Robert P. Taylor's Musicians: Reflections of Music Making

Note, most text below must be on sep pg with link access

Here are some of the musicians whom I've drawn three or more times. The reasons vary, but include factors like ready access to the subject because he or she stands or sits directly in my line of sight and near enough to be clearly seen, he or she sings as a soloist often, he or she has performed repeatedly where I have seen them, even if not at Riverside Church, he or she is particularly interesting or expressive as a performer, he or she is a challange (for some reason) to draw, I am bored with something non-musical that is occurring, though I can not leave because of the boundaries of the event, and so on. And of course there is my firm belief, confirmed by experience, that practicing improves my drawing. And there is the amazing discovery that the same person can look very different on different occasions, even at different performances or rehearsals of the same piece. Some people are simply less interesting than others, whether they are being drawn or not, some people draw one into caricature rather than more even handed representation.

And lighting is so poor in some cases that the desire to draw simply can not be satisfied because one can not see the paper clearly enough to evaluate the marks one is putting upon it. This is true of the theater at Riverside Church for example. And the opposite may true elsewhere - though the paper one would draw them upon IS clearly visible, the stage or location lighting on the performers may be so poor or uneven one can not draw them fairly no matter how clearly one can see ones drawing paper.

One of the strangest things I have noticed through reviewing the thousands of sketchs I have made between 1996 and 2001 is that multiple sketches of a person can be revealing in a way that a single drawing, no matter how "accurate", can not. In some cases, a collection of drawings of an individual, some performing, some not, some in one kind of piece, some in another kind, even when none of them is fully satisfying to my eye can together capture the individual amazingly well!

Well each thumbnail above leads to a set of thumbnails of drawings I have done of that individual, and clicking on a particular thumbnail above will access the sub-index of drawings of that person. If there are only a couple drawings, the sub-index may be to 3.5 in high miniatures; if there are more than three, the sub-index is in the form of thumbnails of all the drawings of that person, each of which links to a page presenting that single drawing in larger scale and my comments about creating it, what was going on at the time, and so forth.