Angles

I’ve been working on this drawing of Catherine McEvoy for my watercolor class. It’s been problematic because my photo reference is so bad. I took it in class last year at Friday Harbor Irish Music Camp. Really, the photo is mostly just the idea for the painting, and a brief reference for Catherine’s face.

My teacher, Steve Curl, brought up something that has helped me with the drawing. “Think about the angles,” he said. “That will give you the dynamism you need to show the intensity the has when she plays the flute.” Steve is a musician as well as a painter, and right off he recognized  the dynamic force with which Catherine plays the flute. That force is what I’m trying to capture.

So I put the drawing in Adobe Illustrator and picked out the angles and the line of action to better understand the drawing. The purple lines are the dominant angles, the light blue lines secondary, and the orange lines are the lines of action. I still don’t have it quite right. I’ll have to spend some time in front of a mirror with a flute (holding it backwards since Catherine plays left-handed) in order to understand the pose. It’s times like these I wish I could afford a model. And I’ll have to spend some more time watching Youtube videos of Catherine. Darn.

Mikado abridged

Yum Yum and Nanki-poo

Some of the funniest entertainment at the Great Dickens Christmas Fair is in the Victoria & Albert Bijou Music Hall. This year they’re performing the Mikado in an hour, and it will make you laugh.

It’s like a send up of a Victorian Thespian Society putting on community theater in their bathrobes. Most of the voices are Gilbert & Sullivan worthy. Yum-yum can hit those high notes and be heard in the next county. Nanki-poo has a smooth tenor. But even if the actors don’t have an operatic voice, they are still fun to watch. Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner was very fun to watch as the actor (what are these player’s names anyway? Is there no cast list anywhere?) played a slightly nerdish Victorian banker-type who’d been cast into the role because he was just really funny. And the Mikado is as pompous as any businessman playing an emperor might be.

The Mikado and Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner

Plus, the play was a great sketching situation, as I could get a grip on what each actor looked like and have plenty of time to do gesture drawings as they posed and sang.

Kondor Brothers Juggle

I can’t find much information on this kid (the one in the red plaid vest), but he was one helluva juggler.  He and his older brother did some pretty terrifying bits that made me wonder where was this boy’s mother? Things like juggling with knives while the little one stood on the head of the big one. No helmets at all to protect his young noggin.

The Dickens Fair information just lists them as the Brothers Kondor, but they’ve been around a while. A man in costume said to me, “he’s even better than he was last time I saw him. He must have been juggling since he was that tyke’s age.” Since this juggler is only about 11 years old, he must have indeed started juggling before he could read, at least.

Indeed. Anyone know anything about them?

Dressing the part

One of the best parts about going to the Great Dickens Christmas Fair are the costumes. They are amazing! Yard of taffeta and silk, flounces and ruffles, waistcoats and petticoats. Oh, I do want a hoop skirt.

It’s fabulously expensive to have a period dress made, so I don’t think I can go that route. If I were handy, I could  join the Greater Bay Area Costume Guild and learn to make my own. Or if I were even more handy, I could follow the directions on The Cup That Cheers and with needle, thread, duct tape and a hot glue gun, I could re-purpose thrift shop finds into a stunning costume.

Unfortunately, I am just a painter. Although I grew up in a family of Women Who Sew (my grandmother was a professional seamstress and furrier, for heaven’s sake!), I was never able to catch on to sewing. But sometimes if I want something bad enough, I can learn how to do it.

Puppet master

Puppets populated one of the booths the Great Charles Dickens Fair. They were marvelous puppets, marionettes who were of course a little creepy, but also charming. (Yes, I like charmingly creepy things—the result of growing up with a steady diet of Creature Features and clowns). I coveted one of these spider-fingered puppets mightily.

The puppeteer and maker, Darren Way, makes his puppets out of found wood. He’s been a puppeteer for years, and his skill was evident.  In one of those quiet moments that define a whole day, I watched as the little chimney sweep enthralled little kids, who spoke to the puppet as if it were a real person. Perhaps it was a real person?

