Tavernelle Val di Pesa

Tavernelle is a dainty town in, as the name implies, the valley of the river Pesa in central Tuscany. It's a few hours bike ride south of Florence, and about two minutes from Barbarino Val d'Elsa, which is in the next river valley over. I fell in with an elderly German tourist there, who was cycling the length of Italy. Excellent stamina for a septuagenarian.

The image is a tiny etching, about an inch tall, overlaid with tinted Japanese paper. It's based on the sketch I made from my bicycle. There are so many landscapes to sketch, sometimes its easier not to dismount.

Jake and Danielle

at a restaurant in Chinatown, in Toronto. It was a very quick sketch, since I was eating too.

Nick is sick

and probably didn't appreciate me sitting down next to his bed to sketch him. But he was too weak to do anything more than croak, so he was pretty much at my mercy.

It's a quick sketch from life, done with a china marker and watercolour.

He should have taken a left at the last right

and now he's lost, and is going to stand there for the next five minutes trying to figure it out, annoying his fellow pedestrians but suiting me.

The Red Chair

with Sarah this time instead of Steve. Part of the fun of life drawing is seeing such different models drape themselves over the same props.

It was done with markers, in about 20 minutes.

drinking tea outside a cafe in Mayfair

Forcalquier

A smallish community in Haute-Provence. I had been reading about the history of the early counts of Provence, in which the place figures large, and was looking forward to seeing the town. But sadly its medieval portions have been a victim of the succeeding centuries. All that remains of the famous castle is a (very ornate) 19th century chapel. The cathedral in this picture, at least, is a genuine 12th century edifice.

It was a lovely area for cycling, however.

fun in the sun

An etching made to commemorate a trip to Toronto Island. This is among the first etchings I ever made, back in 2002.

sleeping in the waiting room

 

...but he woke up before I had time to finish.

The yellow villa

A villa in the outskirts of Florence. These places always look as if they should be something, like the summer cottage of Machiavelli or Aretino's favourite bordello, but of course they're just somebody's regular house.

alone in a crowd

 

If hell is other people, turning your back must be a step in getting to heaven.

The red chair

Steve looks as if he's discovered something horrible on his palm. Perhaps there's a reason palm-readers never do their own readings. Aside from the obvious, that is.

A life drawing in marker, done with the Toronto drawing group the Collective.

This is my life

figure in watercolour

A simple figure study, done from life with pencil and watercolour.

unfinished sketch

Half the fun with public sketching is finding out how much you can draw before the model moves. And sometimes an unexpected interruption can create an accidental composition that's just as interesting as a completed figure.

Friends eat together

Eurydice, Eurydice

Midway through his novel Aurélia, Gérard de Nerval pauses to evoke Orpheus, and the crucial moment of the play when the hero turns and sees his wife snatched back into hell and cries out, uselessly, "Eurydice, Eurydice."

The scene must have had resonance for Nerval, who certainly understood that even the most superhuman effort may end in failure, and who had every reason to say "ma seule étoile est morte."

For whatever reason, that passage in Aurélia produced from me this drawing, in which the face of the one you love is reduced to a mask peering up from the underworld. Or from a wall in the British Museum, as it happens.

I posted a few steps towards the finished drawing back in late 2010.

Attraction is nine-tenths of the law

is what she said.

As come-ons go, it was a good one.

Small craft in Venice

I saw this small watercraft while wandering around the island of Burano, in the Venetian Lagoon. Shipbuilding by hand is one of those once-great vernacular arts that is everywhere on the decline, but one still encounters an immense variety of small craft, each with a design specific to their context and locale. I find them enchanting.

Jenn at the Dakota

A quick sketch of Jenn, who in addition to being an excellent model is a wise and cogent spokeswoman for conservation biology. The drawing was done one evening at the Dakota Tavern; there was going to be someone else on this page - I think a musician - but as you can see, he moved before I did anything more than the hair on his head.

"Why are you talking to me?"

Amalfitan Architecture

An old pile of houses in Amalfi, on the eponymous coast in southern Italy.

Two figures

Kimberly poses with a pet and a Manhattan (made by yours truly). It was drawn from life with markers in about ten minutes.

A quick sketch of the artist's father.

I feel your pain

A lad with lovely and sad eyes.

