For the past two Saturdays, River Arts has been alive with drawing and painting. Current exhibiting artist Jamie Rauchman shared some of his techniques for thinking outside the box and disrupting our assumptions when drawing from life. Jamie explained that often when we draw portraits, our assumptions prevent us from seeing a face objectively. We assume we know what features we need to capture and end up with a piece that doesn’t look much like ourselves. One of the early exercises had us using a grid and turning the reference picture upside down so that it was impossible to assume we knew what we were drawing.

It was really special to see Jamie passing on his expertise on capturing a person’s likeness while his exhibit hung in Folley Hall. To interact with the man behind the painting and hear how he approaches looking at a subject matter really solidified my perspective that his self portraiture work comes from an attempt to understand and analyze something within his own features. Jamie’s work and workshop cast a light on the calculating and exacting work that is required to accurately capture the expression of oneself.

Self: Reflection is on display until the end of next week, and if you haven’t been in-person to see the show yet, we highly recommend stopping by!