sketches

Day one hundred and fifty-seven: When I looked at these bottles this afternoon, I wasn’t sure qwhether I had just walked into a gallery at the Museum of Modern Art in New York or the Museo de Arte Precolombino in Cusco, Peru. Made between 2000-3000 years ago, each bottle demonstrates a remarkable and rare expression of symmetry and line through the careful balance of concave and convex forms. This very quick pencil sketch made with my index finger does not do justice to the true elegance of these treasures from pre-Columbian South America. Ancient modern design, or should I say modern ancient design?

Day one hundred and fifty-three: This afternoon I took the iPad to the Ollantaytambo sun temple and started looking for something I thought I could draw relatively quickly. I ended up sitting on a terrace across from my favorite wall in the complex, which as far as I can tell, faces the rising sun of the winter solstice (less than 20 days from today in the southern hemisphere). Since I usually draw from a camera snapshot, my on-the-spot sketch was a challenge: the sun kept changing and thus so did the shadows. By the time I finished my session, the shadows in the doorway — the original entrance to the sun temple — had completely changed. My favorite part of the wall are the bumps purposefully left during the carving of the giant stones. At times they cast long shadows across the wall, but I included shorter shadows here. The smooth stones are all different shapes, and carved to fit together perfectly. Amazing!!

Day one hundred and fifty-one: The central square of the Andean mountain town of Pisac is filled with stalls selling everything from carved gourds to ceramic bowls to tapestries and cloths of all kinds. This study of the stall across the street from the hotel does not do the actual colors and patterns of the handwoven goods a bit of justice. Yet the sketch is what I could muster from my fingertip on an iPad, and reminds me a bit of early 20th-century modern paintings.

Day one hundred and fifty: With touchdown in Lima at 11:30 PM, I realized in the Atlanta airport that this would be my last chance to post a drawing today. I used a new (to me) application for the iPad called Sketchbook. It has a lot of different brushes and effects (but no blender tools!), all of which seem promising, but so far are simply annoying because I don’t know how to use them to achieve a particular result. There is an art theory that a medium dictates it’s own style to some extent, and I suspect the same is true with digital painting programs. Especially ones with limited function and crafty effects. This sketch of a jet outside the window experiments with Sketchbook, and is a re-awakening of my rusty finger painting skills (expectations?) that I’m sure will grow over the next 10 days. Here’s to a jetset wifi digital world!