Jordan Sits Stock Still

I do very little drawing.  I should do more but it's not part of my job description.

Last winter my flat mate, Jordan, and I had a weekly drawing session.  It often included whisky, sometimes we only had beer.  We had nice chats.  I regret the passing of these interludes in my lonely days.

It's a sketch

Ally takes a turn posing, before taking up the pen herself.

Occasionally, when our scheduled model has failed to show up or been frightened away, we pose for each other.

Florentine Oratory

A sketch done with a dip pen of the oratorio della compagnia di S.Michaele della Pace. It's in the east of Florence's old historic core, across the street from the ancient church of Sant'Ambrogio.

Where's Your Sense Of Perspective Tarragon?

I don't know a single person who hasn't dated a twin and then accidentally broken up with their brother or sister.  I know I felt right silly when she turned to me and said, I'll tell her when I see her.  But what makes people different? Sometimes it is just the small details.  Had she been drinking tea at the time of my retreating monologue then I would have know that is was not she to whom I wanted to address myself, for she only drank coffee.  

That gave me the idea for this diptych, Where's Your Sense of Perspective Tarragon?  Good question.  And where, for that matter are my priorities?

Clear night in Compton

It's been a while since we're visited the Compton of Tarragon's paintings. Here it's a cold clear evening, that will shortly fade into unreverberate darkness. Getting caught after midnight in a narrow cutting, closed in by forest on each side, and with even the moon obstructed by branches, is not an experience easily forgotten.

Samara at Dr.Sketchy's

At the very end of the summer, the lovely Samara posed for an unusual Dr.Sketchy's session in the pavilion at Sunnyside park. It turned out to be a colder day than expected, but she was a very good sport about it.

A hot day in Rome

Although beautiful any time of year, the charm of Rome in June (never mind August!) is much mitigated by the heat. Danielle managed as best she could, and we did a lot of undignified splashing in fountains.

Frances

A ten-minute sketch of my friend Frances, who in addition to being a patient model is herself a skilled draughtswoman.

In the dark of the Florentine night

Bedeviled by jet-lag, I wandered the streets of the Oltrarno after midnight. Sometimes I made small sketches.

Tarragon plays

At a bar in Southhampton, Tarragon broke out the guitar and gave us a rousing song about Cornish coal miners.

Montrichard

For a few years I used to spend a fair bit of time in Montrichard, a quietly provincial French town a bit south of Tours. Periodically, I ventured out to draw the architecture. This is a renaissance gateway plus house adjacent to the ruins of the medieval castle.

It's a drawing in sepia ink overlaid with watercolour. Not a technique I used too often. The usual advantage of a dark underdrawing - the deep value of the shadows is already laid in for you - is here lost.

Zero Romance

Some men you have to keep your distance from.

The Dakota Tavern

Audience and musicians at the Dakota.

Not My Man

A painting about sex. And also, and more importantly, about the incommensurate spaces between people, and how even through the most intimate connection we can hardly plumb the mystery of one other personality.

I think when Dorothy Parker wrote that "hell is other people," she wasn't just being cynical, but only articulating that "the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." We can never really know what they're thinking.



It is amazing to reflect that between Dorothy Parker and H.P.Lovecraft there may have been, on occasion, only a few miles of New York City. That those two writers existed in the same universe is a minor miracle all of its own.

The Academics

"Scholarly writing is almost as corrupting a trade as play-acting. The great majority of one's colleagues are vulgar and petty and devoted to the business of bringing those characteristics to ever fuller bloom. Anyone who enters it with any idealistic notions will have a hard time controlling his disgust and hatred."

 - Theodor Mommsen, 1878, in a letter to a (scholarly) associate.

These days, it's not all that bad. Mommsen was just bitter and old and German. If tyrannies are best moderated by assassination, academia is at least moderated by alcoholism. And since "beer does more than Milton can, to justify God's ways to man,"  we're in good hands.

The dog of the Red Baron

The dog hung around outside the Red Baron, a dingy tourist bar in Siena, Italy, for at least two hours. I like to think he was keeping track of his master's beers.

