Male Back, a drawing after a chalk sketch by Giovanni Segantini (1858-1899)
(below, highlighted detail of figure image)
Drawing
Male nude figure
4B graphite pencil on white Canson 50-pound (74-G) acid-free paper
August 2006
Dimensions: paper 9 inches (22.8 cm) high by 5-7/8 inches (15 cm) wide; image about 6 inches (15.3 cm) high by about 4-1/8 inches (10.5 cm) wide
I drew this male torso as an exercise, to improve a rough black-chalk sketch by Giovanni Segantini (1858-1899). After is a term artists use to basically say copied from, a simple way of giving credit for the work of the original artist. I retained Segantini's swirls of cross-hatching shading lines, which give shape to the depressions and projections of the man's form, but I smoothed them and thinned them quite a bit. I fixed the man's left leg, which, in the original, looked withered and awkwardly bent the wrong way. And I exchanged Segantini's dark background for a white one, and used a graphite pencil instead of black chalk, to give the drawing a lighter and more modern feel.
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