Remembering: Putting Names with Faces

While I’m on my memory theme, I took this face from some old master, but I can’t remember who or where.  (Other than that, and the continual dance of hide and seek that I play with my car keys, I have a great memory.)  I think it’s from a Degas portrait.  (Is there an art historian in the house?)

The advantage of drawing from old masters is that you get such neat ideas.  If I draw from life, I can use what this image teaches me.  Of course, I’m usually drawing fish.  But, hey, they have such fine chiseled profiles, they really do.

Anyway, my violin hero Stephane Grappelli used to play a Bach duo with Jean-Luc Ponty, de temps en temps.  They called it their “Bible.”  So, I take a break from my jazz koi to draw a little classical Degas sometimes.

Another Garden

I drew the garden again.  Made this one a little bigger.

Tapestry of the garden myrtles

I have a favorite painting at the National Gallery of Art, a dear old favorite friend of a painting.  Me and this painting go back years!  It’s Vermeer’s Girl with a Flute.  The tapestry in the background, in particular, amazes me.  The background alone contains some of the most astonishing bits of painting that I’ve ever seen.  In the softly articulated, indistinct shapes of the fabric behind the girl, you find much of the painting’s music.  Its flute notes are all piped in blending, meandering riverlets of color and tone.  They are so out-of-focus as to be completely unrecognizable, yet they are persuasively, pervasively “real.”  Whenever I see the painting I’m reminded that all of life is like this one scene.  The world is luminous and mysterious, indefinite and mutable, meaningful and inscrutable. 

And in something like this spirit of inscrutability I enter my garden of crepe myrtles.  I don’t of course own the garden.  I own the scribbles that establish the garden of my pencil.  Though I have to follow the park rules about when I can visit my trees, with my pencil they transform into personal, imaginative property.  I wander through them like the lady of the manor.  And I abstract them with all the freedom that Vermeer taught me to feel before nature.

My pencil lines are thoughts about form.  I say that the tree boughs shall grow to such height!  I will that the greens be bright!  I indulge all my whim for foliage and fond.  If I want significant swaths of bright white paper peeking through, so be it!  It’s my dream, my vague and transcendent fabric!

Today’s Serious Sea Shell

Another shell, today’s sustained drawing, this one using watercolor pencils.  The light outdoors and hence indoors was diffuse.  We had mostly cloudy, humid weather with scattered thunderstorms and a high temperature of 80 degrees F, here in the Washington DC suburbs.  So I started another drawing of the shell sitting on top my black desk. 

The shades of color and different densities of darkness inside the black are as fascinating as the shell itself.  As you can see, I didn’t get as far as to create a complete background for my shell, more of a vignette around the edges. 

There’s so much to look at in small things.  All the differences around the edges can carry you a long ways.

Chiaroscuro shell

Today was a loose ends kind of day.  Did a little of this, little of that, but had few chances to do a sustained bit of anything.  Except I made this drawing.  Pencil is such a moody, smudgy medium.  Shiny too.  Have to love the way that graphite gives off light as well as absorbs it.

The shell, too, reflected my thoughts back to me as well as absorbed some of them.  The beauty of drawing is the way it lets your mind drift off to lazy, limitless, meditative places.

Sending Oneself to School

Like a musician playing scales, I have been thinking lately about how much I need to PRACTICE!

I might have told you that some years back I went whole hog and purchased the Dessins d’Ingres : catalogue raisonné des dessins du Musée de Montauban .  When you see how much Ingres drew, it makes you feel guilty as hell!  Jealous, too!  And awe-struck.

Well, I’m way outta my league, but I have been inspired to draw more.  And that book renews my faith in the virtues of copying.  Ingres copied gazillions of images by other artists.  (He also put to paper every visual idea he ever had, I think!)

Thus, in that spirit I made a quick morning drawing after a Raphael portrait.  She’s got a little bit of Picasso around the eyes … maybe a little subliminal “copying” going on in this drawing along with the literal.

Drawing Horses

I drew horses today.  (And I even got some work done on my still life!  You can read about that lament in previous posts.)

Drawing horses is something I did just for fun.  (I decided that I needed a big dose of fun, since I was becoming old sober sides.)

I played around with the color quite a bit.  I guess you knew that.  But certainly they are “horses of a different color” just like in the saying.

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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The flowers keep growing

The flowers that I began earlier this autumn are coming along slowly.  I took a siesta for a bit, but I get back to them from time to time.  The great thing about drawing a vase of fake flowers is that they are quite patient.  The only change that comes upon them is dust.  And it is far too minute to be decernible in my depiction!

I am coming to terms with the floral pattern on the cloth behind the flowers.  And it’s daunting the amount of visual “stuff” that lies before your eyes that you can contemplate and attempt to portray. 

I think the picture has come a long way, yet there’s potentially very much that could be done still.  An earlier view of the picture can be found here.
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Working in fits and starts

I work in fits and starts, and recent weeks have been busy with distractions — some of them quite removed from painting and art.  (Unless you consider helping a child make a Halloween costume art!)  But I did get away for a few hours to make a drawing straight from nature — on a lovely autumn afternoon as the guest of this welcoming tree.  You can compare the drawing with a photograph below.

I think it’d be fun to draw it from the photo, too.  And I may do so. 

Or I might not.  I find that I’m often capricious when it comes to making plans.  I’ll call that artistic license! Come visit my store on CafePress!