Tell it Slant

European Starling

2011-07-21T16:01:00.001-04:00

Graphite and India Ink on Paper

Another sketch diary page -- uploaded this ages ago but forgot to post it. This is mislabeled on the page as an Eastern Starling, when in fact it's really called a European Starling.

India ink does approximate the general look of the thing, but the feathers are iridescent in the light.Very cool in real life.

Sparrow

2011-04-28T10:40:00.001-04:00

Graphite on paper

Doing some bird drawings in the old sketch diary these days. This is a song sparrow, similar to the common house sparrow, of which there are many around these parts. We also have a nest of Red-bellied Woodpeckers in our backyard that we've quite enjoyed watching, and a seldom-seen Gray Catbird who comes to our Grape Hollies every now and then. Will soon post a sketch of an Eastern Starling, several of whom stop by the front yard sometimes. They're pretty common here in Georgia as well.

Watercolor and India Ink

2011-03-01T15:16:00.001-05:00

16x13, Ink and watercolor on cold press paper

This is a fairly large piece, relative to what I've been doing. It was a bit challenging working on cold press watercolor paper with this particular technique using standard-nib India ink pens because the rough, absorbent surface of the paper is a bit hostile to the fast, precise strokes I need to make. The trick turns out to be to use the back of the paper, which is smoother than the front, and slow the strokes down a bit. Of course the trade-off in favor of the ink means less control with the paint, but it's a swap I can live with.

One year blog anniversary today!

2011-02-22T20:21:00.000-05:00

Ink on paper

I realized this afternoon that today marks one year since my first post on this blog. That post included a charcoal drawing of a five year old dancer (below), rendered in a meticulously realistic style. This one here is a funny little drawing I did today in my Moleskin journal while on a conference call. You might say the character of my work has changed a bit over the year.

Might even say the change has been fairly drastic, but I think that stems more from gaps and selectivity in my posting than from any major shifts in my actual art practice. When I look back through my journals and finished work over the past year I can see a gradual and intentional progression from realistic figurative and portrait drawing to the more abstract forms I've been doing these days.

Well, onward and, one hopes, upward. Happy blog day to me!

12x9; charcoal and Conte crayon on paper.
Check out that copyright watermark!
So professional . . .

Forms

2011-02-21T14:48:00.000-05:00

12x9; Ink and graphite on bristol

I've really been enjoying drawing these simple forms both in my sketch journal and, as above, larger on bristol board.

Here's a smaller one, this time with a bird:

Ink and tinted graphite on paper

V-Day card

2011-02-17T14:35:00.000-05:00

9 x 6 (photo slightly cropped)
Ink and colored pencil on Bristol

Intention and Influence

2011-02-14T00:10:00.000-05:00

I had an unlikely conversation this afternoon at the baseball park. A friend and fellow little league coach came over to me and said, "you wanna see something scary?" As he showed my email entry in his smart phone, featuring the icon I use for Gmail and on this blog and elsewhere. I told him it was a self-portrait, that the original hangs in my wife's office. When he stared at me blankly, I struggled to fill the conversational void, telling him I had intended it to be a "warts and all" piece, for which I photographed myself first thing in the morning when I looked my worst, and then used a very soft, very dark pencil to "crank up the contrast," if you will. Still no response, so I blathered on, saying it was inspired by the work of Hyper-Realists like Chuck Close, though of course on an entirely different scale.

"Well, in any case, it kinda creeped me out when it showed up on my phone like that."

Clearly he hadn't been fishing for my artist's statement. But the conversation made me think about things like intentionality and how we talk about art. It made me think about straight talk vs. bullshit and even real gut level stuff like one person's deep love for a piece and another's visceral dislike or discomfort.

But it also make me think about how we classify our own efforts as "serious work" as opposed to experiments, which is how I think of most of what I'm doing these days. If I do think of something as "serious" when I set out to work on it, I'm often disappointed in the results. Unless I obsess over every stroke of the process.

As it happens, I drew that self-portrait on relatively cheap, Strathmore 300 sketch paper rather than high quality drawing paper or board, so I don't reckon I set out to do a "keeper." And who really knows if I was thinking about Hyper-Realism and Chuck Close and all that when I made the drawing? I think of it now because we have a refrigerator magnet of his portrait of Philip Glass that I see every day of my life. I did the drawing, and my wife especially liked it, so I ended up cutting a nice mat and framing it.

Well, apropos of nothing, here are some pen-and-ink "doodles" I did during family movie night this weekend. These are out of the sketch diary, so clearly not destined for framing.

"Leaf" -- India Ink and Graphite (glare is from the pencil. grrr.)

"Head" -- Ink and graphite

PS -- I suppose the title's only vaguely related to the content of this post. That's the way it goes sometimes.

