First Drawing Since a Long Time

A surrealist graphite pencil drawing of Bettie Page, American pin-up and 1950s celebrity. It was the first drawing after my oil painting The Return of Bettie Page – 12-08-15. All of a sudden I was in the mood to do another one and I was attracted to the musculature of her back. However, at the time I was half finished I found the drawing had become a bit boring. Finally I came to the conclusion that my attraction towards her back created a fault. I disregarded the fact that there simply was too much negative space left. Let’s face it, the back, head and legs are lovely indeed but I had better cropped it in advance.

The Solution

One could say I almost ran out of options. Surely I could not turn it into a cubist or abstracted drawing anymore. There was only one playing field that suited my possibilities: surrealism. It grew on me that I could play with the Matryoshka effect: a doll within a doll, etc. I drew a larger portrait to the left and saw that I could connect her hear to the shape of her breast, like Escher could have invented. Consequently I did the same with the upper part of her index finger also creating her biceps and there I had the solution I had sought for quite some time. It took not a whole lot of time to draw but coming up with a solution took me longer.

Click here to read about the principle of ambiguous images as explained in my post ‘Gaia – 16-03-16’.

Click here to read about the sale of this art work to a dutch collector.

Graphite pencil drawing (Pentel 0.5 mm, 3B) on Canson Bristol paper (21 x 29.7 x 0.1 cm – A4 format)

Artist: Corné Akkers