The Art Museum partners with the Arts Council of Princeton to provide free virtual drawing classes. Weekly classes are taught by artist-instructor Barbara DiLorenzo over Zoom. With an emphasis on drawing with pen or pencil on paper, each week’s lesson in this series will be inspired by a sculpture in the Museum’s collections. 

This live art-making class is inspired by a pair of painted tomb guardians from the Tang Dynasty. These spirit tomb guardians (zhenmushou) clutch snakes in their hands while subduing animal demons atop rock plinths. The human-faced guardian has one taloned foot on the back of a screaming deer-demon; the lion-faced guardian is seen pouncing on a squealing, green-spotted, winged boar-demon.  

This pair represents the final stage of the long sculptural evolution of tomb guardians, when sculptors began to depict the guardians’ roles as defenders against demons. In this session, we will draw the tomb figures and focus on how to tackle a complex subject: balancing the art of drawing big shapes while also rendering fine details related to angles and placement of the objects.