On the grounds of Quebec Provincial Parliament, drew two toiling figures from Honoré Mercier’s monument. Mercier was a lawyer, journalist, politician, francophone, leader of the Quebec Liberal Party and ninth premier of Quebec. Well, of course we expect liberals to be champions of the working folks, especially those who toil in the fields and bring us our food. But as you see below, the fascists felt they had pull with the very same crowd.
Turns out, the Mormons chose to applaud the same honest folks of the soil. To wit, a statue in the Utah capitol in Salt Lake City. Notice the bee hive cradled by the gentlemen. That’s their symbol for industry. Busy as bees. Idle hands are the devil’s workshop it is said.
Oh there’s more to it than that, in young countries, new states, huge countries with large agrarian tracts and burgeoning mouths to feed, new arrivals were welcome. Check out another statue in that same state house.
Yep! Welcome them newcomers. Bring us them tired poor yearning to be free and hankering to start fresh with a hungry work ethic. Well, we’ve seen what become of that unfortunate message. Canada’s prime consideration now is the size of the new applicants wallets and if you have specialized skill sets and educational pedigree. And their haughty neighbor to the south is no nobler, trying as they are to round up the very foreign born workforce union busting businesses are quietly encouraging. Quietly so they don’t run afoul of their angry political constituents who’d like to see our southern border bricked up solid. There just might be a Great Wall for sale in China.
And then of course, any country worth its salt will promote the education and cultural enhancement of its citizens, both longstanding and newly arrived.
Again, even the Fascists seem smitten with the notion of nurturing young minds.
Although a quick look at this pre WWII building from Mussolini’s reign could leave one unsure of the nature of the nurturing, and a suspect notion of the subject with which whom is smitten.
It seems all governments rush to extol their virtuous and historic accounting of noble intentions. The arts even get a slap on the back as long as their leash is short and their creativity finds its way to ad firms with a gimlet eye for well heeled clientele with a product to pitch.
Let’s have a look at dynamics useful in moving any great, ambitious nation forward. You know, building stuff. Useful stuff, and figuring out how to make grand projects, and new cool stuff. How to make better, and bigger stuff than your competitors. Well sir, you might just be talking about Science, Engineering, Architecture, Mathematics, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and other learned kinda stuff. How things work and how to make it all work better. Grow faster. Fly faster. You see where this is going. Check out my man below with the telescope. A visionary, looking beyond the local realm.
Now if we’re to tell the whole story, you gotta keep in check those who’d try and abscond with your cool new stuff, your good ideas. And maybe, someone’s got something you need to make your stuff better. But, they don’t wanna share it. Well, that’s where these guys come in.
And they just might have to do THIS!
Boy howdy!!! Who’d wanna keep doing that?
Well, you’ll need to come up with something persuasive. Something that not only show real gratitude, for like, your dangerous toil and maybe even ultimate sacrifice! But to let you know, you’ll be taken care of, real good, and for like, all of eternity.
So we kinda come back around in a way to the original statue where that hunched over woman looks to be working her tired body like a rented mule. And it’s not like all them fine folks in their fine shoes and soft fabrics eating delicious meals on fancy gold rimmed plates, don’t give thanks to those who had a role in …. well for certain they give some kind thanks. Maybe it’s a catch all thanks. One that covers ALL the bases. Like a big creator. You know, the BIG creator. But some time they leave thanks in a fairly permanent way, you know, as when they do a statues that represent all that contributed to this uplift. And they make it in stone. Or bronze, which will be around for gosh, a long time. Unless it gets melted down and reused, for something like a bell. Or probably a canon.
I’ll give further thoughts in a later post.
Drawings made with various inks, DeAtramentis and Platinum Carbon and pigmented markers by Faber-Castell and White China markers on several different papers, Stillman & Birn, Tomoe River Paper, Strathmore.
Caught some artists life drawing and sketching out and about.
Fountain pen and Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pens on Tomoe River Paper and Tomoe River Paper.
I’ll admit some of my pages are quite the train wrecks. To wit: the first scan.
To those of you who’ve borne witness to my sketchbooks and been surprised to see the spectrum run from chicken scratching to clusterf@kkery, allow me to explain.
There are times when describing how I begin or develop a drawing to another artist, or student, the sketchbook is my podium, and I jot down my thought process right there, on the spot, in full view of another’s retinas. Not wanting to be ‘long winded’ as it were, (I realize, THAT runs against expectation), the doodles are pretty much whipped out and at times very much short of grace.
The 2nd and 3rd images are minimal, yet clear enough to get the point with the sketch in blue ink on yellow ledger paper showing the progression of a bent over figure, derived from a modeling friend on the left to the imagined scenario of a fight on the right.
