some of Saul Steinberg’s drawings of horses:

The other book on my kitchen table is unlike any book I’ve ever read. Heidi’s Horse, originally published in 1975, is a book by the painter Sylvia Fein, collecting her daughter’s drawings from her very first marks at the age of 2 up until the age of 17. (Fein was inspired by the Henry Schaefer-Simmern’s The Unfolding of Artistic Activity.) It’s a wonderful record of how the visual mind develops over time.

The book can be hard to track down, so here are the sections summarizing Heidi’s progression:

Here’s another page focusing only on Heidi’s horse heads (the title is, admittedly, kind of terrible, at the very least it should be Heidi’s Horses, plural):

In 1985, Sheila Graber animated Heidi’s Horse into this 16-minute film:

https://youtu.be/0iKc3_wQpbE

And here’s a great video from 2006 of Fein talking about the progression of children’s drawings and Heidi’s Horse:

If you sit down with a kid and watch them draw, it’s the most wonderful experience in the world. You’re seeing transformation right in front of your eyes.

The book has been hugely influential on me as I track the progress of my youngest son’s drawing.

More about kid’s art and art history: “Caveman drawings”

A four-year-old will get you unstuck

Wednesday, June 5, 2019

I learned so much about art from watching a kid draw. I taught at the grade-school level. Kids don’t call it art when they’re throwing things around, drawing—they’re just doing stuff.
—John Baldessari

When I talk to artists who are “stuck” I often think they should be prescribed a session with some four-year-olds. (Borrow a kid!) Four-year-olds are the most “unstuck” creatures around. To watch a four-year-old draw is to watch some kind of magic happen, magic that, even in two or three years, will not come naturally, but will need to be conjured, somehow.

Lynda Barry does this at the University of Wisconsin:

“When I came to the university… one thing that struck me was how miserable the grad students were. I thought, I wonder if I could pair them up with four-year-olds?” She started a program called Draw Bridge that did just that. “What I hoped would happen was my students would learn to borrow the kids’ state of mind and learn to approach problems in a way that was less tight and focused, a way that was happier and set the conditions for discovery.”

If you follow Lynda on Instagram, she often posts her collaborations with four-year-olds:

https://www.instagram.com/p/ByGER_QgzuS

Here’s one about drawing Batman:

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bxyh16rl1Ke/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

And here are some 4-year-olds doing a copying exercise:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BxeFX6KDKEf/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

I’m lucky right now because I live with a four-year-old and I get to spend a lot of time with him, watching him draw. (Although, I’m telling you: it’s a lot easier to just borrow one and hand them back!) If you came to one of the Keep Going tour dates, you saw this slide of Jules drawing when he was three:

(I write more about his drawing in the “Your Work is Play” section of the book.)

This is my second time around living with a four-year-old. This one is a little more introverted than the first one. I did a lot more collaborating with the first. I remember transcribing some of his wild monologues:

He was basically an ecstatic poet!

I have two daughters that could both draw like Albrecht Durer when they were about seven years old, before the teachers got ahold of them.
—Kurt Vonnegut

I’m also reminded now of illustrator Mica Angela Hendricks and her collaborations with her 4-year-old daughter, which started out when her daughter saw her sketchbook and asked if she could draw, too. She eventually started draw unfinished heads at night so her daughter could finish them in the morning. “Do you have any heads for me today?” her daughter would ask.

Hanging out with his four-year-old niece led animator Don Hertzfeldt to some of the best parts of his absolutely incredible short, World of Tomorrow. Here’s how it went:

My niece, Winona, contributes the voice of little Emily. She was 4 when I recorded her. You can’t direct a 4-year-old, I learned that really fast. I couldn’t even get her to repeat lines for me. So I just recorded audio as we drew pictures together, played with stuff, talked about the world. I was pretty aware that if the recordings produced nothing, the film would have been dead before it even began. She lives in Scotland and I am in Austin, so I usually only get to see her about once a year. After a weeklong visit, recording five minutes here and there, I had about an hour or so of total recorded time with her. So the first step was finding all of her best reactions and questions, and I began to figure out what her character could be talking about here, or looking at there.

“You can’t direct a 4-year-old…” Truer words never spoken! All you can do is set them up and hit record. And hang on for the ride…