Archive for September, 2009

A bunch of bags

Okay you are probably thinking, enough of these charcoal renderings of every day objects. It was fun to draw something with so many nooks and crannies, like painting drapery folds in classic figure paintings must have been. It’s not like you can really get them wrong and there are lots of shadows and highlights to play with. Maybe this work is a little retro since most paper bags have advertising messages all over them. I remember many years ago that I heard that if you gave your full attention to something its true beauty would shine through, so I tried that on a paper bag and it worked. The bag began to glow like some burnished metal.  This drawing is in memory of that experience. After finishing this drawing, I thought about trying to draw a picture of a paper bag on a paper bag. Now how ironic would that have been? But it didn’t really work and I threw it out.

A Meditation on Emptiness

Still working on charcoal drawings of everyday things. I chose this subject as an exercise on how closely I could control the dark tones. It takes a lot of cross hatching and rubbing to get a solid black. I used a chamois cloth and quickly rubbed in a light gray tone over the entire paper then worked or erased into that. The subject matter of this drawing seems to be the dark space within the pot than the pot itself, like it is some kind of Zen koan.