The Pope's front door.

The main gateway of the Pope's Palace in Avignon.

It dates from the 14th century, a time when the popes were uncompromising in the hunt for heresy and for money. The most famous of them, Benedict XII, not only exterminated the last vestiges of the Cathar religion, but erected Europe's most sophisticated system of taxation and fiscal administration. He fought too against the more spiritual elements of his own church, who were dismayed by his dedication to the bottom-line.

I've always thought the bleakly aggressive architecture of Avignon well reflected that least sympathetic of popes. No one approaching the gateway could possibly construe it as welcoming.

Like a flooded basilica

And he went down to Brighton,
set eye to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
he set up canvas out on the swart beach.

Alfred Krupp's Last Day

An etching inspired by a story I heard about a former inhabitant of Capri:

At the beginning of the 20th century, Alfred Krupp's life of untrammelled indolence and wealth was marred only by the fact that everything about his love life was illegal in his native Germany. So like many before him, he took off for Italy, and led an idyllic life on Capri.

But he overestimated the liberality of his hosts, and when some Neapolitan reporters got wind of his close relationship with a local fishing boy, Alfred Krupp found himself faced with the threat of blackmail.

Animated, perhaps, by the ghost of the Duke of Wellington, he told them "Publish and be damned!" They did, and he was.

Insinuations in private are one thing, open publications another. In a single day, the world turned black around him. Shortly afterwards he committed suicide.

This is the second version of the etching. A third is underway.

The model comes home.

A painting on cardboard from some years ago. My model had just returned from the Amazon - she is usually a very pale woman. She's wearing a blouse she found in the market in Quito.

The difficulties cardboard presents for photography are obvious, I think. It would take a lot of work to smooth out the various bends and wrinkles.

Duke University II

The heart of Duke University consists of fairly traditional campus architecture, on the familiar "dreaming spires of Oxford" model.

It's very beautiful, but for me the main attraction was the Sarah P. Duke Gardens, which are among the most impressive ornamental gardens on the eastern seaboard. It encompasses a variety of gardening styles, including Italianate, English and Japanese. In the drawing above I've rendered the north entrance to the new Japanese tea house.

In addition, because I love industrial architecture, I've included a drawing of the power plant on the aptly-named Coal Pile Drive. I drew it from the terrace at the south end of the E.A. Morris Clinical Research Building.

Duke University

I had the chance recently to wander around the campus of Duke University. It's quite spectacular, not just for its architecture, but also for how the buildings are arranged on the uneven topography.

These two sketches show the back of the Craven Quadrangle - a student residence, I think - and the north side of the Theology Department.

Relaxing in summer

Well, I miss the summer.

The ruin

I came across this ruin while cycling from Narbonne to the old abbey at Fontfroide. How old it might be, or just what it was for I don't know. Perhaps a medieval toll station controlling the road. Or an overelaborate sheepfold. Who knows?

The precise location is just south of the D613 (aka the Route d'Ax-les-Thermes), a few kilometers north of the highway.


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On the train to Siena

Once again demonstrating that trains are the best place to sketch people.

The view from Costa San Giorgio

Looking across the Arno at the Uffizi and the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio from the Costa San Giorgio. The Costa - one of my favourite streets in Florence - is lined with vertiginous buildings, except for a brief gap near the bottom, from which I sketched this view with a dip pen and water-soluble inks.

A preparatory drawing.

I recently began work on a new finished ink drawing, provisionally entitled Eurydice, Eurydice. This is its central figure, as yet divorced from background, various objects, or even something to sit on.

It's going to be one of those not-quite-a-portrait drawings in which the context of the figure, not the figure itself, is the main subject.
I hope to have it complete in a week or so.

A musician

from a recital at Victoria college.

The all-in-black sartorial convention of classical musicians can either make a concert really boring for drawing, if they all bunch up like crows, or really excellent, if one or two can stand out enough for a good composition.

From Naked Ape to Superspecies

is the name of the book she's reading.

