Essex Rd, Islington, London.

This is why picture making is such a pleasure. There is nothing in this scene that can't be seen from the flat on Essex Road. The trees were drawn from life looking out the window, and yet it doesn't quite look like this. Perhaps this is not the picture that will remind you of John Atkinson Grimshaw but I like to think he smiled inwardly when he composed his pictures. It was the smile of truth that artists are known for.

8 lines at noon

Twilight

Drawn at the life drawing sessions held at Bijan's in London, Ontario. Our model brought along a hardback to keep herself occupied. Which was awkward, because the head moves more than you think when you read. Also, it was Twilight.

Drawn with a Copic brush pen, in around fifteen minutes.

Behind St Mary's, Upper Street

I was berated by a drunk woman for painting in black in white. She took it as a personal insult against the charms of spring. My opinion on the charms of good society was not sought.
I like it. It makes me think of Frank Auerbach. Every morning he gets up at six in the morning, before the models show up, and draws picture around and about Mornington Crescent. You might think it was another neighbourhood if you didn't know.

Chris

view from a hill

Looking down the slope from the fortified burgh of San Gimignano in Tuscany. This is an old one, from my first trip to Italy. I took the bus instead of cycling on that trip, but views like this one helped convince me to change my approach.

Another view of Lily

A fifteen minute pose, drawn - as usual - with marker and a red crayon.

9 heads of Lily

Each drawn with a china marker, in about thirty seconds. Some more successfully than others.

You again...

Drawn from life on some paper with two rather nice watermarks.

Time for Harry Potter

The cherry with a rolling stone

A little more love

Two thirty second warm-up sketches, done with a china marker.

Perseus Medusam occidet

A drawing from last year's classically themed Keyhole Session in Toronto. It was a diverting evening of life drawing, in which fetish models played Athena, Medusa, and Perseus. Just because.

So here's Perseus putting the sword to Medusa's neck. The drawing was done from life and took about 30 minutes.

We managed to fit in most of the Medusa story, including a rather unterrifying scene of Athena cursing Medusa, a more convincing Medusa transformed, and the Goddess of Wisdom sitting around looking wise. Or faintly regal, anyway.

Pussy Willows

They were a more difficult subject than I thought.
I once saw a woman lean into a bunch of pussy willows not dissimilar to these and breath, with finger gently caressing one of the soft buds, "Oh Pussy, I love you". That was it.
Very Rinpa.

The road oft taken

Talk is cheap

Not your typical Surrey scene

But nonetheless this is one of the trees in my aunt's neighbour's backyard. Painted out of doors as it was a balmy 10 degrees today. Perhaps curious to some, I only had to dip my brush twice, over the period of an hour and a bit, to get the whole thing done.

food for thought

Steve found a giant stuffed heart in the apartment and decided to pose:

Naples

A quick pencil sketch of a piazza in Naples, at once the most grimy and most tantalizing of cities I have visited. I did this standing, in less than 5 minutes - there were places to be!

Amidst the chaos of Italian cities the orchards of television antennae strike a particularly charming note. It will be a sad day for landscape artists when they are all replaced by satellite dishes.

Reinisa

A very quick sketch done with Copic brush markers.

One of my perennials

The paper is thin. You can see the words from a plastic bag through it. The ink cannot go on to heavily, or slowly. I fancy that my plant drawings would make nice prints, lithographs perhaps, but Romney says there are too many plant prints around as it is. He generally knows best, don't ask me how.

in the audience

After John Ward

Back in the day art instruction depended on imitation. Students were set in front of the old masters to learn their techniques by osmosis. And repetition, of course. It was like Dafen village is now.

Doing it on an iPad may defeat the point of the exercise, as they conceived it a hundred years ago. Nor is John Ward (RA) exactly an old master. But whatever composition he put in his painting, Tarragon has here captured it.

kara

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

Venice by night

Mikhail Vrubel found Venice boring. It was of interest "only for his palette." That was not my experience. Even at night, when your palette shrinks to greys and only a muddy simulacra of the daylight colours are visible, the city remains beautiful and ominous. It's a place to feel lonely in.

And to paint. Watercolour at night is not easy. I was alone, and wandering the sestiero di San Marco, but I had my paints and I had plenty of time.

How Vrubel, a painter at once romantic and nihilistic, could have rejected Venice, the most romantic and abnegatory of cities, is a mystery. Perhaps they were too much alike. Sometimes you have to be a little bit dull in order to appreciate the magical. Tolkien retired to the most tedious suburb imaginable. Perhaps magicians read only non-fiction.

a model

Our brains do strange things. For as long as I was drawing this man, I thought of him as a Polish cavalry officer, dismounted and lost in the heart of the Białowieża forest. A man with a melancholy spirit and a sword in his hand. In fact, he's a yoga instructor. So it goes.

Katherine disdains her phone.

She questioned the accuracy of the likeness. When Matisse's models expressed doubts that he had being paying any attention at all he told them if they wanted to be appreciated they should go to the Spaniard. This anecdote dates from the mid to late teens which makes it doubly funny.

Willy at rest

A drawing done from life with a brush pen, in about ten minutes. Our model had just returned from a long day of hunting, and was dead tired.

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.