Jonathan Silver: Drawings

Jonathan Silver drew well, and he drew often.

In the sixties, he drew in Peter Agostini's class at Columbia, and in studios on 14th Street and Spring Street in Manhattan, where, for a few bucks, you could draw from the model for several hours.

In the afternoons, he would drop in at the New York Studio School on 8th Street--into classes taught by Peter Agostini, Chris Cairns or George Spaventa--and stand in the corner and draw while smoking cigarettes.

He drew at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from art of the distant past, including Greek and Egyptian sculpture.

Later in life, he would draw at night in front of the television while watching crime drama Kojak or New York Mets baseball.

Silver, who was left-handed, usually drew small--8 x 10 inches or less--using a standard Number 2 pencil with an eraser on the end, often on pads of paper his friend Bruce Gagnier would bring back from Sennelier, in Paris.  His drawings were highly restrained, tightly constructed, exact, and disciplined.  He admired Da Vinci and Michelangelo for their rigorous approach, and adopted from Agostini, whose drawings he especially emulated, a method of making a line with a heavy, abrupt ending point--almost a dot--at the end, like a period at the end of a sentence.

Away from the model, his subjects were most often heads or figures--also methodically composed and constructed--mirroring whatever he was doing in sculpture at the time, until the very end of his life, when, as lung cancer was swiftly killing him, his subjects--animals and humans--became more fantastical and frightening.

Click on images to enlarge.

     Three drawings from the 1970's

Three drawings from the 1980's

                              

                          

Three drawings from the 1990's

                                

                            

See more drawings by Jonathan Silver on our Flickr page.

Learn more about Silver on his profile.

Mark Tobey: Excerpts from Two Robert Gardner Films

Filmmaker Robert Gardner made two short films about American painter Mark Tobey, one in 1952, and one in 1973, at the end of the artist's life.  Documentary Educational Resources, from whom both films are available for purchase on DVD, has posted  a short clip of each film online, below.  

This first clip is from 1973's Mark Tobey Abroad, a 28-minute film shot in Basel, Switzerland, where Tobey was living at the time.  Tobey, who was born in 1890, would have been about 83.

About the film, DER's website reads, "With remarkable candor and objectivity, Tobey discusses his work and that of fellow artists, including Picasso.  His keen wit lends humor and bite to his critiques, and his own vitality and spirit make an important statement on his work and on art itself." 

This second clip is from Gardner's 1952 film, Mark Tobey.  Originally titled Mark Tobey: Artist and shot in 16mm, the 19-minute film was shown in festivals in Venice and Edinburgh when it was released.  Tobey, who wrote the music and script, lived in Seattle at the time it was made, and would have been about 62.  

As the DER website explains, the film "tries to show in cinematic language how this man looked at the world;  Tobey himself both performs and is observed.  A unique film in the Gardner oeuvre, the film not only presents an experimental portrait of Tobey, but serves as a window into the American art, avant garde film, and poetic movements of this period."