Buttnekkiddoodles

This will be my last post of nudes for perhaps a few weeks. I’m heading out to Portland, Oregon to attend the Urban Sketchers Symposium at the Pacific Northwest College Of Art. There I’ll be trekkin’ about the hills of Portland with several dozen others of various disciplines, (architecture, film, animation, landscape architecture, painting, et. al.) to draw, out in public, the various this and that’s and thems and those of Oregons beautiful river metropolis. Click on the link to Urban Sketchers and engorge your eyes on the hundreds on entries and the swarm of talent. You won’t be disappointed. So, for the next 3 weeks I’ll be posting drawings, past and present, done on site in various locales. I may sneak a nude in. My hope is that I’ll be able to talk somebody into posing nude in a public location. Cheers.

So, how was ’09 for you? It was productive in a sense for me in that I drew reams of studies, but in many other ways it was quite an ass kicker. I hope y’all are hanging in there money wise. It seems that there’s been a shortage of wise handling of money, and the art market is seriously hobbled but squeezing thru tough times is a hallmark of artists, so, onward, into the fog.
I try to make the New Year’s Day life drawing marthon, 7 AM – 7 PM, at the Palette & Chisel but jobs kept me away again this year, so I’m posting some stuff from years past. Oh, and the last drawing is for Rich, who can’t understand why so many of us revere Egon Schiele. Rich, a nice enough guy who comes to many of the sessions, feels you can’t really draw if you don’t master realist rendering and proportion and yadda yadda…. Well, Rich, how’s this?

My final entry for the year 2009. I found myself a bit in the ditch this year as far as producing finished paintings and pieces of a more ambitious nature. Thanks to my lucky rabbit’s foot for sketchbooks; wherein I have prroductively and theraputically dwelled. Had to move in the middle of the year to save some dough and though that was disruptive I wound up with a studio that is larger, brighter, and more comfortable. In a year when I had no sales and no shows outside Chicago, I finally discovered this thing called a computer that gives one access to a very big stage indeed. And thanks to my bodhisattva, (a dude named Dave Harrod, who set up my website and has continued to assist and counsel me on the mysteries and operation of this binary beast), I have seen unimaginable hours and rivers of tears swallowed by the learning of new tricks by an aged and curmudgeonly dog.
I have also trolled the internet and websites of others relentlessly and am here to say that drawing and the flourishing of eye poppin’ sketchbooks is very much alive and thriving. As I have stumbled into others’ sites, so too have others found their way to mine. Here I’d like to give a shout out to one Clive Powsey, one humble and gifted artist in the wilds of British Columbia whose acquaintence would not have been made without the internet and who has been both helpful and incouraging as a kindred spirit best can. Check him out.
My dear friend and partner Jennifer has been patient in Biblical proportions as her “old school” housemate has wrangled red-faced and blue tongued with the lessons of the new-fangled text book. To the rest of you who’ve saved me from auto strangulation with timely encouragement and technical assistance, my mother thanks you.
See you in the new year. W.Y.A.O. Thanks for stopping by.