Fisherperson at Work

Here’s a part of today’s catch.  I’m drawing these guys on the world’s most beautiful blue paper — Canson pastel paper — the big roll!

Drawing Them

The koi of my drawings, they link me to so many other things.  Like my daughter’s scribbles when she was a toddler.  Like the nympheas drawings of Monet (yes, he made drawings).  The hatch marks of Degas’s pastels.  The impetuous and slightly wacky, yet still beguiling drawings of Joan Mitchell. The dreamings of Emily Kame Kngwarrey. The tire tread marks my car makes in the muddy drive way.  The slug slime trails we find on the porch steps in late summer.

The line follows more paths than an artist ever intends.  What are the larger implications of my gestures?  Do the fish mean something?  What am I trying to communicate?  Does anyone know?

The fish swim up toward the surface and then they dive back into their own murky depths.

Do Clean House Occasionally

Phyllis Diller, a comedian whose humor some of us actually remember quite vividly, though we are loath to admit it for fear of acknowledging how soon hath time, the subtle thief of youth, stolen on his wing, our three and twentieth year … and the three and thirtieth, the three and fortieth, and so on!

Phyllis, as I was saying, upon hearing that some housewife cleaned her house every six months, had brightly remarked, “Why so often?”  It’s a sentiment to which, I usually quite heartily concur.  As she wisely noted, “Housework can’t kill you, but why take the chance.”  I have, nonetheless, been reduced to cleaning my house as a dire necessity.  And in so doing have found some very nice sheets of Canson pastel paper, as well as some Magnani Pescia soft blue drawing paper, that are just the sort of things I need now that I’m “fishing” night and day.

It’s very fortuitous to find a stash of drawing paper that you forgot you even owned when you are right in the midst of drawing all the time.  Thus my late spring no bud or blossom sheweth.  Au contraire, it’s all fish.

So I’m going to draw like a demon with these new pages, but as to housekeeping … once I have got past the dire need, I fully intend to resume my wiser habits of old.  As Phyllis said in deeper explanation: “Cleaning your house while your children are still growing up is like shoveling the walk while it’s still snowing.”

If I start cleaning house again before six months has passed, somebody slap me!  Please!

Many Drawings

Over the holidays and at various odd moments lately I have been drawing. Presented as a potpourri, here are some.

Giraffes and Rodin’s Thinker thinking, in oil pastel on colored paper

Wind-up Boy Riding Tricycle Toy, in oil pastel

Olive oil and vegetables, oil pastel

Clear Bottle, oil pastel

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Drawing Challenges

The web has a bunch of “drawing challenges” going where people offer subjects to draw which are afterwards anthologized in a blog.  One such challenge that I recently stumbled upon is Sheila Thorton’s Old Master Copy Project.  Since I used to do a lot of copying of paintings at the National Gallery of Art, I couldn’t resist this challenge.  This month she has two images, one of which is Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Earring.

The deadline for this challenge ends January 1, so better draw/paint fast! (The other image she chose is Durer’s drawing of his mother.)

These things that people do to motivate themselves and others, to make art in this instance, in my opinion, is one of the neatest, finest aspects of the Internet.  A whole lot of drawing is going on under the radar screen. 

Have you made your New Year’s resolutions yet?  Let one of them be to draw!  Or if not that, since drawing isn’t for everybody, then buy art!

I made my version of Vermeer’s idea using Caran d’ache oil pastels on Canson mi-teinte paper (dark grey).
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The Anonymous Marmalade Jar

Some lines in the cloth behind the marmalade jar make the whole composition look akimbo, turning my jam jar into a rhyme or metaphor for a famous leaning tower somewhere across the pond perhaps ….

I have painted this favorite jar before and let the manufacturer’s name appear, which is a fun if somewhat exacting bit of painting.  But today my jar is rendered anonymous and exists as art for art’s sake — or perhaps as marmalade for marmalade’s sake (?).

I mooshed the crayons down into the paper so forcefully (mooshed, for those of you who don’t know is a technical term … ahem) that the crayon is impastoed.  These wax crayons (Caran d’Ache Neopastels) are the next best thing to paint.
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Flowers still “growing”

I tried to post this yesterday and wordpress wouldn’t let me (bit of a snafu).  And today I have tried a couple times to load some new photos to my computer and my Kodak Easy Share ain’t sharing.  This is what happens when technology rebells.

