The Arm of Moses as Seen by My Little Girl

Don’t tell my classmates, but I kind of like Bargues (copying exercises). Back to animal shapes: I wrote about this a few weeks ago, but I’ve got more to say. So, one way of breaking down an image and understanding it visually is to find shapes within it – kind of like finding shapes in clouds. “This one looks like an elephant… that one looks like a baby…” This week, I was working on my new Bargue drawing, Mose’s Arm from Michelango’s famous Moses on Julius II’s tomb. I was working my way down the arm, blocking things in using the “seeing shapes” technique. Actually, I was seeing animals. And, I had a flashback. I remembered the downstairs bathroom floor in my childhood home. When I was a little girl, I used to sit there and look and the linoleum and see shapes and creatures and animals. They all had stories. There was the guy with the club. There was Our Lady. I couldn’t look at that floor without seeing all kinds of things in it. I thought that was pretty cool – connecting with young part of me and being able to bring it into this new process that I’m learning as an adult.