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abstract

Day one hundred and thirty-nine: I made a couple attempts to sketch concrete subjects this evening, but my mind was simply too drained to concentrate on choosing and mixing colors, or working out a comprehensive subject. So I just started putting color on the canvas, and this is what happened. It seems incredibly flat to me, and while I’m not personally fond of the effect, it’s interesting to know how to produce it. What is more interesting (at least to me) is to create slight variations in the space: mostly flat, but with some space between layers.

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2011 05 19 quick study Comments (0) Permalink

pine street apartment

Day one hundred and thirty-eight: After three full days of apartment hunting I’ve narrowed it down to a couple places near Rittenhouse Square. Both are in brick buildings similar to the one I’ve quickly sketched here, but neither is as crooked! The apartment I’m leaning toward is in this particular place on the south side of the 1700 block of Pine Street.

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2011 05 18 quick study Comments (0) Permalink

daybreak Puerta Vallarta

Day one hundred and thirty-seven: My friend, Dan K, has been making some nice photos lately. This morning he posted one taken at daybreak in Puerta Vallarta. I liked the dim geometric shapes of the buildings in front of the dusky mountain against a sky just beginning to glow with warmth. The spindly radio towers were nice too, so I decided to try a very quick study of Dan’s photo for today’s sketch.

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2011 05 17 quick study Comments (2) Permalink

medieval king

Day one hundred and thirty-six: After a long day I just needed something – anything – to sketch. What you see here is a study of a very worn medieval sculpture (I believe 12th or 13th century), which can be viewed at the Cluny museum in Paris. The headless king has been posing at the center of my computer’s desktop for months. I am quite pleased how it turned out, for although it’s not an exact likeness, it seems to me to be a reasonably realistic representation of drapery. And with relatively little difficulty. I feel like my drawing skills are very slowly, but surely developing. The sketchy note and marks around the figure are there because I like it when artists leave these incidental scratches on their etched copper plate prints.

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2011 05 16 quick study Comments (0) Permalink

study for a seahorse

Day one hundred and thirty-five: This afternoon I visited the National Aquarium in Baltimore, and I snapped a shot of a seahorse with my iPhone. This oil pastel study is based on that photo.

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2011 05 15 quick study Comments (0) Permalink

in the act after the fact

Day one hundred and thirty-four: I had to get something in under the wire tonight, so I grabbed the business card of an artist and mimicked the charcoal style on the back as quickly as possible. Kay Fenton is a senior at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, and this sketch imitates a detail of a work that is part of a thesis project I saw on display this afternoon. I really like the way Kay works and reworks the surface of the multiple-sheet images, and so I tried to something similar, but not in exactly the same way. I think the original picture is called “In the Act” or something to that effect, and I believe it to be an abstraction of some figures. What you see here is thus an abstraction of an abstraction: it is not a perfect copy. Kay’s is much subtler and richer overall. I just wanted to capture a sense of the charcoal shapes on the pages, the edges of which I indicated at the center where they come together.

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2011 05 14 artist tribute
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American night sidewalk (Baltimore)

Day one hundred and thirty-three: Making these daily sketches has become such a quotidian routine, that when I’m traveling it really shakes things up. Did I bring the digital drawing pad? Will I have internet? Where will I set up my computer? What will I draw? Tonight I made this sketch in a Baltimore hotel room, sitting on a couch in the dark with both the computer and the pad in my lap. A little awkward, but I went with it. I snapped a shot of a street corner on my way home from dinner, and used a very fine black pencil to sketch it. The only remotely straight lines I could muster given my couch-slouch position were vertical, yet this turned out to be just what I needed to create a variety of shades of glass and reflections of light. I was going to call this picture “Baltimore Sidewalk,” but realized this setting could probably be found in just about any big American city.

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2011 05 13 quick study Comments (2) Permalink

collage

Day one hundred and thirty-two: I have no idea why I thought I should try making a collage, but somehow there it was. Before starting to sketch, I decided I would use pencil to incorporate artworks that appeared on certain pages of three museum guide books: page 20 of The National Gallery (London), page 30 of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City), and page 40 of the Louvre (Paris) guides. I called out the pages as I grabbed the books, without looking to see what was on the pages first. The sketch you see here is the result of combining and playing with Vase in the form of a humbacked bull (Marlik civilization), Young Man with a Falcon (Tabriz, c. 1540-1550, attributed to Aqa Mirak), and Portrait of a Lady in Yellow (about 1465, Alesso Baldovinetti). This is my natural drawing style, which is very sketchy.

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2011 05 12 composition
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bellows drawing style

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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2011 05 11 artist tribute
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sleepy kitty

Day one hundred and thirty: Today I was cataloging prints at work, which means I get to look at amazing works on paper while I key data about them into a computer database. A sweetly sleeping cat on a pillow in the lower left corner of an intaglio print by the 16th-century artist Federico Barocci caught my eye, and I knew it would make a good subject for one of my sketches. It’s nice to know that cats haven’t changed much in over four hundred years. I had a little extra space at the bottom of my drawing, so instead of cropping it off I thought I’d add an inscription similar to those on prints of the period: Federico Barocci invented it and I made it!

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2011 05 10 artist tribute
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