On drawing Death and Dying: Part Two; By Dave Jaffe

       On Drawing death And Dying: Part Two.




    My first and last try to draw someone dead or dying didn't work out. I took photos from the U.S. Civil War and made them bigger. I thought these photos of dead Union and Confederate soldiers were taken by Mathew Brady.  Yet I was wrong.
    "The Brady war pictures," writes Susan Sontag, "were mostly taken by Alexander Gardner and Timothy O'Sullivan." The pair were working for Brady, Sontag points out.
     In any case I drew two dead men lying on the ground. The men lie in the foreground of my drawing. On the right side of the picture I drew an older woman leaning over one of the dead soldiers. Her arms are outstretched to him showing sympathy.
   I often copy people's photos and change them. "All you want to do is copy," one artist told me years ago. She was right. Yet I still think imitating some other people 's work is the fastest way to learn and do a good drawing. In  any case, the finished picture bothered me. It clearly didn't fit in in my
sketch book that's filled with drawings of trees and o landscapes. Then, too, I don't want to draw pictures of the dead and the dying. Death's presence now looms too close to me. I want to forget it if I can.
    There's another reason to not draw the dead and the dying. For pictures of this sort don't seem to make it into fine art exhibitions these days. They did in the past. Think of the crucifixion of Jesus. This was a very popular subject for visual artists two to three hundred years ago. So were other scenes of the dead and the dying. Yet then along came the Impressionist painters in the last third of the 19th century. "Everybody is prepared to admit that a painting of a fruit can be as important as a painting of a hero dying," writes John Berger. "The Impressionists did as much as anyone to win this previously unheard freedom for the artist."
    Only one famous artist did pictures of the dead and that was Andy Warhol. Yet even Warhol didn't exactly paint pictures of dead people. He silkscreened other people's photos of car crashes, electric chairs and other roads to death. Then he or his assistants just churned out copy after copy of the dead and the dying.
     Now people still paint pictures of death. You can find their work on the Internet. Just Google 'Pictures of the dead'. I did and came up with many works of art. Still, as said, most people who paint and draw don't paint pictures of dying people or those who are dead. So who does? Well, one group of people do give us such pictures and they're war photographers. ' "The camera is the eye of history," Mathew Brady is supposed to have said. This may be true or not.  For now in an age of Photoshop, photos and history can be changed at will.  Yet the invention of the camera in the 19th century did bring many unpleasant things closer to us all. And one of those unpleasant things was people death.