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She's Come Undone -- Framed Silverpoint Drawing

She's Come Undone -- Framed Silverpoint Drawing

Description

Title: "She's Come Undone"
Dimensions: 9.25" x 10" drawing in 16" x 16" frame
Medium: Silverpoint on Gessoed Paper
Description:
I used to go to a weekly life drawing group who would get a model each week. We had one model who had very classically elegant features, and would have been the perfect model for for some pre-Raphaelite Romantic painter. I drew her in silverpoint this particular evening, but couldn't really see what I was doing very well. While I wanted to capture her classic elegance, when I looked at the drawing later, she just looked a little, well, crazy. I tried my best to fix it, but it seemed everything I did just made her look more crazy, so I finally decided to just go with it. I made her hair a little messier, put the little spider on her knee, and gave her a little bit undone landscape to sit in, with a wacky uprooted sunflower and a somewhat invasive, organic sun.
Silverpoint is not a technique that many people are familiar with. If you go to my blog, I have written an extensive description of the technique here:
http://juliedarcy.blogspot.com/2008/06/first-medium-you-never-heard-of.html
Briefly, a piece of Bristol board (paper) is coated with white gesso (primer). The image is drawn onto the paper using a fine silver wire (held with a mechanical pencil body)in the form of many, many tiny little lines. As the silver naturally oxidizes, the lines will gradually become darker, but the image should last for hundreds of years.
This drawing has been matted and framed by me, the artist. The mat is a slightly off-white museum board, and the frame is a very pretty metallic finish that has a sort of champagne-platinum color. The frame color is very neutral and would probably go with almost anything.

Added on Oct 12, 2009