Maria in uniform

She borrowed my laptop to check her email; I borrowed her break time to make a drawing.

steve in outline

Maeve in class

Reinisa awake

How long I waited

Figure study

A figure study, done from life with acrylics on board. This isn't really my sort of thing, but it's a good idea to practice from time to time.

jacki

Drawn from life in 60 seconds, using a Copic brush pen.

Some kind of sad

Drawn from life with a brush pen.

Life drawing is better with snacks.

Another sketch of an attentive medievalist made at the lecture of Chris Berard about King Arthur and Edward III.

Genova Centrale

A quick browse of my landscapes might suggest a fascination with the type of European picturesque aesthetic that prevailed in the 19th century. Nor would that be entirely wrong: I do love a good rendering of medieval architecture.

But I wouldn't ever be content with just ruins and atmospheric crags. One of the great, and rarely mentioned, advantages of making pictures is the ability to see something interesting almost anywhere. I once attempted to interest a buyer in a landscape of a shopping mall some years back. He wouldn't hear of it, so it never got made, but it would have been beautiful! All those horizontal lines!

The Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti famously claimed that "a speeding automobile is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace." To which one might reply, it depends on the automobile...

But he was making a value judgment. New shiny things good; old landscapes bad. Especially if the old landscapes were dominating and impeding the course of artistic expression. He had a point - Courbet was making the same one when he ran through the Louvre to destroy the Venus de Milo. Marinetti and Courbet could not imagine a world where artists could make whatever they liked, whether it be shiny or important or not.

But that would be a better world, wouldn't it? If you can see beauty everywhere, it's nice to show it to other people.

This is a view from near the main station in Genoa. It's a large screen print worked back in with watercolour. Apologies for the low quality jpeg.

Hannah

A drawing done from life in around fifteen minutes, using markers and china markers.

David Says

I turn my head...

...and draw a person in the corner of my eye.

Dorianne

I knew you were waiting

In the rain, in Italy.

Watercolour, as you may know, is a medium in which the pigment is suspended in water. The more water involved, the more it flows around, and the longer it takes to dry.

For obvious reasons, it can be tricky to paint watercolours when its raining.

This is a quick sketch, looking east up the Arno from the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. It was a very damp day. But I think you can see that from the picture.

I painted two watercolours that day. Here is the second.

Abbie in Winter

It was cold day, and Abbie had someone she wanted to avoid. It's easy to forget just how much anonymity a big coat can provide. From December to March every year, Canadians are as uniform as North Koreans.

It's a bit depressing, to be honest.

Heart and Soul