Current project - drawing a friend/fellow artist up at the Weymouth studio. It began as a very informal experiment - we're sitting for each other's portraits - and has developed into a magical session. He has ethos , and his features are heroic.
"For the gods approve the depth and not the tumult of the soul." - Wordsworth, "Laodamia"
Each session has lead to more discoveries, more ways to apply the training, to observe nature, to abbreviate, to explore the balance between the realism of what I see with the structural knowledge from intensified anatomy lessons and lectures.
Well, still much work to do.
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Saturday, April 04, 2009
Spring Starts. Two weeks into this pose - I was able to share a model with Brandon Soloff during his recent visiting-artist tour of Mims Studios. It was a remarkable session, however, just a start, and the model leaves town in a month.
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Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Well, maybe I've just noticed this, but the Art Beadles (sorry, am still reading Dickens) over at ARC are now pimping, besides any atelier who pays the $400 listing fee to become "an ARC-Approved Atelier," and any photocopier willing to pay equally big bucks to become listed as a "Modern Master" - I've probably forgotten several copyright symbols in this sentence alone! - GET THIS, you can now order (along with Asian condiments) real sweatshop-painted copies of the images on the site.
How can any reputable artists associated with this circus not rise up in mutiny?
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Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Abbott Handerson Thayer, "The Angel"
A gem from digging through research on artists of the Gilded Age for an upcoming school trip to DC:
Thayer wrote, after working on the head in the painting above, “Yesterday I found the head so on the right track at last that I had an inspired moment partly aided by that strange summoning of clear sight, and when I looked at it I saw at a glance my best thing. I am blissful.”
And a prayer that some of the amazing electricity of growth and connection and understanding that is bouncing around the studio these past few days touches each of us with that precious and rare moment Thayer describes above.
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Thursday, January 22, 2009
Augustus Saint Gaudens in his Studio
Rilke, excerpt from a letter to Benvenuta, meditation on the Great Sphinx at Giza, seen at night:
“You must have experienced this too: that a view of a landscape, of the sea, of a grand, star-studded night inspires us with the conviction of connections and agreements that we are not able to overlook; it was exactly this that I experienced in the highest degree. Here stood a creation that had taken its measure from the sky; upon which the millennia had left no greater mark than a contemptible bit of decay, and the most shocking part of it was that this thing had human feature (so profoundly recognizable to us, these features of a human face) and that they were sufficient to it in its exalted position. Ah, dear friend, I told myself, this, this face we alternately hold out to fate and cover with our hands, it must be capable of meaning something great if its form can survive in such an environment. That countenance had acquired the customs of cosmic space; parts of its gaze and smile were destroyed, but indestructible emotions had been mirrored into it by the rising and falling skies. From time to time I closed my eyes, and although my heart was beating, I reproached myself for not feeling this strongly enough; did I not have to arrive at places in my amazement where I had never been before? I told myself: Imagine you had been carried here with bandaged eyes and laid down aslant in this deep, almost impalpably wafting coolness – you wouldn’t know where you were and if you opened your eyes now… And when I actually opened them, dear God,--it took them a long while before they could withstand it, before they could take hold of this being, achieve the mouth, the cheek, the brow, on which moon light and moon shadow shifted from expression to expression. How many times my eye had already attempted the ampleness of this cheek; it rounded itself so slowly toward the top, as if in that space there were room for more places than here among us.”
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Thursday, December 04, 2008
There isn't much to write, but I wanted to pull together some images of my current mural project - a copy of Andrea Del Sarto's Baptism of the People. After working up the ornamental candelabra and capital on the left, I'll bring the figures to a more finished rendering in charcoal and chalk.
I adore the ornament. I adore working with complex groupings.
There is big news at the studio, but we must wait for the official unveiling.
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Tuesday, December 02, 2008
Had a moment to play around in Photoshop with a bookplate design, fitting snugly into a major reading jag - a thorough tour of Charles Dickens. It launched with Tale of Two Cities, then David Copperfield. Just beginning Oliver Twist. Next, The Old Curiosity Shop and then on to a pretty little copy of Great Expectations. Before Dickens, I spent time in the magical world of Susanna Clarke, "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel" and "The Ladies of Grace Adieu," a charming book of short English faerie stories. There is a common thread: I'm adoring the English novel, especially those with illustrations.
We've started on a standing pose - I've got a very specific set of goals for this project, which I cannot jinx by writing about it, other than to say I'm working 4 drafts from one pose:
