A few years ago I went to an exhibition of drawings by Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, several of them executed in red chalk. I liked the colour, because it is reminiscent of flesh tones.
I have now made some similar drawings myself, but have done so in red pencil because I thought it would give me much sharper lines. This drawing is based on a painting by the contemporary American artist John Currin. His painting in turn seems inspired by some Renaissance nudes I have seen, though from a period that predates the anatomical accuracy achieved by Michelangelo and Da Vinci,
The red pencil gives a curious effect. Rather than natural skin tone, the red seems to suggest flickering lamp light. After I had scanned this copy of the drawing, I added a charcoal background, which was inspired by the backgrounds of early medieval icons, and yet seems to suggest darkness and secrecy. For me the result has associations of witchcraft and arcane rituals at eighteenth-century hellfire clubs.
John Currin, by the way, has taken over from Lucian Freud as my artist of the moment. He is classed as "American grotesque" and makes paintings of the female figure, but always in a slightly distorted way, sometimes idealised, other times exaggerated to ridiculous proportions. The women he paints end up with pencil-slim waists, or unnaturally large breasts and long slender hands. Few women would surely ever aspire to really look like that, and few men would fail to feel intimidated if they met a woman of those proportions in real life.
Some people claim that Currin's paintings are pornographic. But I think he's actually making a parody of pornography...it's the lustful men who he seeks to make look ridiculous, not the fantasy women in the pictures. Some of his paintings are even tricks on the eye. He knows how to attract men's attention with a large bust or a slim waist, but once he has caught us, his paintings turn out to be nothing more than a can of worms...he paints what at first sight appears to be a beautiful woman. It is only on closer inspection that we see she is leaning heavily on a stick and is actually a cripple. He paints a sylph-like figure, but the longer we look at her, with her grey hair and her blue veined hands, the more years we give her. Even the woman portrayed above: is she sensuously caressing her hair, or is she standing pugilistically with her hands up ready to sock us on the nose?
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