Officer of the 17th Lancers

The 17th Lancers are mostly notable for their part in the charge of the light brigade, commemorated in a famous picture by Caton Woodville. The officer in my picture, however, is arrayed in the full dress uniform of 1914.

And if the thought of soldiers wearing such a uniform on the eve of World War I seems alarming - or ridiculously picturesque - in fact this outfit was reserved for such things as royal weddings. On campaign it was switched out for a set of khakis.

The British, fresh from the lessons of the Boer War, had probably the most practical uniforms of the early part of the war. The French were still gallivanting around in red trousers, while the Germans, although they had adopted field grey instead of their former vivid colours, had retained all the stylings of the old uniforms. So their lancers went into combat with caps as awkward as the one in this picture, if less colourful.

None of which obviates the fact that as the lamps were going out all over Europe, every army sent men equipped with lances riding against machine guns and artillery. The French even gave lances to their bicycle corps, but the less said about that the better. There was in fact a single cavalry combat on the 9th of September, 1914, when the 9th Lancers met the German Guard Dragoons at Moncel, but it was resolved when one side dismounted and used their rifles. Soon after, it was mud and trenches, a lot of tedium and a bit of terror. Things were different on the Eastern Front, of course, but that's another story altogether.

I did this picture years ago, relying on various sources. I had a roll of butcher's paper, and somehow a series of soldiers seemed apt. It was done with watercolours and acrylics, and I made no attempt at high realism. I don't really recall why I gave the guy a black eye.

One of those random pages where you begin to draw one person, and end up having to finish another. It's from my daily sketchbook, but drawn with a micron instead of the usual china marker.

Just ignore me

A rapid life drawing - in pen for a change - from the daily sketchbook.

Suffering

"All suffering is bearable if it is seen as part of a story." - Isak Dinesen

All dressed up for winter.

Black City

A sombre, high-walled city looking over the waters of the bay.

This city has no name, but like other pieces in this series, it emerged from the pool of fantastic stories I read as a teenager.
Which means we can make a list of its sister cities, each of which has a name that will do for this one. For example:

"Distant, twin thunderstorms played to either side-north over the Inner Sea and south above the Great Salt Marsh-as they approached that monstrous city and as its towers, spires, fanes, and great crenelated wall emerged from its huge, customary cap of smoke, being somewhat silhouetted by the light of the setting sun, which was turned to a dull silver disk by the high fog and the smoke."

"On the seventh day a blur of smoke rose on the horizon ahead, and then the tall black towers of Dylath-Leen, which is built mostly of basalt. Dylath-Leen with its thin angular towers looks in the distance like a bit of the Giant's Causeway, and its streets are dark and uninviting."

What in the midst lay but the Tower itself?
The round squat turret, blind as the fool's heart,
Built of brown stone, without a counter-part
In the whole world. The tempest's mocking elf
Points to the shipman thus the unseen shelf
He strikes on, only when the timbers start.

"But the windows of Andelsprutz in her houses looked vacantly over the plains like the eyes of a dead madman. At the hour her chimes sounded unlovely and discordant, some of them were out of tune, and the bells of the some were cracked, her roofs were bald and without moss. At evening no pleasant rumour arose in her streets."

"Over the irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons, the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow."

The city is not ruinous, although
  Great ruins of an unremembered past,
With others of a few short years ago
  More sad, are found within its precincts vast.
The street-lamps always burn; but scarce a casement        
In house or palace front from roof to basement
  Doth glow or gleam athwart the mirk air cast.

…At length he paused: a black mass in the gloom,
  A tower that merged into the heavy sky;
Around, the huddled stones of grave and tomb:
  Some old God's-acre now corruption's sty:              
He murmured to himself with dull despair,
Here Faith died, poisoned by this charnel air.

And of course:

Per me si va nella citta dolente.

Well, I could go on. Dreadful cities are dreadfully common. Nonetheless, they retain a certain allure.




Quotations in order of appearance:
Fritz Lieber, The Circle Curse.The city of Lankhmar.
H.P. Lovecraft, Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. The city of Dylath-Leen. Which is also, apparently, a French metal band.
Robert Browning, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. No name for this one, just the Dark Tower.
Lord Dunsany, The Madness of Andelsprutz.
Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan. Gormenghast, which is called a castle, but is clearly a city.
James Thomson, The City of Dreadful Night. This one is London.
Dante. And this one is hell.

Jim

A bit of life drawing from the Toronto drawing group the Collective.

winter reflection

Mimosa

The plant, not the drink.

Another iPad still-life by Tarragon. He's aiming here for a more painterly style: Camille Pissarro rather than Dutch still-life, if you will. It's possible - even natural - to make everything very sharp in iPad paintings, just as it was in the golden age of Dutch still life painting. The gleaming precision of it was part of the point, after all.