An acrylic sketch on cardboard. Despite the fact that she's reading, she didn't hold the pose for very long. Even the best plans fail sometimes.

The piano player

One of the problems with Tarragon is that he's good at too many things. When he isn't painting, or exercising his wit at the expense of family and friends, he plays instruments. One of which is the upright piano at the house in Compton.

Time for Romance

A couple keeping warm on a cold winter day.

more scenes from student life

Two undergraduate students outside the building at St.George and Wilcocks streets.

I was struck by the contrast between the two; not only did they display two very different clothing styles, the difference in apparel was mirrored in their posture. The princess and the pauper, perhaps?

Pont Saint-Bénezet

The famous bridge at Avignon, sketched very rapidly from the city walls.

I redid my sketch directly on the etching plate, with the result that the image is mirrored; the chapel is in reality on the right-hand (upstream) side of the bridge. It's a very small etching, about an inch and a quarter tall.

student life

Even in the ever-social milieu of the university campus, it is apparent that some people just want to be left alone.

Just like Greta Garbo. Being a grad student is hard work, after all.

A street in Toulouse

A small watercolour sketch, painted standing up facing the rue de Périgord. The church is attached to the Lycée Sainte-Marie de Nevers.

Toulouse is a nice city to paint in. Not only is it quite pretty (in the centre, at least), but the locals all seemed quite pleased to have a painter obstruct the sidewalk. That doesn't happen very often.

Love in Florence

A touching scene witnessed on the concourse of Santa Maria Novella station in Florence. I had to pick a spot for the hands and stick with it. In reality they were very mobile - much like their owners, who soon took off in a hurry.

Neapolitan Effigies

The shallow relief carvings of the medieval period are fascinating and aggravating. So much detail, so little time for me to sketch it.

There are too many things to catch the eye in Naples for one to spend more than an hour or so in San Lorenzo Maggiore, so this sketch is woefully incomplete. Both were tomb slabs lying flat on the church floor. I was entranced by the ornamented armour.

News of the Pilgrimage (II)

The follow-up image to yesterday's.

News of the Pilgrimage (I)

I don’t know if this is a common experience, but I find that whenever I’m at the top of some prodigious height, I feel an impulse to jump. All of us, I think, respond to bigness of landscape – this is why people go to mountains. But I find that a sublime experience commands a sublime response, and what could be more sublime than leaping like Empedocles (or Salvador Rosa, for the artists) from a great height? I know, I’m a romantic. 

The impulse is not a strong one, of course, but it is persistent. It’s like the desire one has to touch whenever a beautiful person walks by, or the temptation to reach over a patio fence and snatch a fruity cocktail on a hot day. Being Canadian, one never does these things, nor should one.

But the fact remains, a precipice is inviting. Children, this one at least, found it thrilling to edge close to cliff-tops. I think I was aware, when I was lying on my belly in the grass above Beachy Head, that this was the fastest way out of the world in which one lived, but to which one did not belong.

As is (too) often the case, Saint Augustine said it best, some 1500 years ago: "What makes the heart of a Christian heavy? That he is a pilgrim and far from his country." 

Not Tarragon's first painting of this title.

Danielle and a chair

She's wearing jewelry by Co-operative Designs, a vintage sequin top, an Anti-Flirt skirt and shoes by Nine West. The blazer and chair (Ikea!) are mine.

Albi

A quick pencil sketch done from the base of the bishop's palace at Albi. The tower belongs to the church of the Madeleine, erected under Napoleon III.

I later made an etching based in part on this drawing.

A small sketch

This is a preparatory sketch, done in acrylic, for a large aluminum etching. It's on a dainty piece of canvas, only six by eight inches, which is why the weave is so visible.

The final etching will be about 18 inches tall, and far richer in colour.

Obviously, it's about sex.

Chinatown at 4am

We stumbled into the restaurant barely conscious, all danced out and ready for dumplings.
Opposite from us, in exactly the same condition, was the bride-to-be and her bridesmaids. She looked worn out. So did we, probably.