As yet untitled

2011-02-10T20:00:00.000-05:00

Watercolor and ink on handmade paper

I forgot about this guy -- a page from the "watercolor journal." I think I don't have anything to say about it, but I feel like posting it here.

Valentine Doodles

2011-02-09T16:56:00.000-05:00

5x8, india ink and graphite on paper

Le jour de l'amour is fast approaching, and that means hand drawn or painted valentines will be required. So I'm prepping with some doodles in the diary. As usual, the captures are pretty poor, coming as they do from my smart phone, emailed straight to blogger. But I think they're good enough to represent the quick spirit of these.

about 4x2, india ink and graphite on paper

New painting

2011-02-04T09:10:00.000-05:00

14 x 11"; watercolor on cold press paper

Here's a first attempt at a painting based on the sketch I posted a few days ago. Not what I was going for initially, but I sort of like where it went.

Landscape

2011-01-29T10:35:00.000-05:00

approx 7x5; graphite on paper

An idea for a painting I had last night. Hard to get good captures from a moleskin using a phone, but if I wait until I can set things up for proper photography, I'll never actually post anything.

I think these look a bit too much like onions sprouting. What I would want in a painting is to make them look really huge, like ranks of these big structures receding toward the horizon, creating a kind of forest.

Watercolor Doodles

2011-01-28T13:40:00.000-05:00

9x8; watercolor and India ink on handmade paper

My other "sketch diary" is a handmade book I've had for years. Someone gave it to me and it's been waiting for its use. I finally realized that the heavy, absorbent, naturally fibrous paper should really take water well, so I gave it a shot and I really like it for small watercolor experiments.

In the early pages the forms are a lot like my other pencil and pen sketches, quasi-organic lines and shapes that just go wherever they want to as I tease little patterns out here and there. But with the addition of color, I get to find even more surprises lurking about as I wander around in the page.

Creatures

2011-01-25T22:00:00.000-05:00

In my sketch diary I've been trying to play with line and texture, just letting forms meander on their own until something starts to suggest itself.

Sketch Diary

2011-01-25T16:44:00.001-05:00

Testing blog by email, sending a page from my sketch diary.

What do you miss about Art School?

2010-06-16T13:40:00.000-04:00

I've been thinking about school recently because I speak to artists of my generation (out of school twenty years, give or take), and they say they miss it.

I have a hypothesis that what people like about art school is not the professional instruction but something else, a quality or set of qualities that seems hard to regain once you leave. And I'd like to put my finger on just what that combination of "extra-curricular" factors is.

So help me out here: What do you think is special about art school? What do you miss about it? What would you want to recapture (or capture) if you could? For me, it's something like this:

Big, well lighted studio space
Atmosphere of free experimentation
Community of open discussion, debate, collaboration, critique, and coffee

Susan

2010-06-09T16:08:00.000-04:00

24in x 18in; Watercolor and graphite on cold press paper.

I asked my friend Susan awhile back if I could draw her and she very kindly obliged. At the same time, I've been working on relaxing my style some, trying not to get as caught up in reproducing detail. I have great admiration for abstract artists who can paint (or draw) well without obvious reference to external objects, or at least with only the loosest reference.

It's actually really hard. I've been doing a lot of sketches trying to just capture simple line and shape, but I always end up trying to make my shapes into things -- like a tree or a bird or whatever.

Well, this is clearly a painting of something (someone), but perhaps I'm getting better at quitting while I'm ahead -- at not torturing the paper with detail until it's overworked and trite.

In Progress: Reprise

2010-04-08T12:13:00.000-04:00

"Henry"
14 x 11,
Charcoal and sanguine on paper.

I don't know: maybe I'm finished. The subject of this portrait -- himself an accomplished 8-year-old artist (photography, drawing, and clothes/costume design) declares it's done. He likes it the way it is. But this is still a lot looser than I'm accustomed to working, especially in charcoal. To me this is almost hyper-realistic around the eyes, and then just suggestive of shape and shadow everywhere else. If I were to continue working on this, I would probably darken most of the shadows considerably and find a lower key mid point, then smooth everything out so there's not such a feeling of "brush work" in the large color areas.

But the more I live with this piece the way it is, the more I like it. There's a little bit of nervous energy or something that fits with the subject. The one thing I will almost certainly fix is the right eye (left as you're looking at it): the unfortunate placement of reflection, pupil, and iris shading combine to make it look like a little cone popping right off the paper! All together, that eye either needs to be more in shadow or properly developed.

Well, enough of the self-critique. Other critiques welcome before I put this sucker to rest for good!

Peace,

-p

Kumi Yamashita: Light and Shadow

2010-04-05T18:50:00.000-04:00

This may be the most innovative work I've seen in a long time. Just brilliant stuff.