Anyway, this drawing is 30 x 48 inches so it gives me plenty to do.  I have some photographs of the still life, too, taken from different angles — helps me get ideas for other versions of the same motif.  Degas counseled the artist to “redo the same thing ten times, a hundred times,” and he thought you should look at the same motif from different angles.  Since I’m working in a pastel-like medium, his advice comes readily to mind.

This drawing is made with Caran d’ache water soluable crayons on Canson paper.  I’ve got a lot of quickly and vigorously drawn green lines down there at the bottom.  But I’m trying to work them into a dense Degas hatching mix.  More on that later. 

If I can get my computer to cooperate! (Never let a PC see you sweat.)
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Why crayons are wonderful

The close up view of the drawing reveals the hatching and cross-hatching that I wrote about a few posts ago.  The technique is a lot like what you get from traditional pastels except that there is no dust. 

This is like your traditional kids’ Crayola crayons except with a very rich, heavily pigmented and highly workable texture.  As a drawing medium it is extremely responsive and flexible.  As a consequence you can fully enter into your idea without any hassle about the medium.  And you can find a kid-like joy in this portable, scribbly crayon. 

They’re a little on the expensive side, though.  If one rolls under the couch, it’s worth diving under there to retrieve it!

Beautiful Dreamer

Her face has pale violet and a light, apple-green like you find on a smooth Granny Smith.  Her hair and eyebrows are the warm brown of early autumn leaves.  Cobalt blue outlines around her nose and cheek and mouth are like the first brisk mornings of late September.  And her head and hand are drawn in dark lines like the stark shadows of shortening days.

A summer dream that dreams of autumn — of school and playground adventures.  The coming of Halloween with its fabulous costume parade and sacks of candy.  Studies and books, school supplies and standing in line, and raising your hand eagerly, hoping to catch the teacher’s eye.

The same motif that was a pencil drawing in the previous post, I drew with crayons here.  These are oil pastel crayons, and the colors are “out of the box.”  I mixed some passages, but I also let the exaggerated color happen that goes with using the crayons unmixed and as you find them — I just let that happen.  Cools and warms create the dimension.  And zigzag lines jazz things up.  I also made no effort to “finish” anything.  Those out of the box colors, well, they lead to out of the box ideas.  None of the colors are quite real, yet they are evocative of real things.

I don’t know quite how to explain it, but I like a drawing that follows your attention wherever it goes and for as long as it goes.  And when the thoughts stop in mid-stream, the drawing just stops in its stream too.  And the empty spaces seem to say something.

This drawing, like so many of my studies, was like being in a dream.  And then something wakes you up. 

And you stop dreaming.  You are awake!  Time for school!

[Top of the post:  Child Sleeping (study for a painting), by Aletha Kuschan]

Dialing for Still life

I write to you from afar — I guess that doesn’t really quite make sense on the internet does it?.  Suffice it to say I’m not at my usual post, I write a dispatch “from the field,” and moreover I’m doing it with dial-up.

This picture above was something I found wedged inside one of my drawing notebooks.  I’d forgotten all about it.  But here it is.  It’s a little still life “painted” using artist’s crayons on linen.  I’ve both seen and read about some of Edouard Manet’s pastels that he did on canvas and decided to make this picture on cloth just to be doing the same thing Manet did.  It goes along with my theory of walking a while inside the old masters’ shoes. 

After having made trial of it myself, I’m afraid I cannot report back as to why Manet chose to do pastel on cloth as though it were a painting.  In my own picture, perhaps the chief effect is that the colors stand out against the warm brown-grey of the linen, which one must admit is kind of nice.  But overall I suppose there’s no advantage in doing pastel on cloth (rather than on paper) that is immediately obvious.  It’s one of those things to do, I guess, “just because.”

So “just because” — here  it is.  Nothing ventured nothing gained.  The objects are ones that held a special warm place in my heart.  The aluminum cup is one my mother used to measure sugar.  Its battered interior catches all kinds of silvery glimmers of light.  The other principle object is a bottle of mercurachrome, once used in quainter times to treat small cuts.

You can make a still life of the most unpreposessing things.