Bram Ebenezer

I've finally finished this drawing of Bram. It's actually almost life-size, which isn't saying much since he weighs all of four pounds. I'm fairly pleased with it for a change, although each time I look at it I can easily see what I should have done differently and what's not quite "right." Believe it or not, given my penchant for drawing my dogs, I have no other sketches of either one in the works right now. Instead I'm working on two self portraits and a pastel of a room in my house. I think I've done the dog thing to death at this point, but that said, I'm sure I'll be back drawing one or the other of them again soon. It's an addiction of sorts. I've been asked countless times why I draw them so much and do I ever draw anything else? And the answer to those two questions are "because I like to draw them" and "yes, loads of other things, in addition to all the paintings that you'll never see here online." If Monet can paint dozens of paintings of the Cathedral at Rouen or haystacks or his lily pond over and over and over again, then why can't I draw the same two dogs over and over again? I hate being defensive about my art, but I also hate feeling as though I am being forced to defend my art.

Full Body Sketch of Bram Standing, graphite on paper, 2009

Nests and Eggs

I love birds and I love their eggs. I've been collecting nests and fallen, broken and/or hatched eggs in the wild for many, many years. I used to have an amazing little nest whose shape was absolutely perfect (an anal bird, after my own heart) and in it I had all the tiny broken eggs and feathers I had been collecting for eons. The eggs were of all different colors, from various species of songbirds and there were feathers of all sizes and colors as well. I kept the nest tucked inside a china cabinet where it was safe from my marauding cat until one afternoon when, in a lapse of judgment, I forgot to put it back after adding a new find to it. I went out to do some errands and when I came home all the eggs had been eaten with just tiny flecks of color left here and there on the floor, every last feather had been chewed down to nothing and the nest itself lay scattered in loose and broken pieces in a trail between several rooms. I was heartbroken, and angry at both the cat and myself. I have collected a few nests since then, but no eggs, and nothing has come close to the perfection of that one beautiful little nest.

I recently bought a book called, not surprisingly given this topic, Egg & Nest* and it's simply amazing. The photographs of the eggs and nests stored for decades in the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology's headquarters are enough to take your breath away and the history of egg collecting is equally as fascinating.

I don't usually draw eggs as they're really rather simple and, to be perfectly honest, just plain boring to draw, but I do keep the more beautiful ones that my chickens and ducks have laid. In fact, I have an entire carton in my refrigerator of the first eggs ever laid by my little Bantam East Indie duck hen named Babette Fleur, all of which look exactly like Jackson Pollock's Autumn Rhythm Number 30. Since my girls are getting older and not laying many eggs at all anymore, I thought I'd draw a few of the different eggs they lay while they're still laying them, however sporadic that might be.

*Egg & Nest, by Rosamund Purcell, Linneas S. Hall and Rene Corado, Harvard University Press, 2008

Two Duck Eggs Flanked by Two Chicken Eggs, pastel on paper, 2009

Head Study of Bram

Surprisingly, considering how much I draw my dogs, this is the first sketch I've done of Bram in the nearly two months he's been a member of the family. How odd.

When it comes to my work, even just the studies, sketches and journal pages I put here on this blog, I tend to see nothing but the flaws, the mistakes, the things that could have been done differently or improved upon. I'm really bad at not giving myself very much credit for what I do, and I seldom if ever toot my own horn when it comes to my art work, neither the serious stuff nor the lesser stuff. But that said, I have to say that I think I really nailed his tiny mouth here. I really do. Bram has a crooked and funny, slightly turned-down little mouth that looks exactly like the tiny rabbits in the Rankin/Bass Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Christmas special. You know, the stop motion one from 1964 with Hermey and Yukon Cornelius and the Island of Misfit Toys (which always makes me cry because they're all so unloved sitting out there alone in the cold, cold snow waiting for Santa each year)? Well, in the scene where Rudolph walks Clarice home after he's been booted from the Reindeer Games for being different (now there's the spirit of Christmas in action, eh?), the bridge of the song "There's Always Tomorrow" is sung by two little rabbits and two little raccoons and Bram's mouth looks just like the little rabbits' mouths (especially the one on the left). At least I think it does. And I think I did a smashing job of capturing his funny little lips in this sketch.

So there. And now if it ever comes up I can say I actually said something positive about my work. At least once, at any rate. And it was about something I love: Bram's odd little mouth.

Head Study of Bram Ebenezer, graphite on paper, 2009

Vincent Van Gogh

I’m in love with Vincent Van Gogh and I have been for as long as I can remember (in spite of my not having chosen him as my “Dead Soul Mate” here a few years back). Sometimes my feelings are in full-blown obsession, sometimes in merciful remission. Right now, I’m feeling it big time, baby. While I like Vincent’s work (I’m more partial to his lesser known graphite, chalk, pen and ink drawings than his Impressionist canvases, and among his paintings his self portraits over his landscapes), I personally am more enamored of the man himself. While the majority of people dismiss him as a madman, albeit a genius lunatic, there was so much more to him than the manic loony who lopped off an ear.

