Went out to Portland, a town I’m developing quite a fondness for, for a week, to take care of business and clown about town. For starters, as I was riding the light rail, the Max , in from the airport, a young woman in a green tee shirt, festooned with facial piercings, and hair piled high and gathered in a black paisley patterned bandana, sat right in front of me. You see her in the top left drawing. I would run into her a week later at the airport as I was drawing a view out a window by a coffee stand where she was getting off work. That drawing of the tarmac with highway and hills beyond is at the bottom of the middle column. She noticed me drawing, mentioned she’s an artist, her boyfriend a tattooist so I showed her the drawing I made of her the week before. She was very charming and I seriously wanted to do a portrait of her but figured she was tired having just finished an early morning shift.
Once in town, I shot over to the Chinese Garden, a reconstruction of a poet’s walled compound from the garden district in Suzhon. There I drew the Foo Dog you see above.
The next day, after a fine lunch with my Northwest Coast friend Doug at Jake’s Seafood Bar and Grill*, Doug and I headed to The Art of The Shave where we took turns under a straight razor deftly managed by the suave and engaging Elijah Mack, who transformed our grizzled jaws into smooth as polished baby butt profiles. Eli, with tattoos aplenty & perfectly comb-raked pompadour, is a first rate conversationalist, raconteur, and one sharp dressed muthafukka. (* You can see drawings that I did with artist Pete Scully one nite at Jakes during last summer’s Urban Sketcher’s Symposium on my earlier entries, “More Glimpses of USK in Portland” and “Post Partum Portland”)
I then went and joined up with Portland artist Bill Sharp, whose astute work you can view by linking to his website through my blogroll, for some life drawing at Hipbone studios. I wasn’t on my best game there and you can see I fell prey to some of my bad habits. My proportions were all out of whack, I shorten folks legs if I’m not alert and there is barely any suggestion of form and twist in the hips of the reclining poses. I was trying to whip it out and got some lazy scrawls instead.
The evening of the following day, after work, I went on a boat ride up the Willamette River during which I drew the 2 portraits in the 3rd row of fellow riders. I began the drawing titled Il Tom Siena by drawing the hairdo of Siena, our trade show sponsor at C2F. Then Tom O’Brien, an artist from Seattle, obligingly posed to complete the sketch.
Row 4 columns 1 & 2 were drawn at Linda & Fred Engstrom’s vineyard, Cloudrest, a plot of land straight out of Eden. We had 2 hours to draw before the place took a soaking. The blue glazed pot was drawn from under their eaves where I took refuge from the rain.
As with most places, Portland has it’s cast of characters. And time spent on her streets, riding public trans, and in the libraries, book stores, bowling allies, and bars & cafes, will give you a very colorful assortment of the species. Cork, a distributer of art supplies, is seen wielding a 2 olive martini and set to sling his transparent bowling ball with skull encased. In addition to an abundance of piercings, labrets and the like, and vast acreage of tattooed skin, Portland relishes hirsute displays. The reading rooms of Portland’s main library offer choice examples from shaggy to shorn. Check the twin peaked pompadour on the intent reader, 2nd column, 5th row.
All the rain aside, and the Northwest being a part of the world that excels in precipitation, the lack of marrow congealing winters and blistering summers, the highest unemployment after Michigan, and years of the attrition of a deeply entrenched meth trade, means a sizable transient and homeless population. On the west facade of the library at 10th and Yamhill, up under the crown, is the well known phrase from Luke 6:31,”Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. Those who find themselves down on their luck, or wrestling with MH issues, who are on the street because of life choices or who struggle negotiating life’s often tough terms are fortunate that Portland’s weather is temperate and her citizens embrace the pathos of Luke’s words. Washington and Oregon have led the states in efforts to keep the pharmaceutical building blocks of meth behind the counter. No thanks to the foot dragging of Big Pharm.
