My contribution to the August 12 auction of art work on skateboards as a fundraiser for a free skate park in Bar Harbor.
Dude. Totally.
Deck front
Deck back
Archive for the ‘art’ Category
“Decked Out” for the MDI Skate Park Association
Sunday, June 27th, 2010Celebrating the return of images
Monday, March 29th, 2010with new work. This is “Watermelon and Pears”, pastel, 24 x 18 inches on board.
I have one more drawing planned from my set-ups in the hoop house over the summer. The light in there is diffuse and very white. I plan to start the 2010 flower season by constructing a table-top in the house to take advantage of a large south facing window for compositions with bright slanting planes of lights and shadows, yellow highlights and winking green glass bowls. I’m looking for an abrupt transition from Renoir to somewhere past Janet Fish – can’t wait!
Jerusalem Airlift
Thursday, March 11th, 2010Jerusalem is an adjective in my family; it denotes a similarity in a New World object to something from the Old. Jerusalem artichoke (Helianthus tuberosus) isn’t even remotely related to an artichoke, but the taste is similar. Jerusalem Cherry, (olanum pseudocapsicum), is a member of the nightshade family with poisonous fruit – small, round, bright red fruit that look something like cherries. The Old World names were good enough, but the distinction had to be made lest you make a fatal pie out of New World cherries.
My family wrote hundreds of letters when I went away to college. Going away to college was new, but they’d had experience with going away to war and that’s how they approached it. Hundreds of letters about food. About their lives back home, actually – but I’d never realized that food was so much the overarching motif of those lives. I’m working the letters up into a collection. The Old World sent food, but the New sent a facsimile – a Jerusalem Airlift.
Mary came back to the Firehouse after, and we arranged platters of meats, breads and salads for 100. They gave us much more and also sent a beautiful whole ham for Mother and Ben. Dad cut it in chunks last night with the big knife so it could be divided easily. Mother froze the bone for soup later on. PS Thought I’d send nuts – maybe you can use a hammer and something for a pick.
It is supposed to snow this afternoon 2 – 8″ stopping around midnight. I am working overtime tomorrow, then on Sunday we are having your father’s birthday party. He wants that coconut pineapple cake of Doris Watkins’. It always falls apart, but he always asks for it.
I have plenty of excerpts to work with, and hope to begin setting up material to draw as illustrations. (I’m going to skip the ham.) A perfect frontspiece for the book, I think, will be a picture of me standing ghostly in the back yard, holding a layer cake.
Washed away
Thursday, February 25th, 2010
30 knot winds tonight with driving rain and a flood warning until mid-day tomorrow. We’re expecting 20′ waves and the shore roads are closed to traffic. This is a big, slow moving storm and the ground is still frozen – water is streaming down our dirt road to make a muddy delta on the highway. Almost all of our snow has melted away, leaving the brown and gray landscape that will stay with us until greening begins in April.
It’s a long time till April, so I’m posting pictures of the snow from my daily companion sketchbook. The landscape won’t look like that again until we come full circle around the sun.
New work
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010
Louis Harrison Barnard’s Japanese Tea Set, with cosmos and calendula blossoms.
New work
Saturday, February 6th, 2010
Birch St., Bangor Maine
Study on Jacopo Carucci Pontormo
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010
“The Deposition”
And now, for something completely different, my warm-up page for this drawing. Sadly, I didn’t get to use the hat.
Study on Rubens, via Loomis
Wednesday, January 20th, 2010Andrew Loomis wrote a lovely, useful and rather dated book entitled Fun with a Pencil – How Everyone Can Easily Learn to Draw. It’s a wonderful book, and he’s not lying. “Start with a circle”, he says, “it doesn’t matter if it’s as lopsided as the family budget, it will work”. He continues to chatter and encourage through nose lines and foreshortening, mocking up whole interiors in two point perspective and illustrating types through racial stereotypes. His books are a rare sort of useful fun; a combination of how to draw big ears and freak hats with accurate information about how the human body hangs together – and how to draw its shadow.
I took a few nights off and drew exercises out of the book. When I’d had my fill of bushy eyebrows and huge ears (Loomis is inordinately fond of drawing old men), I tried a study of Rubens, “Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus”. Sisters Phoebe and Hilaeria were abducted by Castor and Polydeuces, and of course their cousins Idas and Lynceus avenged them, killing Castor and starting the chain of events that led to the Trojan War. This is the most popular scene in that long chain because it involves beautiful half-draped women being swept up on horseback, or grappled with, or clinging to, swarthy men. I think this Rubens is the most intimate interpretation: note how Hilaeria’s and Lynceus toes are rested together, and her hand on his foot. In many places the participants are locked together like puzzle pieces, trapped by the horses rearing dangerously close.
The painting suited my purposes nicely – all that force and direction expressed in twined limbs and rounded flesh is the perfect exercise for the theory that all animal action can be drawn from a foundation of spheres and dissecting lines. So, Rubens via Loomis:
New work
Friday, January 15th, 2010Bangor in the snow: the corner of Merrimac and Water Sts.
