Archive for the ‘still life’ Category

Pastels from Wolf Kahn Weekend

Just a few works I did during the Wolf Kahn pastel workshop I attended last weekend. On Saturday we worked outside, and I admit I wanted to create a Wolf Kahn look alike with bold colors and simplified shapes. But choosing those colors and shapes is more challenging than it looks. So I stuck with a more representational style. On Sunday, we worked indoors since it was raining all day. I found the medium of pastel very frustrating. everything I did looked blurry and rough. Getting sharp edges required going over and over the work. But who ever said art was easy?

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.

Back to the basics

After finishing up with my one-man show in the first week of August, I felt energized and exhausted. I had a lot of ideas of how to move forward. Too many in fact. I felt stymied. In order to get back to basics I thought I would just focus on drawing for a while. Because of its permanent nature oil painting feels like making an important statement that needs to speak to all the painting that came before it and justify the hundreds of years it could stick around. Drawing however feels more like an exploration that can be picked up on a whim and disposed of without too much trouble. If I don’t like, toss it into recycling. I started by drawing simple objects around the house. This toothpaste tube seemed to speak to me, something of the loneliness and sadness it must feel being mauled and squeezed without much thought. Who knew it had so much to say? And I wouldn’t have heard it unless I drew it.