Ah Lord, HATS. Hats bedevil me. Getting the drawings to feel like the hat sits on a solid globe, that a noggin is really shoved into one. Like hairdos, that amount to more than spaghetti slapped up against the page. Most of the Prussian Blue colored drawings are done with a fountain pen using Noodler’s Kingfisher Blue, the black drawings on ledger paper are drawn with a Visconti fountain pen using Platinum Carbon Ink. The colored drawings are my old reliable Pitt Artist Pens. The top 6 rows were drawn in a Veterinarian’s Daily Record ledger book from 1959. The ivory colored paper in row 7, column 1 & 3 and the 3 drawings in row 8 were drawn in a Quo Vadis Note 27 daily planner which has the creamy smooth Clairefontaine paper that also has good blocking ability. Fairly important as I draw on both sides. The clay colored paper in the lower rows are from a Utrecht sketchbook with recycled acid free paper.
OK, there’s a few repeats, lazy editing on my part. Just trying to catch up with the backlog of studies over the winter. The drawings in the 3rd row across are from a new sketchbook, A Veterinarians Daily Record. The blue pages are in fact that color. The book alternates blue and oat colored sheets every several pages. Odd thing about the blue pages, they barely register a white grease pencil. I thought they had enuff tone for me to pop a highlight but the effect is dismal. The fountain inks look good on the paper and are easy to smudge before they set up.
Getting caught up on posting drawings from the last 4 months. Most of these were drawn at the Palette & Chisel in Chicago, however, the drawings on toned paper of Amanda were drawn at Trapeze studios in Seattle. All drawn with the usual suspects, India ink, Pitt Artist Brush Pens, fountain pens, China Marker for the white highlights. The pink drawing of Jessie is done in Iroshizuku Yama Budo fountain ink. The toned paper is from a recycled, acid free sketch book by Utrecht. And the drawings in the date book are Clairefontain paper in a Quo Vadis planner.
I renewed an interest in fountain pens perhaps a year and a half ago and have been drawing with them about 50% of the time. My first flirtation with them some 25 years ago was discouraging because I didn’t understand their mechanics, and improper care, combined with the wrong ink, bollocksed up a few pens. After trashing a semi-expensive Pelikan I moved on. But I always thought they had an elegance to them and had seen fountain pen script that produced an interesting line. Capable of lines both thicker and thinner than ballpoint, they also produced a wetter, thinner flow that could vary in tonal density from the start to the finish of a line or flourish. There was a noticeable “pooling” of pigment when the speed of the pen stroke slowed significantly or as the nib would come to a full stop. And while they seldom had the flexibility of the tines in a dip pen such as a Copperplate nib, some of the stub nibs had directional variance in line width and by virtue of an ink reservoir called a cartridge or a converter, the fountain pen had the distinct advantage of not being tethered to a bottle of ink. As you may have gathered at this website, I like to draw on buses.
Since it is also evident that I like to draw in previously used ledger books, I was always encountering numbers and script done in various medium. After looking at what was evidently fountain pen ink, I decided to give it another go. One frequent visitor to BND, who had been complimentary in past viewings expressed unvarnished disdain for my use of the fountain pen. Apparently tormented as a youth in school by the required tool, they had no love for the boring line produced by this writing instrument. I’ll note here that I got similar responses 35 years ago when I traded in my pencils and charcoal for a ballpoint. And having tried all the beasts on the shelves in art & craft & writing stores I often found myself struggling with an instrument I hadn’t mastered or by it’s very nature was ill suited to sketchbooks and ledger books. Often, that was the point. To see what would come of a new tool and to take some of the control and predictable flourish away from my hand. So just as I contend there are no bad poses, I don’t like blame coming to exclusive rest with the materials. Attributes can be found in unsuspecting places if you’re alert, no? A ballpoint that bled like a stuck pig and would most likely find itself in a waste basket, gave me a wide and juicy line as distinct from the brittle line produced by the well behaved accountants’ Bic fine point.
The very watery nature that is integral with fountain ink allows me to dab it while still wet and stamp ambient marks and smear the ink to get swaths and hazes that expand the vocabulary of the tool’s signature.
