Buttnekkiddoodles

Headed out across the country for my Fall tour on September 10th. Denver was the first stop. The above statue is dedicated to the 3,000,000 young folks that worked in Roosevelt’s “Tree Army”, the Civilian Conservation Corps. 55,000 worked in New Mexico alone. When you hear the mantra that government is the problem, not that it can’t be problematic, and that business and the “market” will be our salvation, business was slow in coming to the rescue in the 30’s in this country. If the market is so dependable, why did 3,000,000 Americans feel a need to trek off into the outback with shovels and picks? Just a Thoreau like need to get back to nature?

    

Got to Denver 9 hours before my bags, compliments Delta. Knew it would be tricky when my flight schedule had me landing in Minneapolis for my connecting flight at 4:35 PM and the flight to Denver boarded at 4:35 PM. we landed 18 minutes late and a mad dash to the next gate just got me in before the door closed. Once in Denver, got off the bus from the airport and thanks to the kindness of strangers, made it to the ballpark where I met Tim. Tim provided the lift in his pedicab to my hotel while holding a running conversation about things Denver, etc. Worked a demo the next day at Meininger Fine Art Supply, the oldest in Denver, and many parts West for that matter. Henry Meininger’s grandfather opened the store 132 years ago and has provided quite the slew of artists with gear including Charles Russel and Frederick Remmington.

   

That’s Judd Meininger, great grandson of the original owner of H.R. Meininger Fine Art Supply, and wife Olivia, takin’ in a Colorado Rockies ballgame and a strip of chocolate covered bacon. Hell yeah I had a bite. Judd is quite the omnivore and a fired up cat with a vigorous appetite for life, period.

      

Labor Day finds me again at the Palette & Chisel for their 12 hour Life Drawing Marathon. I had an OK day but kept screwing up otherwise decent efforts by shrinking certain limbs and letting proportions go all blooey. When I don’t have a gob of time I prefer to draw intuitively rather than set a drawing up with a slew of measured lines and blocking in masses. Plus on this pose, someone kept getting in my way and I got lazy with the figures left arm so the lower arm isn’t quite long enough.

      

Drawn with the usual suspects. Pitt Pens, grease pencil, Visconti Rembrandt fountain pen gassed up with Platinum Carbon, in Utrecht toned sketch book and ledger book.

 

Had to head back to the Northeast for demos in Portland, Salem and Seattle while it was very hot in Chicago. Lucked into spectacular weather on the West coast.

I had the first day in Portland to just run around so, I met up with Gail Vines and Bill Sharp and drew in Jameson Park for about 2 hours. It’s a beautiful inner city, block size park with a nice sloping and shaded grass lawn, and a water park with the stacked block sculpture you see in the full sun. It was teeming with way more kids and adults than I cared to draw. My work schedule was packed and that was the longest period I would enjoy to just sit and work on one drawing.

 

Hit the town one night and wound up in a club called Dirty where I made a poor attempt to capture some of the goings on in th pretty frenetic environment. Caught a quick silhouette of a patron enjoying one of 2 swings suspended directly over the bar. If you didn’t get stabbed in the ear with a stiletto heel, you might be lucky enough to catch some pocket change in yer martini. Made it over to Hipbone Studios east of the river for some late night nude sketching.

 

The drawing below began with a sketch made of a friend’s kid on the beach at Sawyer, Michigan, and developed over a couple of nights as I stood outside the John Helmon Haberdasher in downtown Portland.

Well, it’s Butt Nekkid Time again. New Year’s Day finds me once more at The Palette and Chisel for their 12 hour life drawing marathon. Jumped on the Red Line at 7 AM and made it to the Palette and chisel a bit before 8 AM to a good and growing crowd. Threw in some end of the year studies about town for good measure.

   

It’d been a wile since I’d ventured into the Palette and Chisel. Didn’t get any stellar results thou I like the one of Brittany and the seated drawing of Melissa. The ledger book I’m currently drawing in was given to me by Stuart Balclomb. The preexisting ballpoint writing was done with such pressure that the pages feel not unlike seersucker fabric and are fun to draw on. At first the surface seemed a little waxy to me and I thought the pages were resisting some inks. But I’ve been using the Pitt Artist Pen, ballpoints, gel pens, and fountain pen and ink. The inks have been, Iroshizuku, Platinum Carbon, Noodler’s, and Levenger’s. I can’t tell if the sheets have been inconsistently sized or if all the handling has made parts of some pages respond to the inks differently, but there has been a touch of resistance and feathering. The paper was made for ballpoint and that stuff goes down like a champ.