Gondolas

Gondalas at rest.

I was hypnotized by the pattern of the stakes and the black craft. Painted on a warm November day in watercolour and gouache on the wharf-side steps outside Santa Maria della Salute.

more cafe sketching

down by the Arno, in the zona rosa.

I had just arrived in Florence, and I was jet-lagged and disoriented. I was in the east end of town, well past the old city, and had nothing better to do than go down to the river and draw while the sun set.

But after a short while a Nigerian girl showed up and asked me if I wanted to f**k. I declined, and gave it no more thought. Yeah, I was that jet-lagged.

A few minutes later she was back, with a bedraggled looking Italian man in tow. He seemed ashamed and was very apologetic, but it wasn't because of what he was up to; it was because he was interrupting my drawing.

Really, he didn't need to apologize. I was the one in the wrong place.




It was done with india ink and a dip pen. The sun was shining through the trees and reflecting in the river.

Another life drawing, done in about 10-15 minutes with a pen and marker.

Our model - who was posing for the Collective drawing group in Toronto - bears a worrying resemblance to the elderly Evelyn Waugh. Only naked. Which is troubling, because I am convinced that Waugh lived his life from birth to death without ever deigning to become naked.

Tarragon's engagement with minimalism continues. So too his interest in English weather conditions.

baby, I care about your problems.

A sinister looking lad.

An ink drawing of Jenn, done from life in about ten minutes. She's one of my favourite models, sporting not only an iconic haircut but also the knack for taking poses that are simultaneously elegant and monumental.

She posed for the Collective life drawing group in Toronto in the summer of 2010.

A girl with two labret piercings and an I Love Canada shirt.

The Canal of Giudecca

as seen from a window of the Doge's Palace.

It's an etching on zinc, printed on hand-coloured Japanese tissue on a support of rag-cotton European paper.

Two students of Latin, concentrating hard on the Aeneid.

The Egyptian Musician...

...is a long way from home and surrounded by ignorant children. I couldn't tell whether playing relieved his all-too-apparent melancholia or only set it into sharper relief.

An aluminum etching

An early experiment with etching into aluminum with copper sulphate.

To make etchings from aluminum plates is to abandon many of the advantages of the medium; etching in copper or zinc permits incredible precision and lines of such fineness they could never be produced with a pen. Moreover, both metals are of sufficient hardness that large numbers of proofs can be pulled without significant distortion of the design.

But the reaction of copper sulphate with aluminum is far more violent than those that occur with zinc or copper. Lines become blotted and uneven, while open surfaces are pitted and moon-like. These take ink well, but delicacy is impossible. Worse, the softness of aluminum means the proofs will loose quality  quickly.

On the other hand, aluminum is light, easy to manipulate and relatively cheap. And the roughness of the etching process produces a crude and spontaneous effect that I like a lot.

it's not me. it's you.

cafe sketchbook

Studying in the student lounge.

Camposanto

The ancient graveyard in Pisa in the aftermath of a storm that left the marble shiny and mirror-like.

The storm has pulled away to the west, leaving a typically incandescent Tuscan sun to cut the architecture into high relief. Visible over the southern roof of the graveyard is the duomo and part of the upper register of the leaning tower.

It's an etching on zinc. The textures are aquatint, but the colours are watercolour applied after pulling the proof.

A portrait sketch of Tarragon

Tarragon in a pre-prandial moment at the house in Compton. I did this rapidly - between gin and tonics - with a china marker and watercolour, on an old piece of cardboard backing from a used-up sketchbook.

Tarragon didn't much want to stay still when he could be drinking.

students at La Verna

very much a work in progress sketchbook entry - sometimes when I know I don't have time to make a complete drawing I do a quick sketch sketch plus colour notes, so I know what to work with when I return to it. Which in this case I never did.

It shows a few students sitting in the choir stall at La Verna, listening to their professor lecture on St.Francis.

A castle in Naples

It's a grim and dreary day here right now, and both my work and the rather ugly library in which I'm working have taken on a foreboding aspect. Nor will I get home without getting soaked to the bone.

So here's an apt watercolour, done in Italy a few years past:

It's the Castel Sant'Elmo in Naples. It's about as repressive a structure as can be imagined.