Buttnekkiddoodles

  Last Saturday I made my way to Calvary Cemetery on a day of exquisite beauty. The light was intense, producing strong, crisp contrast and deep shadows. A fairly chilly day for mid June at 60F, and a cool breeze from the lake meant the necessity of a sweatshirt despite the heat of direct exposure to the sun.

I had expected to meet up with a group of artists also going there to sketch, but, despite the relative openness and simple layout of Calvary, we never bumped into one another. Deep into the cemetery there are sufficient crypts and statuary and scattered cedars to screen people separated by only a couple hundred yards.

Calvary Catholic Cemetery was created because 19th century Irish residents of Chicago were being excluded from burial in some of the city’s cemeteries.

I brought a simple kit of Pitt Artist Pens including my some of my dwindling supply of the various  #fabercastellusa PAP Big Brush Grays. I will be truly bummed, if not challenged to become adept with other medium. I also used a Faber-Castell Black Leather fountain pen filled wit DeAtrementis Document Black Ink. The top sketch is in a #clairefontaine Goldline Watercolor sketchbook, the bottom sketch is on a on Stillman & Birn Nova Beige sketcbook. White Big Brush Pitt Artist Pens gave me the sky and highlights.

Jacksonville, Florida takes down Confederate monument after 122 years.

In October of 2017 I traveled to Jacksonville, Florida to give some demonstrations. On a day off I needed to mail a package and headed downtown to a shipping service just off Hemming Park. Downtown was pretty quiet and since I was unfamiliar with Jacksonville I decided to nose around. I noticed a tall monument in the center of Hemming Park which appeared to have a soldier atop the pedestal. As I stood on the Southern edge of the park I saw an historic marker and upon reading it discovered that behind me had stood the Woolworth building which had been the site of Civil Rights demonstrations in the early 1960’s. In 1963 African American students and a white professor had sat at the counter looking to be served and were met with no service and humiliating treatment. Drinks were poured on the student and professor.
In 1960 the demonstrations led to violent clashes between whites and blacks which became known as Ax Handle Saturday. I had known of the lunch counter demonstrations but did not realize they had been in Jacksonville nor did I know of the severity of the attacks on demonstrators on the day which became known as Ax Handle Saturday. I was stunned to be standing on the site of such momentous events in this country’s struggle for Civil and Human Rights.
I then walked over to what expected might be another monument to Confederate soldiers erected in the Jim Crow era that followed the post Civil War Reconstruction period. I had just come from New Orleans where the statue of Gen. Robt. E. Lee had just been removed. As I suspected, it was a Memorial to the Confederate soldiers who died in the Civil War. On the monument we’re the words, “Our Heroes” and “God Bless Our Country”. The date of commemoration was 1898, solidly in the Jim Crow Era.
As I was drawing the statue, [as I have drawn and documented other monuments to the Civil War, in particular the monuments erected to commemorate the secessionist movement that waged war against the United States of America in order to defend the institution of slavery, and the racist White Supremacy legacy], an African American gentleman who had been walking around the park, passed close by me and muttered lowly but sufficiently for me to hear, comments about a “white mutherfucker” that I felt were very likely directed at the dude wearing a Texas Longhorn baseball cap and sketching the vestige of the Lost Cause. The city of Jacksonville had been locked in a dispute over the removal of these monuments as had/have the other cities and states still exhibiting them. If I was in fact the gentleman’s intended person of disgust, and if it was in regards to an apparent interest in the symbol of the savage oppression and ongoing injustice to African Americans, he could little know that I, who was a child of southern parents, no longer romanticized the history of the old south nor the Confederacy, am a firm unionist and applaud the removal of these monuments. We have still a lot of reckoning and healing over a truly grievous part of our history.

Drawn with a Graf von Faber Chevron fountain pen and Pitt Artist Pens.

 
Stopped by my framer’s shop and drew Avram masked-up and in the midst of a project. Owners Ross and Darren have done an excellent job under truly challenging times to complete old orders, accommodate new orders, and help their employees thru this grueling health/economic crisis all the while observing protocol for the pandemic and keeping everyone safe.
Drawn with a Faber-Castell Basic Black Leather fountain pen and Pitt Artist Pens on a Clairefontaine Goldline Watercolour sketchbook.

 
headed to Sawyer, Michigan for 5 days of extreme social distancing for myself and Giamila.
Spent too many hours a day watching the treadmill of news coverage on CNN and MSNBC alternating with reading The Lincoln Conspiracy  by Meltzer/Mensch. Tag book documents the failed plot to assassinate President Lincoln before the takes office. To both process the dramatic events since the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin and take a pause from the stream of activity I’d head to the beach to draw. I was quite frustrated to be out of position to directly cover the demonstrations in Chicago but I believe the issue of injustice against the black community has renewed vigor and there will much to cover once returning to Chicago, including covering City Council sessions and upcoming court cases once the guidelines on social distancing are relaxed.
I used Pitt Artist Pens and a Graf von Faber-Castell Chevron fountain pen in a #clairefontaine Goldline Watercolour sketchbook. #fabercastellusa
  

The one place I thought I could go during this time of pandemic lockdowns with Chicago Police dispersing gatherings of a half dozen or more was a cemetery. So Giamila and I agreed to meet up, masked up as well, at Chicago’s elegant Graceland Cemetery.
In general, cemeteries are very sparsely attended so I was a bit surprised to find dozens of people, solitary, and groups of five, roaming the ground. Kids were zooming about on bicycles, a practice generally discouraged by cemeteries. Many unmasked. Lady G and I sat by this tombstone for an hour and a half while I drew and then roamed the grounds, her first time ever at Graceland.
If you have the opportunity I highly recommend a visit wherein you will find the tombstones of luminaries such as Louis Sullivan, Jack Johnson, Mies Van Der Rohe, Daniel Burnham, Dorthy Page, Pinkerton, Cyrus McCormick, and many others after whom Chicago streets, Parks and buildings are named.

Pitt Artist Pens, fountain pen on Clairefontaine Goldline Watercolour sketchbook. #fabercastellusa #clairefontaine