From what I could find about Way, his puppet shows and stop-motion animation are normally not for children. But I guess he made an exception for Christmas.

Week of Dickens Fair

Steampunk seems to have infiltrated the Dickens Fair.

Normally the Great Dickens Christmas Fair is so crowded that people in my family (they shall remain nameless, but they know who they are!) didn’t go this year. They would have been surprised at the lack of crowds.

That’s not good! The fair need crowds. The chestnut sellers have to make a living! The jugglers need to be watched! Morris dancer need cheering. Crafters need customers, and players need an audience.

So I’m going to do a week of Dicken’s fair postings. I hope it helps get people out and attending.

The Great Dickens Christmas Fair

We kicked off the Christmas season with the Great Dickens Christmas Fair Sunday. It was delightful and entertaining as usual. Dickens and the Victorians practically invented my idea of Christmas, and I love the play-acting.

This year I went prepared to sketch with a Tombow dual brush pen, a Niji waterbrush, and several Staedtler pigment liners. I used the same 7″ x 7″ hard-bound Daler Rowney I used last year for my first foray into public sketching. I have to admit I still haven’t finished that journal, and besides, I thought it a proper and fitting way to round out the year.

I decided that I’d do at least 10 pages of sketching. I counted journal pages, and put a big number 10 on the tenth page so I’d know I’d reached my quota of sketching for the day.

And I did it.  Some of my pages aren’t anything I’d want to show anyone, but oddly, the least successful as sketches have the most possibilities for future projects. I’ll blog about the completed projects later.

Sketches I will show you

Polka at Fezziwig's Dance Party

Fezziwig’s Dance Party was as fun as always. In fact, it was more fun this year because the players asked us to dance, and then they taught us to waltz.

Waltzing with someone who knows how to do it is an experience verging on the sublime, and I recommend you run right out and find someone to teach you. In fact, any of the old-style dances are barrels of fun, and I think everyone should try them. Fortunately, the Bay Area has a lot going on. Try the Period Events & Entertainments Re-Creation Society  (Peers) website. They sponsor scads of events, and their links page gives even more info on other local and national period reinactments and events.

Irish Step Dancer

The Siamsa le Cheile dancers put on a terrific exhibition of traditional and modern-style Irish, Scottish, and Cape Breton dancing. After all these years of being involved in the music and dance, this stuff still makes my heart stand up like a 4-year old kid and whirl around till it’s dizzy.

The Dark Garden window displays seem like a perfect spot to draw, since the models hold their creative and cute poses very well, and let’s face it, just about everybody looks better in a corset. Unfortunately, the windows are also a perfect photo-op, so there’s a lot of jockeying for position with photographers. Also, people do love to look over your shoulder and comment on your drawing. Maybe some year, when I’m more confident sketching in public,  I’ll get a hoop skirt, set up my easel, and become a part of the show.

Lovely lists

One of my favorite bloggers, Ricë Freeman-Zachery at Notes from the Voodoo Cafe has been blogging about getting organized, and she had a great post on the value of lists.

Lists! Normally the dining table (which doubles as my office) is awash in lists.

But her post reminded me that I had sort of fallen off the list wagon, and that I had better climb back on if I wanted to accomplish anything. So I sat down and made a list of stuff that had to be done—grinding, boring, distasteful chores like balancing my checkbook—and it had to be done soon, or my world would would sputter and stall like a 1967 Volkswagon fastback in a rainstorm.

And I actually finished the most pressing things on that list. And, as is often the case, after I disposed of those boulder-like tasks that weigh so heavily, I suddenly had a spurt of creative energy. Now I have three half-finished drawings and ideas for a dozen more. It’s funny how undone business like an out-of-balance checkbook can block my creativity.

