self-portrait

Good-bye, 2012.

Winter over Green Bay

Tarragon drew this image from life this morning, using the Procreate app on an iPad.

How I know

A drawing done from life with a brush pen and pastels.

celebrate

kathleen

like a statue he reclines

Three heads (and a torso) of Emily

Three small portrait sketches of Emily, who posed for the Arts Project in London, Ontario. They were done with a Copic brush pen, as usual.

Charlotte Passing

A portrait sketch in oils by Tarragon Smith.

Maria in uniform

She borrowed my laptop to check her email; I borrowed her break time to make a drawing.

steve in outline

Maeve in class

Reinisa awake

How long I waited

Figure study

A figure study, done from life with acrylics on board. This isn't really my sort of thing, but it's a good idea to practice from time to time.

jacki

Drawn from life in 60 seconds, using a Copic brush pen.

Some kind of sad

Drawn from life with a brush pen.

Life drawing is better with snacks.

Another sketch of an attentive medievalist made at the lecture of Chris Berard about King Arthur and Edward III.

Genova Centrale

A quick browse of my landscapes might suggest a fascination with the type of European picturesque aesthetic that prevailed in the 19th century. Nor would that be entirely wrong: I do love a good rendering of medieval architecture.

But I wouldn't ever be content with just ruins and atmospheric crags. One of the great, and rarely mentioned, advantages of making pictures is the ability to see something interesting almost anywhere. I once attempted to interest a buyer in a landscape of a shopping mall some years back. He wouldn't hear of it, so it never got made, but it would have been beautiful! All those horizontal lines!

The Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti famously claimed that "a speeding automobile is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace." To which one might reply, it depends on the automobile...

But he was making a value judgment. New shiny things good; old landscapes bad. Especially if the old landscapes were dominating and impeding the course of artistic expression. He had a point - Courbet was making the same one when he ran through the Louvre to destroy the Venus de Milo. Marinetti and Courbet could not imagine a world where artists could make whatever they liked, whether it be shiny or important or not.

But that would be a better world, wouldn't it? If you can see beauty everywhere, it's nice to show it to other people.

This is a view from near the main station in Genoa. It's a large screen print worked back in with watercolour. Apologies for the low quality jpeg.

Hannah

A drawing done from life in around fifteen minutes, using markers and china markers.

David Says