iPad paintings: Art in the Age of Mechanical Transportation

Tarragon took the train to Paris the other day. The trip took far longer than scheduled, due to a "fatality on the tracks." French transit service announcements are so blunt.

In any case, the gendarmes cordoned off the tracks, thus immobilizing a long line of trains between Paris and the channel. There was nothing for Tarragon to do but make pictures of the view outside the train window.

This is the first one:

And here's another. The train began to move again as he was making it. You can almost see the acceleration in the picture.

Both pictures were made on an iPad, using the Brushes app.

Tarragon and War and Peace

A few days ago I posted a drawing of Danielle reading War and Peace. Or more accurately, taking a break from reading it. Here's a picture of Tarragon reading the very same copy.

The difference in their apparel in down to the season. Tarragon read it in March, which can be cold, even in Florence. Especially in Florence, to be honest. Those big marble buildings are designed to keep the heat out and the cool air in, and there was a lot of the latter. Danielle read it in June, and by that time nothing could keep things cool. The Arno valley is humid, mosquito-ridden, and generally squalid in summer.


The drawing was done with china-marker on a large piece of textured paper, with the watercolour added immediately afterwards.

ryan...

...was a guy I used to know.

watercolour self-portrait

An old self-portrait, done in a mirror using watercolour, gouache and pencil on a primed piece of cardboard. In those days I was too poor to use canvas for a quick sketch like this one.

Well, I probably still wouldn't use canvas for a sketch like this one.

the teaching assistant

Drawn from life during an anthropology tutorial.

Woman with a knee brace

A rather sparse composition from a few years ago. The processes of physical injury and recovery can be visually fascinating, perhaps because of the asymmetry they often force on the body. The human form is resonant in our visual part of our brains; it is the easiest shape for us to pick out in any environment, which is why camouflage works not, as is often thought, by blending into the background, but rather by breaking up the recognizable outline.

I wanted the design of this image to reflect the asymmetry of the injury, as well as its arbitrariness. Perhaps it would have been better if I chopped off the leg altogether, but that was not the state of the model. Nor, of course, would I wish it upon her.

It's an etching on zinc, printed at the Open Studio in Toronto.

Asleep on the job

Drawn from life in the student lounge.

sometimes a bottle is just a bottle

Danielle and War and Peace

An old drawing, showing Danielle with the even older copy of War and Peace that she, I, and my brother passed around in the spring of 2001. We were all very caught up in the adventures of Prince Andrei and Natasha and the others - they kept us distracted during long Italian nights in the days before internet. Don't mention the television. Italian television is dire.

That book is one of the few I wish I still owned for purely sentimental reasons, but it has long since fallen apart.

We all study together.

The Lagoon from Burano

It was a hot and calm day in Venice, and the limpid water seemed to rise out of the lagoon to thicken the atmosphere and obscure the view. Here is a view of the city, from the nearby island of Burano.

Hannah

A quick sketch of Hannah, twice. One minute sketches are a good way to get warmed up for a session, and from time to time are worth keeping for their own sake. It helps to have a good model.

Frances

Just a random sketchbook page today, showing a few 30 second warm-up drawings of my friend Frances.

The rooftops of Prato

A rapid sketch of some rooftops in Prato. The drawing is an old one, as is visible from the date. That was  my first trip to Italy, and I still remember the bewildered delight I took in the architecture of Tuscany. For a person brought up in North America - land of broad avenues and free-standing buildings - the unplanned conglomerates of Italian housing seemed both suspicious and exotic.

The expectation of space is one of the great privileges of America (and Canada); to enter a land where neighbours were not separated by lawn or road was to embark upon an adventure.

The drawing was done in a sketchbook on heavily textured paper. I have not attempted to clear away the smudges accrued by constant use, nor the the beginnings of a note about the council of Trent.

You Never Call

time for dessert

Pastry chef and all-round dessert overachiever Courtney has one of the symbols of her profession emblazoned on her arm.

I say, why stop at one? The tools of the pâtissiére are many and various.

Mortality

I went to Kew Gardens in the summer of last year and purchased this plant.  I call it a name other than what it is known by.  It used to be a strong, hale and happy plant.  It had the look of one that enjoys conversation.  In retrospect I wonder if it was the sort of enjoyment that is valued only by those who lack almost all other pleasures, like a man who never sees the tent we call the sky.  I don't know.  All I know is it never told me it was suffering for want of light and almost overnight its strength failed, and now I am sure it will die, although it lives by the window.  You can not take death masks of plants or I would have done so.

John

A page from an old sketchbook. In those days I was using a dip pen for everything; it's amazing I didn't spill india ink over everything.

romantic intentions

In the cold, cold night...

A drawing done from life, in about ten minutes, with several black markers.

The Tulip Hour

consider this

George

It's a rare day that I live up to my own standards. That's how it should be. "I am still learning," said Goya in his old age.