[Kumi Yamashita at Kent Gallery]

Novelty for its own sake is different from innovation. For example, I could stand at the bus stop in front of my house painting large canvasses with the blood of freshly-eviscerated mourning doves, and it might appear novel (it would actually be pretty derivative, but I bet few in my neck of the woods would call it old news). But would it change the way anyone thinks about light and shadow, substance and absence, "thingness" and emptiness, being and non-being -- in short, the stuff of life? After all, isn't art itself, at least in some aspirational way, an attempt to reconcile the limits of mortal existence with the infinite creative power of the universe?

Or maybe it's just about making pleasant things for pleasant people; I'm not sure.

Anyway, back to Yamashita. Take a look at how this artist works with light and shadow not as something to represent, but as medium itself. Building pieces up from mundane components -- blocks of wood or aluminum, thread and tacks, bits of paper -- to create beautiful illusions of substance and absence coexisting in the same physical space.

I'll leave it up to you what it all means, but to my mind, there's a lot more here than a stunning array of techniques!

Follow the Kumi Yamashita link and be sure to click around and look at all the work there. You'll be glad you did!

-p

In Progress

2010-03-31T17:06:00.000-04:00

I think it's sort of a miracle how a piece starts to emerge from blank paper. This is charcoal on paper in the very earliest stage of composition: I use a very light minimal contour drawing in sanguine to define a few reference points -- irises, nostrils, ears, lips, top of the head, point of the chin, etc., and then I just start to block in some major color areas. For this piece, I haven't even put a stick of charcoal on the paper yet. Instead, I've used "dirty" chamois and a little tool I made that holds a tiny triangle of chamois in a ball-point pen tube.

I spent less than an hour last night laying down the drawing, patting around the charcoal, and tapping the tiniest bit of detail in, and suddenly it feels like 70-80% of what I'm trying to capture is there -- the expression the play of light and shadow. 'Course, I'll end up spending many obsessive hours on ear cartilage and eye shading and reflected light, but maybe I should learn to loosen up and stop sooner.

Bragging Rights

2010-03-25T09:33:00.000-04:00

Everyone is proud of his kids, right? I mean, we all think our children are sort of ridiculously talented. In fact, it's sort of tiresome to sit around comparing the achievements of kids with regard to their cuteness, their verbal prowess, how many books they read, how many home runs this one hit, how striking that one was in his ballet recital and so on. But dude, lemme tell ya: I got an eight year old that can flat take some pictures!

I was prepping a small set to print for a show, and after trying a few minor manipulations, I decided they're best exactly as they came off the camera -- un-cropped, unfiltered, untouched. Here are down-sampled versions of the three we're printing for him. He took these over a year ago when he was seven.

I used to be a potter

2010-03-22T13:39:00.000-04:00

This raku piece is titled "Earth Jug." I worked a lot in wood/salt firing, raku, and some pit firing, along with cone 10+ stoneware and porcelain. I have a kickwheel and a rugged, malfunctioning electric kiln in the shed behind my house, along with buckets of kaolin and 20 Mule Team borax and various colorants and other miscellany. Not to mention several shelves of unfired pots waiting the 15 years or so for me to fix my kiln.

Maybe I should get on that!

Experiments with soluble graphite

2010-03-17T15:26:00.000-04:00

I really like Derwent's soluble graphite -- both their "Graphitint" and "Graphitone" products. I've worked with these with and without water on a few different paper types. The other day I was playing around with a graphitone stick on a piece of coated paper, so the medium would not absorb but instead move across the surface very stubbornly. It was frustrating but rewarding: I found I could layer it up and push it around with a wet chamois to get some interesting effects, then let it dry and scratch it with sandpaper to create a surface that would adhere a little more faithfully. Using these techniques, I was able to add some more color from tinted graphite and create some exciting results.

Not sure if I'll keep playing with these techniques or not, but it's fun to get out of the comfort zone!

10x9, soluble graphite on coated paper

Watercolor Portraits

2010-03-16T15:32:00.000-04:00

Still working on portraits, experimenting with sizes, approaches, media, techniques, etc. I've been working with watercolor some in addition to graphite and charcoal, and I'm not entirely happy with the results. But here are a couple of examples sort of bracketing different wc approaches.

First up, watercolor and tinted graphite on medium drawing paper, going for a distressed look w/r/t the background. but fairly tight on facial detail:

Roughly 8 x 7. Photograph is pretty poor.

Next is a larger work on true cold-press watercolor paper, about 14 x 10. Here I'm working a lot "wetter" and looser on detail, with the result that the features are almost washed out:

Performance capture -- OK Go

2010-03-10T17:51:00.000-05:00

Just saw this today. Amazing piece of video.

Quick sketch: Nude a l'Orange

2010-03-05T12:08:00.000-05:00

I drew this while watching the Olympics one night. Skating, I think. Roughly 7.5 x 8", Derwent studio pencil and tinted graphite on medium sketch paper. Just a doodle, really, but I kind of like it.