Vincent was an exceptionally intelligent, extraordinarily well-read person who spoke multiple languages and loved to hold in-depth discussions with people, in spite of the fact that most people routinely (and sadly) avoided any conversation with him at all. He felt acutely the pain and suffering of humanity, which was the cause of much of his troubles. He desperately wanted to connect with people, but was instead misunderstood and ostracized because he was so different from everyone else, even from those within the contemporary artist communities of his day. His loneliness and solitude were never a conscious choice, but rather a miserable condition forced upon him by society in general, and which only exacerbated his neuroses. His desperation and pain are palpable, even 119 years after his death.

I’m presently reading four books on Vincent all at once, cross-referencing as I work my way through them all: Lust for Life, the epic biographical novel from 1934 by Irving Stone, Van Gogh Face to Face: The Portraits, by the Detroit Institute of Arts which is the companion book to a 2000 exhibition of his portraits as well as a comprehensive volume of his portraiture in various media, I, Van Gogh by Isabel Kuhl, and my personal favorite which I’m re-reading yet again: The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles by Martin Gayford. I adore this last book.

While all artists tend to be colorful and somewhat odd people, Vincent in his individuality, his sensitivity and his manic and frequently intensely strange behavior makes all the others seem rather dull and boring by comparison. He saw poetry in the ordinary and the commonplace, and beauty in that which is most ugly. He knew that true beauty is found in suffering and in the depths of the soul and not in the superficial or the 'safe'. He knew that that which is the most flawed is also the most transcendent, much like Vincent himself was.

I couldn’t imagine life without Van Gogh in it. What a boring place it would be had he never graced this world with his magical presence. Thank you Vincent.

Vincent Van Gogh, Sien Seated, May 1882, graphite, ink and sepia

Large Edison Jack Sketch

This is a very large head study of Edison, which utterly dwarfs him in actual size. The nose alone on this drawing is bigger than Edison's entire face and the whole sketch is considerably bigger than his entire body. I think it might be interesting to go even larger, just to draw out the details in his face, but considering how long it took me to find the time to finish this one, that probably won't be happening anytime soon.

Head Study of Edison Jack, graphite on paper, 2009

Dog Sketch

Head Study of Oliver, graphite on paper, 2009.

Renoir Revisited

When I was a teen and then a very young adult, I was smitten with Renoir and his work. I loved Le Bal au Bougival and during that period of my life it was one of my favorite paintings, if not the favorite work. I would go and visit it at the MFA and easily could have stood there for hours dissecting the subject matter, the swirl of movement in the woman’s dress, the light, the colors (especially the red bonnet), the brush strokes. The only thing that would tear me away from it was a companion growing bored and begging me to please move on to something else. Anything else. I saw an enormous exhibition of Renoir’s work in the mid 80’s, a staggering collection of his life's work, and was thrilled to have been able to experience so many pieces in one place. But then my personal love affair with Renoir cooled. I’m not sure why I lost interest in him as I have always been into the French Impressionists, but I did. My tastes changed and my affections went elsewhere in art, I guess.

But I recently read a fantastic book about Renoir, and more specifically the summer he painted Les Dejeuners des Canotiers, and am suddenly finding myself rediscovering the artist I once was so taken with. I’m finding though that with age I have become far more discriminating in my tastes in regards to his work, with only very specific pieces holding my attention this time around, but I have also discovered some lesser known works of his that as a teen I never knew existed. And the book has also opened my eyes to other artists and other works that I had never given much thought to while in my youth, or that I knew but had no interest in, but now find I do.

I am completely in love with Gustave Caillebotte, an artist whose works were virtually unknown not only in his lifetime, but had gone unnoticed even as recently as the 1950’s. His work, while Impressionistic in many respects, is also very different from what the average person considers to be an Impressionist work. As an engineer at one point in his life, his architecture within his pieces is staggeringly beautiful: the buildings, bridges, ironwork on balconies. His light and his perspectives were radical for his day and are as stunning to behold now as they must have been when first painted. Except for what he accomplished in only a few short years, he gave up painting as a career for other pursuits (though he still painted occasionally for himself) and died far too young. He left a rather small collection of works in comparison with other artists of his day, which is unfortunate as he was simply brilliant. I guess the scarcity of his works makes them that much more special.

The Renoir book has reopened my eyes in a way they had never been opened before when I was a girl. I’m finding so many new and exciting things that came out of the mid to late 19th century French art world that either I had forgotten all about or never even knew to begin with. Old favorites and new thrills, all of them wonderful, and I find that in many ways I feel like I did as a teen, making art discoveries that stir my soul and make my art world exciting and really fresh again. If you think you know everything there is to know about a subject, you just might find that you have barely scratched the surface. And that’s such a rush. It really is.