Old Vintage Photo

Years ago I saved a vintage picture of a nude on the beach. Origin unknown and my best guess would be from the 1930s or 1940s. The picture was rather grainy and but it showed a great composition of a female body in slanted position. Very simple but also essential. Then years pass by and like an old love you forget about her, only to pop into your memory all of a sudden.

On a Diet

After my last graphite pencil drawing ‘Hommage to the Entombment of Christ by Caravaggio – 05-12-20’ I was in the mood for keeping things essential again and that is when I remembered this one. It is like after a fine 5 course dinner the one thing left is to go on a diet. The fine thing of such an artistic diet is that the drawing does not become so elaborated. Correspondingly I searched for some powerful lines and plains. Of course the tilted body already granted me a powerful dynamic composition, only for me to keep it as basic as possible.

Tonality

Because of the strong cast shadow to the right of the body I was not in need of anything fancy in the negative space around the female form. In fact, I kept parts of the contour delineation to the left open and sketched in some midtoned plains in the positive form. Last but not least, I decided to call it ‘On the Beach’ as a token of my minimalist approach. My hope is that the viewer will interpret the beach around her body because of the title. Hopefully the drawing will not have such a dramatic effect on the viewer than the movie bearing the same name.

Graphite pencil drawing (Sakura 0.5 mm, Pentel 4B) on Winsor & Newton Bristol paper (21 x 29.7 x 0.1 cm) – A4 format)

Artist: Corné Akkers