This is my sister’s 3rd child…a lovely, sweet girl. I love charcoal for capturing children’s faces. I still have so much to learn about drawing the face. I may have to do this portrait over and over again to try different papers and their effects with charcoal, try pastels, try it all! It’s all too fun when you have an adorable subject such as her!
And how! Well, there’s nothing like art imitating life…
This is my life right now. Starting a new job teaching art part-time at Redeemer School (teacher work-days are NOT part-time:), three different open houses this week, oh actually 4 with mine, two medical appointments for me, and physicals for my two sports-active kids, piano lesson for the littlest, and a host of other things that may not get accomplished! If I assign colors, lines, and splashes to all of this, the above image is what I’d get. Helps me see the beauty in the midst of chaos.
Artists look for relationships…connections, bridges, the way things are related to one another. This can be relationships between subject matter, background & foreground, shapes, colors, lines, etc. It can also be relationships of subjective matters, like the relationship between a father and his daughter. This is my husband and our youngest enjoying a good laugh together. Expressing this moment through art tells so much more than a photo does.
And so…another of my little niece. This is the fourth version of her. (You can see the others in recent posts). This past week I’ve been taken with working in watercolor and trying to apply some of the freedom and freshness of my watercolor abstracts to representational subject matter. I’ll show you some more this week. I’ve also been reading a book on Andrew Wyeth I picked up from our local library titled, The Two Worlds of Andrew Wyeth. He comments in this book on how he loved to paint the same place or person over and over and over again, each time trying to understand and convey something more. I like that.
She never knew someone was drawing her sitting at her post, eyes peeled to activity in the lake at Hanging Rock. Had she known, she might have stayed still for me to finish the drawing…hence there are no legs.
These ladies, however, stayed put for quite a while, standing in pretty much the same position albeit punctuated by hand motions, turns of the head, and brief bending down to tell their child something. Still, I had to draw quickly since I had no idea when they would go in different directions.
And these folks were directly in front of me. I tried to be as unobvious as I could, but at some point the lady looking more my direction began to wonder. I finished up, so as not to appear sneaky or like I was spying on them. Still, I enjoy these little quick dashes of a day my family spent at the lake. I’m still not comfortable with “public” drawing…I’m too worried that those I am drawing will be offended or uncomfortable. I’d like to get over this, to draw confidently in any setting, and be ok with others knowing I’m drawing and even be ok if they talk to me about what I’m drawing. No fear! Well, I’d like to…
There are times when only paint satisfies…paint for paint’s sake…to watch the colors oozle, wazzle, meld, splash, splatter, etc. I paint them with a sense of space, but with no particular place in mind. They are a series of responses–selecting a color, laying it down, and responding to that stroke by choosing the next color or stroke, repeating this over and over until it feels complete. Perhaps not “finished”, but complete.
…or two. I tell ya, I honestly feel crazy sometimes when I think about how I would like to draw or paint something. Pastels? Pens? Watercolor? Crayons? Charcoal? My mind races around the many materials at hand and often I end up doing multiple versions. This is charcoal and pastel from the same photo of Gracie that I did the pen and Caran D’Ache version in the previous post. And here is yet another approach with marker and Caran D’Ache :
Each is done very quickly…a sketch. Sometimes I just want to see how each medium would turn out. Sometimes I’m actually searching for a certain “look”. If I were commissioned to do a portrait–charcoal and pastel are my favorites. But for sketching and exploring, anything goes.
I have to confess: I have this nagging thought in the back of my head that says I should have one main medium as an artist. The voice tells me that no serious artist bounces back and forth from this to that to the other…but rather has a medium he/she employs for sketching and then a medium he/she employs for “paintings”. Case in point–Wolf Kahn. I’ve been re-reading his book of pastels (which I totally recommend). He seems to sketch/paint with pastels, and then when making larger works, he uses oils. Straightforward. No fuss. No quandary about which medium to play with next. Even his sketches as a whole have an overall continuity in their execution, and this is easily carried over to his large oil paintings. My stuff? It seems all over the place.
But I have to wonder…perhaps many mediums IS my medium. Maybe I shouldn’t try forcing myself to “settle down” to one medium. (Indeed it seems a lot of the fun would be taken away.) Perhaps Mr. Kahn actually uses multiple approaches much of the time and the books and exhibits merely assemble works that are within one vein only. Then again, maybe not. But I am encouraged by a particular quote in his book. He says, “I have tried to avoid looking for a single style, trusting instead that every work will by necessity exhibit Kahn-ish elements; after all, I made each of them.”
I think I’ll trust this to be true for all of us!
I am inspired by some drawings I’ve found through the Urban Sketchers site, particularly those of Veronica Lawlor. I enthusiastically commented on one of her recent postings, asked her a few questions, to which she graciously responded. She calls her drawings, “guided chaos”. Check here:
http://onedrawingaday.com/2009/07/27/art-battles/#comments
for the full explanation. I love this thought of our drawings being guided chaos. I’m not sure if the guidance Veronica refers to is a zen thing, or a right brain thing, or just the store of years of drawing expertise, but there is certainly a sense in her drawings of a confident line set free to wander the page. I really like that! I’ve been playing around with this multi-colored line and splashes of color and am having a blast with it.
The key is to let your lines go free and not worry so much about how it will turn out. These drawings are from photos of a recent trip to visit my family. The gang’s all here in this picture as we eat together, and the baby is my sister’s fourth…little Gracie. I’m trying all kinds of lines and colors…they certainly aren’t the lyrical lines of Veronica’s, but they are fun…”guided chaos” indeed!
I’ve often thought that if I can reclaim the inconsequential segments of my life, I could actually accomplish a few things. Often, we artists talk ourselves out of drawing or painting because we don’t have hours on end to be in our studios. Personally, I find motherhood to be a huge challenge for finding time to paint, especially in the summertime, when our lives are chopped up into little bits driving here, there, and everywhere. If you take your sketchbook with you, you’ll find all kinds of time to draw…during soccer practices, swim lessons, and piano lessons.
These sketches were made while my youngest had her weekly piano lesson at a friend’s house who has a gorgeous outdoor room. These are a few views from sitting in one spot and pivoting a bit as I drew. Bits of color added later. By the end of a week of this “drawing in the margins” of your life, you will be amazed at how much art you’ve been able to make.
