Sunset, Friday, 10 July 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Today I’ve added new material for each of my three students: Mohan, Lakshmi, and Willa.

Twilight, Saturday, 27 June 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on linen, 16 x 20.

This was only 15 or so minutes after the sunset.

Change happens.

I decided ‘twilight’ was a better description than ‘15 or so minutes after sunset’. Then, as I was painting, the iChing (iPod on shuffle) threw out Antony & The Johnsons, “Twilight.”

I have yet to hear anything by Antony that I haven’t liked. I would say he’s the marriage (?) of Boy George and Roy Orbison, except that fails to do justice, if not to his talent, to something that he expresses. I first encountered him through his soul-shaking performance of “If It Be Your Will” on Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man. Several of the performances on that soundtrack, while perfectly fine in the context of the film, grow precious on further listening – but not that one. Rufus Wainwright is another notable exception.

Shooting this linen canvas – the photo setup involved – gave me a chance to add a sunset that I really like, involving the Lincoln Memorial, from January 5th.

I’ve also added a new entry – “Looking at the Sunset (Part 5)” – a sketch that I originally thought was bad. In fact, I only ran across it again because I’d sketched this crazy twilight on the back of the same sheet! 

My reversal of opinion about my own sketch – I actually like it a great deal – illustrates something I told my students (Willa, Mohan, and Lakshmi) about a dozen times each, when they’d be discouraged or dismayed by something they’d tried to do – and it’s something that I told them (every time) I have trouble learning myself. Especially in visual art, the quality of what you do can’t be judged by your own immediate emotional reaction. Save your work – save your sketches! If nothing else, days, weeks or years later when you encounter them again, they’ll bring back some part of your life to you.

You may also be surprised how much more promising they seem than they did on the day you were caught up in judging yourself.

Thunderhead in the South

Pencil and Prismacolor crayon in Moleskine notebook, 8 x 10.25.

This was another case, as happened in one of the entries from Baltimore’s Federal Hill in May, where I started sketching on a righthand page but had to annex the back of a previous sketch. Also another occasion where I needed to work quickly to avoid annoying Flint the foxhound, to maintain the delicate sense of collaboration that gives us some control over him when he’s running off leash.

This view is toward the Southwest Mountains. I’m happy to say that I violated at least one and perhaps as many as three of the precepts laid down by John Torreano in his aggravating, rather overweening book Drawing By Seeing. I thought the book might be good for my little art classes, but it took my 11-year-old student Willa Lin to show me that it was simply too doctrinaire. She dismissed the book out of hand in less than one minute!

Sunset, Monday, 18 May 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on linen, 16 x 20.Tonight I’ve posted appreciation pages for my three – count ’em, three! – students, Lakshmi, Mohan, and Willa.