But occasionally I manage a drawing in which the simplicity of line and the fullness of the composition admit no further attempts, and I feel satisfied. There is one here. This is another:

I confess his rather beatific smile may be why I like it so much.

Another view of Florence, done as an experiment with water-soluble crayons. I used to wander the city almost daily and makes sketches like this one. As a way of teaching yourself how to paint with watercolours, I recommend it.

Perhaps I should mention that this is an early one.

2 researchers

...of violence in the Renaissance and the early middle ages respectively.

I drew them with an overlarge brush pen during a lecture.

kathleen at rest

It's May, and classes are over. This drawing is a bit late.

Sometimes when you gaze too long at the model, the model gazes back at you.

in the airport

In the window of the student lounge

Plague Doctor

By the end of the 17th century, the great waves of pestilence that had periodically swept Europe since the Black Death had come to an end. Consequently, the medical importance of the plague doctor, such as it was, also subsided.

The costume, however, with its sinister mask and black habit, was firmly entrenched in the public imagination. At some point in the 18th century, it entered the ambiguous and erotic territory of the Venetian Carnevale, where it joined a cast of characters otherwise drawn from the commedia dell'arte.

We may suppose that it served then, as now, as a memento mori. There is something in every festival, but especially carnivals, that is ripe with the promise of loss.

Robert asleep

The artist and martial artist Robert Bentley maintains a somnolent posture.

Sinister Street

I work best alone

James in the door

A stream east of Florence

Just east of Florence is the small hamlet of Ponte a Mensola. It's named for its equally small stream, the Mensola, which runs down from the northern hills into the Arno. This is a view of it:

It was done with a dip pen and india ink.

It's still cold in Toronto.

Rain over the Arno

A view across the Arno. It was November in Florence, and the rain caught me in mid-brushstroke. But the raindrops left interesting marks, and I ended up with a painting that perfectly summed up that wet and drear day.

A caprice to eat off

The capriccio is an almost extinct genre of art. The trends of the late 19th century were inimitable to it, and it was not such a robust growth that it could survive either Adolf Loo's pronouncement that "all ornament is crime" or Monet's urge for unvarnished truth. For a capriccio is by definition both ornamental and false.

Nor did it get a chance to revive during the 20th century, for a capriccio is also whimsical, and whimsy is the enemy of modernism. Since the '90s, of course, you could paint what you wanted, and there are talented folk out there reviving the art of imaginary landscapes.

Certainly in the realm of game and movie design this is big business, but somehow doing it by committee for a team-built end product doesn't feel very whimsical.

And there's no doubt that some amazing images have been created, so I shouldn't complain. Being unable to live up to Pirenesi is not really a criticism.

As for myself, my contribution is more modest. It's a paper plate. I did try something bigger a little while ago.

I did it during a conference lecture. The lecture was not boring; it was inspiring.

la petit rêve

This night has opened my eyes

A drawing from the keyhole sessions in Toronto.

a model

Some more of the life drawing.

Two views of a bridge in Venice

A page from the small brown sketchbook I kept on my first visit to Venice.

It's the Ponte degli Scalzi, the first bridge over the Grand Canal encountered by visitors (such as myself) who arriving by train. The top sketch was done with a dip pen and india ink, the bottom with water soluble graphite and a white crayon.

light me up

Hannah

A drawing done with various markers and china markers in a bit less than twenty minutes.

A china marker, by the way, is a kind of crayon designed for various professional uses. They leave marks on anything, including glass or metal. You can wash the marks off smooth surfaces with enough soup, but china marker on paper is completely indelible.

Drawn in the cafe of the Kelly Library at the University of Toronto.

The Dark Angel

Illustrating poetry is often a bad idea. Especially if you try to do it literally. The things that make an effective poem - language, and the effect language has on our brains - are quite different from the effect of images via our eyes.

It's a complex business, so perhaps here I should only say that while pictures come to us via the straightforward processes of vision, for poems we need interpretation. We talk about someone's "poetic vision," or even "musical vision," but to combine these words is to speak metaphorically.

Nonetheless, there have been many successful pictures based on poems. But most of these don't really illustrate the poem. What they show us is an episode from the story that the poem told us. Ingres' Jupiter and Thetis, for example, succeeds wonderfully in depicting an event from the Illiad, but has very little to do with the poetry of Homer. The same might be said of thousands (for Homer alone!) of other paintings.

The things words do are not the things pictures do. But the impulse to combine the two is hard to shake off. Artists read poems, and poets look at pictures. A response is only natural. A rare successful example is the work Odilon Redon produced in response to Edgar Allen Poe's poetry. Another (perhaps) is Georges Barbier's work on Les Chansons de Bilitis.

Obviously, I'm leading up to a picture of my own. It's an illustration - or at least a response - to Lionel Johnson's The Dark Angel. It's a poem about the pain of repressed desire and, in its use of language, the elaborate machinations people undertake to reinforce and justify their own sexual repression. In many ways it's a very silly poem, but so is this picture.

The red brand, by the way, is a medieval Spanish version of the IHS Christogram.