Temptation of Red

Red ink has something in common with red dresses and red lipstick. That is just one of the lessons you learn in life, sooner or later.

Light in the Tunnel

A thirty second sketch, done with a china marker while standing in the subway.

Faye

This picture comes from a painting completed sometime last year.  Using old material can be a fruitful.  It is painted over a faint winter landscape depicting moonlight shining over a frozen bay covered with fresh snow that fell all day and all night during the 12th day of Christmas.  For some reason the scene of fresh snow and barred passage brought to my mind the story of the young Abe no Nakamaro, poet and timekeeper, who never returned to his homeland.  But that's all gone now.

Rachel

There's a famous Jack Chambers landscape in the AGO showing an overpass over the 401, Ontario's biggest and busiest highway. It is an oddly shocking painting. Not because there is anything shocking about highway overpasses, of course - they are banal enough objects. But that banality rendered in gleaming oil paint with Canaletto-like attention to detail is calculated to make you rethink your ideas about landscape.

Well, this picture by Tarragon is neither detailed nor an oil painting. What is interesting about it is that he made it - on an iPad - in those fleeting seconds as the overpass approached at 100 kph. Which is another way to rethink our ideas about landscape paintings.

Drawn from life with various markers in about fifteen minutes.

Off the Piazza

Looking south from Piazza Republica in Florence, Italy. This was drawn quickly with a micron, and coloured with watercolours.

a harmonica player

Drawn from life at the Grad Club at the University of Western Ontario. It's one of those quick, 20-second sketches that one can keep doing all night.

A lull in the wind

In this ink drawing, Tarragon has employed strongly contrasting brush strokes to enliven a naturalist subject with a richly calligraphic texture.

winter underland

A sketch from the subway.

Flowers on my lap while sitting on the train.

A drawing made on an iPad by Tarragon.

The Arno looking east

Years ago, I lived in the extreme east of Florence. It was an unremarkable but unsqualid neighbourhood, for the most part, ornamented with unfriendly-looking modern churches. But just to the south, on the river, you encountered an informal zona rosa of the Nigerian prostitutes - the woods in this picture were a dubious place at night.

In the daylight, however, the river was lovely. Especially, as here, when the sun creeps back after a warm rain.

staredown

Between this man and his jug of beer there can be only one victor.

Asleep and dreaming

James strikes - or reclines into - a pose.

Drawn with a brush pen and a red china marker, in about ten minutes.

Victoria

A drawing from my daily sketchbook, done - as usual - with china marker.

Young Tess feels the strain of modernism.

There's something about portable computing technology that makes Tarragon think of 19th century literature, apparently. It's probably the stress of altered circumstances, as when a young maiden knifes the wrong man and ends up dead herself.

It was sketched on an iPad using the Procreate app, while waiting for the spaghetti puttanesca to finish.

The Flat Lands at Night

The vastness of southern Ontario, as glimpsed through the window of a car at 120 kph. Tarragon had to fix the image in his head and work quickly.

It's a sketch done on an iPad, using the Procreate app.

Tarragon with the Complete Works of Frederick Seidel, mk II

I sketched (and posted) this drawing some time ago, but recently decided to add colour.

I want to ride all night

Done late at night, on the subway. My first subject got off at the next stop.

Flowers for Anno 2013

You have to start somewhere.

A still life by Tarragon, done on the iPad with Procreate.