Buttnekkiddoodles

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

I’ll miss drawing in this old ledger book.  I started doodlin’ in the old horse July 25th, 2009. The book, a 200 page  ledger book, The Policy Register of the County Fire Insurance Company of Philadelphia,  was a gift from a pal and had contained some 64 pages of entries in graphite, of groceries and expenses  between January 1932 and 1946. I flipped the book and began drawing from the rear. At a certain point,  our entries collided. However, I’m leaving 2 pages of the previous authors’ writings untouched. The old book has seen a lot of wear and tear, literally. Lard knows how old the book really is, but I can tell you them 16 1/2″ by 11″ sheets are brittle and easily torn and tattered. On some of the scans from the book you can see flecks of dislodged paper that have fallen on the scanners’ glass plate. Have a close look at the  neck of the model in the 3rd column 4th row of this post and the young boy’s hair in the 4th row 2nd column of March 9th’s entry, “Chicago Commuter Portraits in Ink”. The more I work thru it, and the more I let others browse it, the more it sheds and tears.

Any chronology I may have been establishing has been muddied by my reluctance to move on. I go back to make use of sparsely worked pages ( column 3 row 4 ), jam a head study into a crevice in row 5 column 2, or dove tail a studious Marko from a live session at the P & C in between someone hammering away on a laptop in a coffee shop and the sinuous echo of a tree branch. On pages where I’ve amassed speed study spaghetti, I love to reclaim some crowded real estate as with the seated figure row 5 column 1 or the composite head column 3 row 5. I began drawing a bus riders’  brow, eye, and nose who then disembarked. When the next commuter took his seat, I finished the head with rider #2’s mouth, chin, jaw, ear, collar and ski cap. Love doing that. Haven’t attached a woman’s French braid to the face of a swarthy old man yet but I’m hoping…

While most of the drawings in this book are observed from life or out of my head I do still draw from other references. Always have. The diaphanous, winged head in bonnet, row 3 column 3, is after a portrait by Hans Holbein and the back to back female and male nudes in row 3 column 2 are copies of  life drawings by Canadian great, Clive Powsey.

Only 14 of these beautiful oat meal colored pages remain in this ledger book and then it’s on to a lakota papered sketchbook less than half this size. And though I intend to range back thru these pages to amend and violate prior efforts; I’d be stealing the breath from some of the sheets if my OCD gets the better of me.