Reading Twilight upside down.

The reader, that is, not the book.

Drawn from life with a Copic brush pen, in about fifteen minutes.

Francis the cartoonist

The incisive cartoonist of sketchy musings, stopping to consider his next drawing. Or maybe his next cookie. I don't recall.

Coming back late to Compton

Courtney Plays

Look back and savour

A drawing done from life in about ten minutes, with several Copic brush pens, at a Keyhole Session in Toronto, Ontario.

he knows your ways

The gothic church of St.Pierre in Avignon

It's the clocktower of the church of St.Pierre, in Avignon. I was there a few years back; I cycled along the south coast of France and around Provence, carrying a tent and my sketchbook. Avignon was among the most attractive - although not the most welcoming - of the cities I visited. Its chief merit, other than unreasonable quantities of medieval architecture, was delicious kebab and a very pleasant campsite.

There's really nothing like rolling out of your tent in the morning and seeing the Palace of the Popes across the river.

St.Pierre is not attached to the Palace of the Popes, but is more or less contemporary. It shares - except for the 16th c. facade - the same aggressive Provencal Gothic style of architecture. It's all sharp angles, spikes, and small beady windows. Not very friendly.

It is fun to draw, however.

You know what not to do

new french boyfriend

Drawn from life with a Copic brush marker, in about ten minutes. Or maybe less.

K's Plants

Julia

emily twice

pink in the dusk

MJ, twice

Two 30 second portraits:

Rain coming over the lake

Another experiment in painting watercolours while a) getting rained on, and b) travelling with friends. Neither condition exactly encourages lengthy or detailed studies.

So here is a view of the Lago di Garda, from the peninsula of Sirmione, looking towards the Alps:

It was a beautiful day in May; three times the rain came in and soaked us; three times the sun came out and dried us out again.

It's The Devil On My Back

A new woodblock print hand-carved and printed by Tarragon Smith.

Courtney, quickly

Sisters and Brothers Come Together

Matt is naked

It happens sometimes.

Giambologna and students

An old sketchbook page, from when I was living in Florence. I was taking a course on renaissance art history, naturally, and made notes both of the lesson and my fellow students. The armour and the eagle sculpture indicate I was in the Bargello Museum that day.

I know you're lonely

Drawn from life at the Arts Project in London, Ontario.

Guy Fawkes Balloons

I missed Halloween, so this can be my Guy Fawkes day contribution.

Because the harvest was coming to an end they thought it would be symbolic to burn him alive in a giant pumpkin. This picture has four mini pumpkins with one mini Guy Fawkes in each. In the end they couldn't find a pumpkin humongous enough in which to put him so the idea came to nothing.

kathleen

Daughter of a Memorialist

A recent drawing by Tarragon:

One can find this image in a poem, or perhaps the poem finds the image:

In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.
She would like some one to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
Will commit that indiscretion.

It's by Ezra Pound, from his earlier period that was still imbued with the self-aware and cautionary dissatisfaction characteristic of artists in the Edwardian period. Soon enough Pound would shift from warnings to denunciations.

As for Tarragon, he too is concerned with the problems of inheritance. It must be very wearing to grow up in the shadow of the great artist; everyone would prefer to be spoken to for him or herself, not their breeding. It is, however, a problem that is nobody's fault.

Hand and Foot

A Vision in the Cloister

A drawing for Halloween:

Around the year 1099, something terrible was seen. A monk, walking the halls by night, surprised his superior, Abbot Berard, in the act of cooking and eating a young boy. In shock, he beheld the abbot strip the flesh from the “tender limbs” of the child and devour it piece by piece. He fled the monastery in terror, but morbid curiosity soon got the better of him, and he returned in time to see Berard dipping bread in the dead boy’s brains.

Unfortunately stories of this sort, as the examples of Gilles de Rais and Albert Fish assure us, are sometimes true. But happily, in this case we are dealing only with a “terrible vision” beheld at night. A dream, in other words.

Nocturnal visions may strike us as an improbable avenue of character assassination, but it held weight in the year 1099, for our anonymous dreamer stood before his fellow monks on the following morning, and told them what he had seen. The wise among them considered it a prophecy of God’s judgment.

Of course, we only know about this dream because the historian Gregory of Catino, himself a monk, despised Berard with uncharitable passion. He recorded the vision - as well as Berard’s “untimely and detestable demise” - in his book.

He called his book the Liber gemniagraphus sive cleronomialis ecclesiae pharphensis, a mouthful modern historians have replaced with Farfa Register, after the Italian monastery it chronicles. Within, he detailed Berard’s crimes: an insatiable greed for money, defying the precepts of the order, selling off property owned by the monastery, and neglecting to acquire more, introducing vile and extraneous doctrines. In short, there was a difference of opinion on management styles. Unfortunately for Berard’s posthumous reputation, history is written by the writers.

As every monk is considered a brother, and the abbot their father, for the latter to harm his community is akin to a parent injuring their own child. Hence the grisly strength of the baby-eating metaphor. According to Gregory, even though the dreamer mentioned no names when he described his vision, everyone knew he was talking about Berard.

