OK, now you get to see how I can mess up my web-guy’s fine work. I moved a bunch of sketches from my Figure Drawing Gallery to Sketches and Gestures, and although both slide shows progress correctly, the thumbnails shift on every other slide. This kind of thing just stops my right-brain dead in its tracks! “Oh W-a-r-r-r-r-r-r-e-n!”
So why have two categories? The Figure Drawing Gallery contains pieces I would show. The “Sketches and Gestures” section contains pieces I probably would never show, but that I haven’t thrown away yet. Sketches and gestures sometimes have more of a sense of immediacy and intimacy, even though they are probably done hurriedly and might contain serious inaccuracies.
How do I decide what to keep and what to throw out? The initial decision is easy, because most of what I do are warm-up drawings, and practice pieces, or compositional planning. Many are not even recognizable, and since I prefer representational art, recognition is important to me. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but for me, it is all about whether the piece keeps my attention, in that I want to look at it for longer, and look at it more often, as opposed to looking at it and saying ‘Yeah, OK, that’s pretty,” and just moving on without a second glance.