Bears!

For our Life Drawing field trip we all went to the Walker Art Center and the Bell Museum of Natural History.  At the Art Center we got to see a lot of interesting examples of fine art, with all kinds of interesting works to investigate.  There were interesting examples of sculpture, paintings, and displays that used human bodies.  One piece that really stuck out for me was titled "Repressed Spatial Relationships Rendered as Fluid No. 4 Stevenson Junior High and Satellites" by Mike Kelly 2002.  It was an interesting drawing with a hanging sculptural accompaniment that seemed to render a building and it's environment in a semi-serious way, resembling distant, distorted memory to me.

 These are a couple of pictures of bears that I managed to render while at the Bell Museum of Natural History.  The place was filled with taxidermied animals, and of all of them I found the voluminous bear forms to be the most appealing.  I tried my best to capture the foreign body shapes and distorted mammalian structure from what I had learned of human anatomy in class up until that point.   This first drawing was an attempt to capture a scene of two bears wrestling eachother, which turned out sort of odd, bears looking like pigs.  I was never sure where to start, trying to capture a spine, then possibly some kind of bear ribcage, or just following the axis and contour lines of their intertwining limbs and bulky bodies.  I feel the second drawing of a bear playing with a fish turned out to be much more successful.  The bear has all of the lines it needs to capture its general form, and has some elements of depth and distance with the further elements fading into the paper.  The whole place, as well as the museum, had a nice atmosphere and I was glad to have had the experience, even if it was a bit short.