But a digital picture is not about the materiality of possessions. How could it be? It barely exists in itself. So instead Tarragon has opted to play an impressionist-style game of focus, in which the subject is not the objects in the picture, but the light streaming through them, and the reflections they cast.

in the student lounge

cafe sketchbook

the dock at Sirmione

A memento of a pleasant day in May. It was a day trip from Verona; we were there to see the water-courtyard of the castle, eat gelato and maybe swim a bit. And the very authentic house of Catullus, of course.

So naturally it rained. But between the rainfall - which came down from the Alps regular as clockwork - there was time for a few watercolour sketches. This is one of them. Another is here. It's not impossible that the pictures are better for the lousy weather.

Distant Star

Alone

Years ago Tarragon sojourned on the North Atlantic coast, and amidst the fog and the Labrador current, something Scandinavian stole into his work. His figures turned their backs on one another, or took up station alone in empty rooms, as here. It's a stage many of us go through, but not all of us do it on canvas.

A thread of attenuated minimalism runs through Tarragon's paintings to this day, but it now expresses itself more in the landscapes than in figurative paintings. And so the nordic angst of works like this one has relaxed a bit, into a quiet sense of solitude. That's the way life goes.

I don't know anything about this painting, or if it still exists. For myself, I have decided that it shows the protagonist of Kurt Hamsun's Hunger, sitting disconsolate in a Hammershoi interior. He is dreaming, perhaps, of richer colour and thicker paint.

steve

A quick life-drawing in marker.

messy red lines

An old drawing, done with a red china marker on low-grade paper. It's yellowed even more since.

It's a nostalgic feeling, looking at an eleven year old drawing. The occasion has vanished from my memory, but I look at the two aborted starts in this picture and know I must have been a frustrated draftsman that day. How fortunate to have a patient model.

class is almost over

Capri

A sketch made while waiting for the ferry back to Naples. Capri is a weirdly charming place, redolent of past glories without being pretentious. Perhaps because those glories were themselves a sequence of nervous foreigners, men and women in pseudo-exile, trying to forget and failing miserably. Like poor Alfred Krupp, for example.

Anyway, the view shows the rise leading up to Tiberius' villa. Perhaps the cliff in the picture is the point from which ill-performing catamites were tossed, if we can believe Suetonius' account. (We can't...)

the red tie

I dropped by the Keyhole Session in Toronto this week. It was a Valentine's themed version, and therefore all about lust and romance. Well, just lust.

So pretty much the same as every other keyhole event.

cafe sketchbook

Pete pays attention.

A boot for Saint Valentine

People sometimes complain that holidays are ruined by materialism. But really, we all live in a material world. And so I made this picture of material things as a Be My Valentine. Everybody likes flowers,  after all, and quite a few of us like boots, too.

Wikipedia tells me that 190 million cards are exchanged each year on Valentine's day. This, presumably,  won't contribute to that statistic.


The picture was made with pencil, watercolours, and several kinds of marker.

unfinished sketch

The trouble with randomly drawing people in cafes is they get up and leave...

2 generations

Drawn from life in an Italian deli in Mississauaga.

Keyhole Session: A Romantic Gesture

Two women at the Keyhole Session drawing event last march. The drawing was done with various markers and a red china marker. It took about ten minutes.

The sparrow calls

Brilliant Laundry

The vivid Italian sun against a house and its laundry in the village of Ponte a Mensola, a frazione on the eastern outskirts of Florence. I lived nearby, and often walked out to make sketches.

While I was making this one, a local man approached and started telling me about the stone quarries up the road in Settignano, and how Michelangelo swallowed the dust from the stone along with his mother's milk. I knew the story, but it sounds better served up with the spice of regional (or is it subregional?) patriotism.

The picture was made with pencil, gouache and watercolour in something less than an hour.

Jacki and Rob

Drawn from life in about fifteen minutes, while listening to Nathaniel Merriweather. Good times.

Surrey Woods

The woods in winter, in the Downs south of Guildford.

Tarragon has painted in these woods before, in the spring. I've also made a drawing of the same woods, and of a lonely man stopping at the crossroads in their midst.

sketchbook page

Ah, it's February, the month of romance.

For anyone who's curious, here's what a warm-up page from my life-drawing sketchbook looks like:

Jason

red shoes, and nudity

Here's a bit more life drawing. Our model very kindly agreed to sit still for a lengthy pose. This picture took about 30 or 40 minutes, and was done with several different kinds of marker.

Convention calls for artist's models to be naked, but I'm always happier to see some brightly coloured clothing. Nonetheless, I'm ambivalent about the merits of lingerie in drawings. It compartmentalizes the figure in a way that makes drawing easier, and more visually complex, but on the other hand, because it's so close fitting, there's no disruption of the natural lines of the body, and the process of drawing remains very predictable. Clothing that has lines of its own is often more interesting.

Of course, clothing is interesting for another reason. As Kenneth Clark long ago observed, the state of nudity in art "takes the most sensual and immediately interesting object, the human body, and puts it out of reach of time and desire." A clothed body implies that a decision has been made about what to wear, and that in turn implies a personality.