Actually, right now I’ve got another type of list that’s working well: a list of things the artist must do.  At the Portrait Society of America, on their archives page there is a good piece in pdf form called From Rookie to Pro by Michele Rushworth. It’s evidently notes from a lecture, each item a bullet point, and it’s very good advice. It helps me maintain my discipline and determination.  A copy of the list now lives on my refrigerator where I read it every morning and evening.

Year of the portrait

Unfinished self-portrait

Each fourth-year student at the atelier chooses a thesis that they work on in and out of class. My area of focus is portraits. Because one of the things I’d like to be doing is drawing portraits. Ppeople fascinate and  confound me, and compel me to try to understand them. And drawing them helps me do that.

In college a million years ago I studied theatre, which is really the study of humanity, magnified by over-the-top drama, stage makeup, and masks. Theatre, and the people attracted it, can be a risky business. It can be quite painful. So one year I gave up theatre to study horticulture.

I did that because—aside from being obsessed with plants—I found that studying the sciences of botany and soils had a certain kind of safe roundness in which I could wrap myself. There were no lumpy inconsistencies and thorny disputes of the kind that make humanity a hard garment to wear. And so for years I immersed myself in the study of horticulture.

During that time I had a dog.  She was a great dog, but she didn’t really know she was a dog. She’d really never been around many dogs. Then we moved into a house where there were two other dogs. Much to her surprise and delight, my dog discovered her canine heritage. And she loved being a dog. So much that for a few months, she would barely speak to me. She just hung out with her two biggest, bestest doggie buddies.

Like that long ago dog of mine, about a decade ago I suddenly found myself  in a place full of people. It was hard going at first. But slowly I’ve discovered that I am, indeed, a human, and that other humans are fascinating. Maybe I like being human again.

And so  I’ve come back around to studying humans. Don’t get me wrong. I still love the green world, and seek refuge among forests, meadows, and gardens when the human world gets to be too much (and it does, believe me, it does). But I’m learning to deal with the humanity of the world.

And I find that drawing helps me figure people out. That’s a plus. And when I’m drawing a portrait, I can sometimes connect with the person I’m drawing in a very deep, intuitive way. I really like that.

And so, I’ll be drawing a lot of portraits, and studying the where’s, why’s, and who-to-fores of portrait drawing, along with the study of all my other fractured interests. I’ll share what I learn here on this blog.

Into Pergamon with Rob Anderson

Drawing by Rob Anderson

Last Saturday we went to see the show Into Pergamon by Rob Anderson (my teacher at the atelier). The show centers around a collection of drawings he did of the Great Frieze of the Pergamon altar that’s now in Berlin.

This is great stuff! His work is subtle, seemingly delicate at first, the charcoal like feather marks on the paper. But the longer you look at it, the more you see the strength and internal integrity of it. It comes into focus suddenly and forcefully, and simple charcoal and chalk drawings on brown handmade paper come alive with the clash of giants and gods at battle.

In his bio, it says, “He [Rob] did not in a moment of inspiration walk into his studio to spill out these skillful drawings in a fit of artistic passion. It didn’t take him a day to complete these works, nor did it take several days, or even weeks, but months of tedious and arduous work.”

It struck me that the time he took to make these drawings is almost as powerful as the drawings themselves. In our instant-society, where we expect everything to get done in less time than it takes to cook Uncle Ben’s minute rice, this kind of focus and dedication is rare.

And it makes me wonder if the new direction fine art will take will be back towards craftsmanship, back towards thought, and planning, and effort.

There is a movement, to be sure, of artists who want to study realism, but the big guns, the critics and columnists, the editors and galleries, don’t seem to value this, calling it a “populist movement.”

“Sheer draftsmanship,” they sneer.

But draftsmanship coupled with artistic vision…doesn’t that put a drawing or painting squarely back in to the realm of fine art? It becomes something that is valued not just for the thing itself, but the thought, dreams, and desires, and the time that went into the making.

Into Pergamon is at Ohlone College in Fremont until February 6, 2010. Give yourself plenty of time to see it.