After that we see a very cursory sketch of four people in green about a table with indication of an implied horizon line for POV. Pretty quick and loose in light green with follow up line work in black to give a tad more clarity, as in,”Okay, there you have it. Now y’all get started and let’s see where you take that in 30 minutes”.
Next up….uh oh, it appears Don not only displayed how to do a loose layout in a light Umber color followed up by dropping black marks on top to strengthen form and pull near features out of the background, but perhaps a touch of impatience also, eh?
Two more images show our pedagogue starting to use the same page for multiple lessons. Hang on tight, this could get confusing.
Now we come to a diagrammatic sketch of a bush. That’s more like it. Focused, with sufficient development to explain the incorporation of simplified geometry, developing form by building values, awareness of light source, and enriching surfaces with varied textures.
And after that…oh dear, he’s back at it, certainly demonstrating some of his trickier palm print for leather techniques, but those moire hatching patterns could mean our boy is adrift on one of his tangents again.
Thank goodness he’s returned to a simple linear layout of a house, I guess, and some kind of…like…machine-ishy gizmo whatchamacallit. We’ll like the text says, I guess you had to be there.
Now the blue panorama of the cemetery should be as self evident as the kid can get. Start light and general, work towards the specifics and develop the values. This was actually done, on site, for the benefit of a class. But you’d have to poll the class to get second opinions about the benefits passed along.
So the six sketches that follow demonstrate one thing in particular. That I loathe wasting good paper. The question of the merits of any given drawing here being set aside for the moment, I often go back into my demo pages, especially the minimally developed and sketchier ones and start to reuse, or repurpose, or transform, or crowd ‘em up. Especially if I’m on a bus and I’m frantically flipping thru the book to find the space to drop in a passenger’s head. Like the bearded dude’s noggin.
It can get pretty disjunct.
Occasionally, I’ll drop a drawing on top of some sketches that were minimal or light enuff that any early meanderings got incorporated into the whole with little evidence of pentimento, or prior being. Kinda the way I feel about reincarnation. With all the new input and distractions and constant jazz and extrapolating forays, how are you ever gonna recognize your way back to your old self.
Hunh?????
Mmmm, last up is a page that seemed to have begun one journey, jumped track, and rode away on an obsessive tangent.
Drawn with various medium such as fountain pens using Platinum Carbon Ink, DeAtramentis Document Black and Brown Ink, Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pens, Polychromos Color Pencils, Gouache, and White Grease Pencils on ledgerbooks, and Clairefontaine notebooks, Goldline Watercolour sketchbooks, Stillman & Birn Nova Series sketchbooks.
Gosh, I miss life drawing. I draw from life on a regular if not daily basis. But to draw the human body, uncovered, to really slow down and take an intense accounting of this marvel of the world. To see the structure and the substructure while capturing the play of light over the form. In the past two years I’ve barely drawn the nude and have stopped attending live sessions. I gave the virtual, online live session a go but there is a subtle spatial difference of drawing from a screen, a two dimensional surface filmed from the singular perspective of a lense and standing before a figure. When drawing live, in the same space before a model, I feel the negotiation between my two eyes. The very tricky play of parallax which creates the jostling of binocular vision.
And the craft of translating the third dimension onto a plane. Dealing with the slow fatigue of the model holding 15 and 25 minute poses, where the greater the difficulty of their pose, the more the wrestling match with gravity creates settling of the body, and the not always slight twists which may ease the strain of the pose but tease the artist to accommodate new profiles and morphing negative spaces. I miss it and I love it. All that and the accounting of lights nuanced play over the form. Again, each minute shift means light edges and slips to new real estate.
I enjoy looking at this marvel that is us.
Every sleek contour, every wrinkle, crevice, bulge, scar, wart, hollow, hump, jut, droop, dimple. The heft and hang, the flab and fold, the sheen and shade, where there’s hair, where it’s spare, the stretched and gathered, the glint of light on pout or snout or knuckle or nail.
Ah and skin. That marvelous organ which wraps and conceals all that writhes and wriggles beneath. At times dry and cottony, other times it more resembles satin or warm alabaster where one can literally see light penetrating it’s surface.
And the extraordinary dance between the hand and eye, and the mind and the heart that is the craft of drawing. The Thesaurusian challenge to describe as simply as possible or with as wide an alphabet of marks as one may, the same features again and again and with tireless return, again with no loss of delight.
Know thyself.
I’ve been missing it.
Drawn with a variety of fountain pens – usually with water proof pigmented ink or water resistant inks some of which are dyes, white grease pencils -aka White China Markers, my trusty Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pens, on the rare occasion a color pencil, on various papers.