And there was, moreover, a precedent. Some six decades earlier, a similar dream was recorded at the French monastery of Cluny. There, some visiting Spanish monks dared to celebrate their own festivals separate from the rest of the community, and on the wrong dates. The following night, two of the French monks dreamt that the Spaniards, armed with cooking-forks, had fried a young boy in a large pan, while the boy cried out “Father, they are throwing away what you have given them!”

This evidence was decisive; the newcomers could not sunder the family with their unfamiliar ways.

An equally repulsive story dates from just a few years earlier, this time set in Egypt. One night an important general named Fadl was strolling the halls of the palace in Cairo, when he came upon the Caliph al-Hakim with the body of a young boy. The caliph had just dismembered the child, and was cutting up the internal organs. General Fadl was too shocked to conceal himself, and quickly returned home to set his affairs in order, for he knew he had seen too much and had not long to live.

As an abbot is father to his monks, so a monarch is father to his kingdom; our historian, Sevurus ibn al-Muqaffa, uses the child-dismemberment episode to start off a long recital of al-Hakim’s many crimes against his subjects, including arbitrary executions and mutilations, forced conversions, torture,  interfering in dietary conventions, killing every dog in Egypt, and likewise the pigs, banning raisins, consorting with Satan, and a great deal more.

A thousand years ago, then, child-murder and cannibalism appears to have been a standard calumny against those who upset the proper order of kin relations. Nor was this the end of such slanders, which persist today. But that is far too heavy a subject either for Halloween or this drawing.

Gregorio di Catino, Il Regesto di Farfa, ed. I. Giorgi and U. Balzani, v.5, p.156: De quo videlicet praefato abbate, quadam nocte visio terribilis visa est, scilicet quod tenellum puerum et innocentem, coctum assatumque comederet. Cuius cum cocta membra minutatim incisa pene devorata haberet, quidam ante illum assistentes, cum haec viderent, foras fugerunt prae stupore. Interumque paulo post ingressi, ut huius intuerentur crudelitatis finem, videbant quod iam in cerebro pueri intinctum panem avide manducaret. Et cum hanc quidam frater in capitulo coram cunctis referret somni visionem, illius supresso nomine, idem ipse, ut credimus, abbas, veritatis spiritu compellente, interpretatus est dicens; Pro certo sciatis omnes, quia ille de quo haec visio fuit, est vir mortis, et in rebus pessimis ac nefandis domus huius et mei gravissimi damni, manum tenet flagitiose. Quod qui noverunt mirati sunt,  et cognoverunt hanc dei iudicio prophetiam ab illo fuisse ignoranter prolatam.

Rodulfus Glaber, Historiarum libri quinque III.iv.132: “Quod cum fecissent segregati a ceteris, visum est nocte eadem duobus senioribus loci quod unus de Hispanis fuscina focaria arriperet desuper altare puerum, mitteretque illum in sartaginem prunis plenam, ita clamantem: ‘Pater, pater, quod tu dedisti isti auferunt.’ Quid plura? Apud nos antiqua consuetudo, uti decebat, prevaluit.”

Sevurus ibn al-Muqaffa, History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria, Part six, p. 183.

Dorianne

Drawn from life in about fifteen minutes, using various crayons and a Copic brush pen.

Lonely Farm

Drawn on a warm day in May, from an old field on the downs below the Hog's Back in Surrey, England. I used micron technical pens and a handful of Copic brush pens.

autoritratto

An old self-portrait, drawn in front of a mirror with a china marker:

Barbara

look to windward

Old age and treachery will always conquer youth and enthusiasm, according to an old teacher of mine. Maybe it will.

Old age hath yet his honour, according to another authority. Death closes all, but before that, there is a certain perfection in the imperfection of age - like an unfinished drawing, in which the empty spaces establish their own kind of order.

Sometimes you have to look harder to see what should not be added. Death, says Priam in the Iliad, can expose nothing in one who is not beautiful. He meant that the old and the ugly already looked like death - an uncharitable thought. The old may be nearer to death, but every step on the way is itself an accomplishment. Drawing the lines on an elderly person's face is like marking out the medals on an old soldier's chest.

how high the moon

it will tear us apart

seven heads

Seven heads of one man.

Ponte Santa Trinita

A quick pencil sketch of the ponte Santa Trinita in Florence. My pencil didn't quite capture the elegance of Ammanati's design - the bridge is one of those objects whose lines are simply entrancing.
I drew it from the northern embankment, sitting up on the stone barrier.

steve with a gin & tonic

tulips

The Professor

together now

Twice shy

Two different angles of the same model, drawn from life with markers and crayon.

Rachel

And I love you so

Night Eyes

Barbara

Drawn at the Arts Project on Dundas in London Ontario.

Reinisa

Relaxing under the window of my old apartment. She has more tattoos now.

A drawing from life done with technical pens, crayons, and various markers.

that man