A recent life drawing from The Palette & Chisel of a model I hadn’t drawn before. Liked her funky style and the fab braids. I believe I worked on this drawing for almost two hours. Pitt Artist Pens on toned drawing paper.
Some drawings from Friday’s life drawing session at The Palette & Chisel. Some of the nude models and some of the artists. Pitt Artist Pens on Toned paper.
Pitt Artist Pens on Toned paper.
Went to see the screening and discussion of the film FIRSTHAND: Gun Violence, at the Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership. On stage we’re two of the five panel members, Dan Protess, producer and director of the film and Reality Allah, outreach worker for READI Chicago. FIRSTHAND is a 15-part digital series that follows the perspectives of five Chicagoans living with firsthand experience of gun violence in Chicago.
The gentleman on the right, Reality Allah, spent 20 years incarcerated and has since his release vowed to dedicate his life to reducing violence. He is now an outreach worker for READI Chicago where he uses 30 years of his experience and knowledge to engage men at high risk of violence with transitional jobs and cognitive behavioral therapy and to connect them with other critical support services. He is featured in the documentary series FIRSTHAND: Gun Violence.
At last night’s panel discussion Reality Allah said that a billboard for the documentary was erected in south Chicago with his face featured. When he saw the billboard, he realized it had been placed five feet from where he was arrested prior to beIng incarcerated for 20 years.
For more information:
wttw.com/firsthand #FIRSTHANDwttw
When I’m working in a sketchbook I like and am having fun, I hate wasting paper so, I will work and rework pages that are full of doodles only meant to quickly demonstrate a technique. Occasionally, those pages become real exploratory exercises on imagination and improvisation. This was just such a page. Pitt Artist Pens on Clairefontaine Goldline sketchbook. Below are shots of the page as it developed.
Another fragment from the online graphic short story, “The Java Knot”.
“The flight had been the usual affair as flights go. Packed. Turbulence that saw the stewardesses hustle to buckle in for half an hour. Some child with an ear infection hitting a whistling high C at 110 decibels. Somehow, I always manage to be within two rows and to the fore of a wailing buccal cavity in misery. And while it’s a rare occasion, fortune saw to it that the narcoleptic passenger to my right kept metronomically landing 15 pounds of head into my right shoulder. When I’m not fitfully trying to avoid the flop and jerk of my own drowsies, I like to write, or sketch, during the flight. Did I mention I’m right handed? Stewardesses traipsed back and forth up the aisle with drinks and unwanted snacks, more such now that the airlines are hedging the possibility of in flight anaphylactic shock. Ear plugs are the high altitude attire that create some form of gated perimeter for those not wishing to eavesdrop on the politics, sports goop, and job resume small-talk job within earshot. I don’t wear ‘em. Maybe my hearing, like my pop’s, is slowly cruising the dusty road of atrophy and my vanity refuses to take notice. Maybe, due to the swirling waves of public white noise, I welcome it. I don’t sport a very keen sense of smell either. Further protection and comfort in the pool of perfumes and flatulence you could find yourself in on a crowded tube of humanity. Either way, I didn’t get any agitated dialogue from the row in front of me till we had landed. And only then did I get the odd scent drifting towards me from the two men now standing in anticipation of their row joining the disembarking Congo line. It may have been all the other distractions and my effort to maintain calm within the environs of my seat that I now swore to a haze, or a light vapor, or smoke, rising from the older gentleman. He was sweating. Both he and his apparent travel companion were wearing very similar reddish brown leather jackets. Jackets like the type detectives wore in cop shows from the Seventies. You knew the second you saw that cop, that he was on the take. The two guys in those brownish red leathers were talking in hushed tones, with the younger one seeming to display an attendance that was at once of tender and threatening concern.”
Pitt Artist Pens on Hahnemühle watercolor sketchbook.