This is the second installment in a series of photos of a drawing of St. John’s Day asters in a blue Mason jar. This record of work-in-progress is more interesting than I had anticipated, well, to me anyway. I’m conscious each night as I go to work on the drawing that there will be a particular geography to what I can get done – it’s very odd to see those boundaries recorded permanently in these photos.
Session Two:
I’ve never posted a drawing-in-progress; it seems like cheating. Finishing a piece is a real rush for me and considering it before completion is rushing dessert, but here it is. I feel this is a sea change in the underlayment of my drawings and I’m enjoying working over the black, faintly gnarly structure.
I’ll post follow-ups as work continues. As an aside, WordPress wanted to change underlayment to undergarment, and maybe that’s the way to think about it.
The New Year is almost upon us – must be time to start a new daybook. I use the Exacompta “Space 24″ weekly desk planner. At @ 6 x 9 inches it has plenty of space to record weather, appointments and lists day to day, a generous “notes” area, and the paper lends itself beautifully to drawings. Meetings, conference calls and on-line seminars are just doodles waiting to happen.
The amount of stress relief available from a black pen on smooth, heavy, finely finished paper is amazing. The Exacompta books start with the month of December of the prior year, so I’ll be switching over to 2011 tomorrow after recording notes about the “Boxing Day Blizzard of 2010″ (15″ of snow over two days here on the island) and what we had to eat on Christmas day in 2010. It’s always a wonderful feeling to start in on newly opened pages. Below is a small beastie from a short staff meeting in 2010 – Happy New Year!
Study after Pontormo’s Madonna and Child with Young St. John, charcoal on board, 20″ x 16″
Grape jelly in the cool winter light of the hoop house. Pastel on board, 16 x 20.
Life has been pretty creative, lately.
Strawberries and Grapes 20″ x 16″ pastel on board
Hansa roses and a sterling tea set on a sunny summer afternoon. Pastel on board, 18′ x 24″.
This is a study for a larger work that also features with roses, watermelon, green grapes and tiger lilies. I thought I ought to be familiar with some of the basic parts before I start on the larger chaos.
Tea Pot Study, 14" x 14", pastel on board
with 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 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.
