Ziegfeld Girl

This graphite pencil drawing ‘Sans Titre – 06-01-26’ shows Caja Eric in all her art deco glory. A tribute to her beauty, refracted through the lens of cubism. She is one of the famous Ziegfeld girls and portrayed by Alfred Cheney Johnston. His picture sparked this one, even though changed a couple of things. The pearl necklace I left out of the equation. The reason is that the image already looked very styled, probably by the boxed-in blocks of light. Since I wanted to keep it simple I didn’t find the necklace to be of any significant added value. Instead, I focused on drawing some geometric structures to create that boxed-in look in a representative way. I made sure not to hatch the negative space into a solid boack, as in the reference picture.

Compositional Challenges

The face was another thing of course and the main theme. First I thought of drawing some wavy patterns, extending from her facial features into the negative space to the right. However, they didn’t meet my expectations. The drawing became too fragmented and the curves I drew looked too small. After all, the head already looked very small in the overall composition. Therefor I decided to style the head and hair only slightly cubistic. It didn’t need much anyway. Some portraits lend themselves to go full throttle, others don’t because they are much more delicate, such as Caja’s. Who is an intriguing character anyway. I looked her up on Wikipedia. Not much information, except for her participation in the Ziegfeld folies as actress, dancer and singer. This one follows up my last on in the series, called ‘Sans Titre – 16-08-26 (Marion Cottilard)’. A perfect start to kick off 2026.

Graphite pencil (Faber Castell Pitt Graphite Matt pencil 14B) drawing on Clairfontaine Ingres paper (21 x 28.5 x 0.1 cm)

Artist: Corné Akkers

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