Day one hundred and thirty-one: A late evening discussion in the Thrivent Financial Religious Art Gallery about George Bellows’ painting of The Crucifixion reminded me that I wanted to sketch this figure from one of his prints. The male nude appears in a 1923 lithograph titled Christ of the Wheel. I chose it because of the interesting diagonal hatch marks that Bellows used on the man’s back. My layers of charcoal lines in a variety of gray tones is an attempt to emulate the effect that Bellows achieved with the lithographic medium. I had a lot of fun working on this figure study, and found that when I relaxed and stopped trying to mimic every line perfectly, then I really started to draw — even though I was mimicking another artist’s style. Bellows is perhaps best known for his famous painting of boxers at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
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