Doris, pastel, 24 x 19 in. |
Since the day Margaret Dyer stepped into her first life-drawing class as a college student, she knew that working with the figure was destined to be one of her life’s great passions. “I’m so inspired by people, just people living their everyday lives,” she says. “The figure is like a continuously moving landscape, with rolling hills and planes.”
In essence, it’s the energy, the life force in these figures that Margaret sets out to record and communicate, most often with her pastels but more recently with oils as well. To capture the dynamism of the human form, Margaret says she relies most heavily on three formal artistic qualities: composition, value, and color.
Composing With Shape
Looking at even a few of Margaret’s pieces from her larger body of work, you see how many of her paintings are cropped in tight, as if the outer edges of the paintings can barely contain the vitality of the models within them. “I don’t want my work to look too formal,” says the artist, “so I crop off heads and elbows, which helps to create a more abstract image. And the closer I get, the more energetic it becomes.” She adds that she admires other artists’ ability to do stunning work with more traditional poses, but she prefers the informality of cropping for her own work.
One of the advantages to zeroing in on her subjects is that it creates unexpected, interesting negative shapes. Even when she’s not cropping tightly, she still places the figure on the page in a way that creates beautiful and varied negative shapes. Not only does this add excitement to the composition, it can also assist with drawing accuracy. Says Margaret, “I find that if something I’m trying to draw is too complicated, I can simplify things by looking at the negative shapes surrounding the positive form. This comes from years of formal drawing training.”
As much as Margaret loves to work from a live model, she admits that a lot of her work is done from photographic references that she takes of her friends and family. But, she hastens to add, “When I work from a photograph, I act as if it’s a live model. I reconstruct the figure as if I were working with a live model. That skill, so ingrained in me, can only be developed by practicing life drawing.”
What I’m looking for is a vibrancy and energy that happens when color goes on color. I just keep glazing until I see that buzz happening everywhere.
She continues, “I always felt like I had to justify working from photographs, until I saw a Degas show. The exhibit included his photographs of women in the bath and other images of his that we’re all so familiar with. I felt so vindicated. And who better to be inspired by than Degas?”
For Margaret, the drawing and composing stage is a make-or-break situation. “If I don’t like the painting at this initial stage, I won’t continue with it,” she explains. “It has to have some sense of beauty. That may sound presumptuous, but I have to find beauty in what I’ve done. If I don’t, why bother continuing? I’m not going to fight a painting the whole way through.”
Contrasting Value and Color
With an interesting composition built on a solid drawing, Margaret then adds contrasts of value and color to bring her works to life. “I work really fast at first, just following a gut feeling to establish the abstract shapes,” she explains. “Then I emphatically apply color, keeping my values clear and simple.”
Her initial pass of color is designed to establish an exciting interplay of lights, darks, and middle tones. When she first learned to paint, she was taught to start with the darks, then do the mid-values, and then the lights, but somewhere along the way, she realized it was easier to do darks first, then lights, and then work with the remaining range in between. Getting the dark and light values correct up front allows her to use these two outer parameters as reference points for the accuracy of the rest of her values.
And by “emphatically applying color,” Margaret means using the right pastel for the job. Rather than laying down lots of layers of a semi-dark color to get a deep dark, she uses pastels that have lots of black pigment mixed into them. Similarly, rather than applying a light coat of a color to make a light value, she uses pastels that have plenty of white pigment mixed into them. In this way, her first pass of color—laid down with the sides of the sticks, like strokes of paint—covers the paper fairly thoroughly, providing a rich foundation for the layers to come.
From here on out, as she more carefully develops the forms within the figure, Margaret applies glazes of alternating color temperatures—warms, then cools, then warms, etc. Her color choices are often arbitrary, but because she sticks with her value pattern, they completely work. What’s more, the light glazes allow the underneath colors to come through. “What I’m looking for is a vibrancy and energy that happens when color goes on color,” she says. “I just keep glazing until I see that buzz happening everywhere.”
Wrapping up a painting, she begins by toning down all of the areas that are too strong. “I don’t want it to be a cacophony where it’s all screaming,” she says with a laugh. “Then I add some really strong or direct strokes, so that there’s something that’s still pure.” A few extra strokes to provide some dark accents, redefine the drawing, or break up a few harder edges finish the work.
Finding Inspiration
Thanks to the dynamic life force that flows through and from her paintings, Margaret’s work has a timeless quality that allows viewers to infer all kinds of mood and meaning. Says Margaret, “That universal feeling is inherent in the gracefulness of the human figure. Because of that, I’ll never run out of great ideas. I just have to look around.”
See her demo below!
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