Our model chose to keep on her shoes and stockings and panties and glasses; had she decided to be naked, she would have presented a very different aspect. Ironically, it would have been far less sexual. One of the  reasons the convention of nudity still exists is because it allows us to use models as mere objects of art, or at least of art instruction, without the distraction of remembering that they are real people.




*He said it in The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, Princeton: Princeton University Press, p.25. It's all very old news, but worth reiterating.

cafe sketchbook

It's a Mickey Mouse bag.

Across the Horse-Jumping Fields

A new landscape by Tarragon, showing us a portion of the village of Compton in winter. One of the most illuminating things about the English countryside is the tracery of footpaths, established by common law centuries old, that crisscrosses the farms and hills. Due to their origin as old peasant right of ways, the contours of the paths are often obscure.

In this picture, the trees on the hill to the left wreath the graveyard and the Watts Mortuary Chapel; another view can be seen here. To get to the chapel from the spot Tarragon painted from, a walker must trek several hundred metres to the right, traverse the trees to the right of the farm buildings and then travel along a sunken road to ascend the hill on its far side.

The system has its advantages. The town of Guildford, population 70,000, is a fifteen minute walk from the same spot. You would never know it.

the wise man sleeps alone

Girl with pillow

A picture drawn from life with a pencil, and coloured with acrylic paints.

Rachel

A five minute pose, done with a china marker.

2 views in Venice

A page from a small sketchbook I once carried in Venice. Above, the view down the canal from the entrance to the Guggenheim done with a marker; below, the Ponte dell'Academia, drawn in pencil.

greg

iPad drawing: The Blue Plate

There's a school of thought that holds that every still-life is a memento mori, whether the artist has included a skull or not. The idea is implicit in the French word for the genre, nature mort.

The thing about still-lives is that they're supposed to be still. But those done on the iPad are anything but. The colours are too lively, the strokes record every gesture of the artist's finger. And of course, in a literal sense, they are alive with the electricity that maintains the image on our screens.

Of course, in its original incarnation the still-life was about conspicuous consumption. What was best in life was for the sideboard to groan with gold and silver plate, a big side of bacon, and bones of your enemies. But if that wasn't possible, a painting of it made a good substitute.

iPad still-lives don't work exactly like that either. How exactly they do work is an open question.

Tarragon made this still-life using the brushes app on the iPad.

Winter likeness

Two from the daily sketchbook, all wrapped up for winter.

At the bar

The Bedford Academy in Toronto.

A Sazerac and Danielle, II

And here's the original line drawing that served as the base for yesterday's picture. Not radically different, of course. Some may prefer the simplicity of the penwork. I'm a bit divided, myself.

It was done with fine tipped micron pens, plus some Copic brand brush markers for the boots and the hair. She had to sit still for quite a while; 40 minutes maybe. Which was enough time for at least three Sazeracs.

A Sazerac, and Danielle

A fairly detailed life drawing, in which I failed to restrain my love of rendering clothing. I made the drink by way of bribing my model to keep still after a long day of clomping around in those boots.

For the purists out there, the Sazerac that day was made with bourbon, not rye, so it's not 100% authentic. But it was delicious.

I've been experimenting with photoshop of late. It's a bit too easy to go overboard with colour using the computer, so I've been conscientious about keeping it to a minimum. I'll post the original line drawing tomorrow.

Joan at the Christmas Party

And a poinsettia, of course. It's a quick sketch from life. She was watching the antics of those who had consumed far more wine than she.

Jason stretches

He's a yoga instructor. He's very good at stretching.

self-portrait

Another old self-portrait, drawn with a china marker on heavily textured paper - you can see the vertical lines from the weave. I used a mirror to make the drawings in this series. Later on, I got my visual memory to the point where I could include the hand I was drawing with, but this is an early one.

It's visible how much younger I was when I made this. I'm wearing a random beret that I used to keep my hair under control, a jumper later stolen in a internet cafe in Florence, and an old cavalry gauntlet I found in the market in Piazza del Ciompi.

painting quickly in Verona

Occasionally I set out to make an architectural watercolour without doing a drawing first. I'm of two minds as to whether this is a good idea or not.

I did this one in Verona a few years back:

It's a lot sketchier than I prefer.

The buildings are among the many gothic survivals in Verona. I did the painting in the Piazza del Erbe - the old market, as the name implies. Through the arch you can see one of the Scaliger tombs (Mastino's, if I recall correctly). These are among the most spectacular funerary art of the entire Gothic era, but for some reason are underrepresented in both the academic and tourist literature.

don't slouch so much, you look so pensive

Drawn quickly from life with a china marker, while waiting around in a French train station. I felt like some colour so I added the overlay in photoshop.

The man with the strawberry

It's a man, with a strawberry.

Drawn in under ten minutes with some markers and two colours of china marker.

cafe sketchbook