who are your favorite authors?

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Originally Posted by stlukesguild

Is it just me, or is wordeater smokin' hot?

No, you're definitely not just you. I noticed that right away. Let's hope she isn't one of those new members who post a few times and then never return.

Not that guys a bunch of drooling guys tripping over their own hanging tongues could possibly scare a girl off.:leaving:

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Well, just to ameliorate this possibility . . . wordeater, I was lying. You are very, very ugly. :D

Problem solved.

Sorry, just meant it as an innocent jest there wordeater--if you're still there.

I promise that neither my knuckles nor my tongue drag.

Don't drink and write: as demonstrated, alcohol can get the better part of flattery...

Man, things have changed...All of my friends who attend art school (which pretty much equates to everyone I know in this city) have to attend 6-hour long drawing studio classes.

Oh the classes were 6 or 7 hours long... but we did not spend a great deal of time on extended poses. The first hour was almost always spent on "gestures" (rapid drawings that may last a minute or less) with the idea of developing the ability to rapidly grasp the major movement in the pose as well as the proportions. After this, the rest of the morning might be spent on poses that grew increasingly lengthy... up to perhaps a half-hour. In the afternoon we focused on longer poses (at least once we had moved on to the more advanced levels: year 3 onward)... perhaps an hour or two.

Many students enter art school having spent endless hour rendering every pore in the skin... yet failing to see that the overall structure is weak. The teachers pointed out that this was akin to worrying about the wallpaper before the foundation has been laid. As such, a great deal of the time spent in the first two years of my art school experience were spent in breaking bad habits, in learning to look... and gaining a basic knowledge of the underlying structure of that which you were looking at. We spent endless hours in studying anatomy, physiology, perspective, geometry, etc... We also spent a good deal of time studying the drawings of the masters as well as critiquing each other's drawings.

Very few students, at that time, retained an interest or passion for drawing from the figure once they had entered the advanced levels and declared their majors. Abstraction ruled at the time. As a result there were few opportunities for working from the model in an extended pose... one that lasted for days and allowed for a highly finished drawing or painting. I had to petition the school to gain access to a life drawing model once a week for the full day. One of my two formal mentors established the evening sessions with the model in response to the interest shown by myself and 3 or 4 other advanced students who were serious about drawing from the model.

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Originally Posted by stlukesguild

Addressing the literary aspect of your post, MortalTerror suggested an opposite strategy. He pointed out that in a list of 10 or 20 authors most of us who have read a great deal will include those obvious authors whom we could not be without: Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, Goethe, Montaigne, etc... Going well beyond this arbitrary cut-off... past the point where all of us might preserve all of those authors that we could not be without... we might then explore the realm of those authors uniquely important to us.

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Thank you for remembering. For anyone interested, I kept my list of 65 favorites with brief explanations for each on my blog.
http://www.online-literature.com/for...og.php?b=12266

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Originally Posted by Alexander III

But I think they very crux of the question lies here. Not those men who are important for humanity, or who possessed the greatest minds, those who are vital to us. To take the dessert island stereotype, if one could only bring the work of 3 authors with them, who would you choose, the best, the greatest, the most renown? No you would choose those which, (to be all romantic and sentimental and crap) would most give you that pure and almost spiritual delight, a feeling akin to love, which keeps you going, which after having read and during the reading allows you to sit and look out at the waves and sea and be lost in such lofty thoughts that every single one of you burdens and miseries appears in a new light, those men with whom if we were about to be shot by the firing squad, and had one last night in a cell before our execution at dawn, those men whom we would choose to pass our company with for our final night of existence, those men in whom we place something far beyond appreciation, something akin to a kinship which add's a new sense of understanding to our lives.

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That's all very colorful, Alexander, but the circumstances I find myself in has a lot to do with what I want to read. If I had one night left to live I'd assuredly read the Bible, because I think that could do me the most good where I'm going. If I were trapped on an island, I don't think I could bear reading Hemingway's lovely descriptions of man alone in the wilderness. I would rather have a survivalist book than Shakespeare. And if I were asked to choose just one book to encapsulate me, I would have to say that I am not so one sided as that. How could I choose another man's words to express what is deepest inside of me? If I had just one night, I kind of like to think I'd spend it writing, but there's a good chance I'd spend it looking at pictures of naked women.

If I had just one night, I kind of like to think I'd spend it writing, but there's a good chance I'd spend it looking at pictures of naked women.

:smilielol5:

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Mine are Charles Dickens and George Eliot.