What Birds Tell Me - 2024 04 08

 

Watercolour paper, acrylic ink

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sleeping Rescue - 2025 08 26

Image
  Sleeping Rescue - pencil, pen and ink, 8 1/2 x 11 on paper Eddy was asleep on the bed. Gripped by a moment of optimism and energy, I made a combined pencil drawing of blind contour and observed contour lines. My perception of proportion is almost dyslexic, so I need to work back and forth across the subject to pull in and out of the shapes to get something approximate of my observed subject. The pencil drawing sat for a few days while I waited to figure out what to do next. Yesterday I decided to try something with ink. I mixed in equal measure, black and raw umber ink. In five shot glasses I spooned one tablespoon of water for each. The first shot glass received one drop each of black and raw umber. The second shot glass received two drops, the third, three drops, to the fifth shot glass, which received five drops each of black and raw umber ink. To look at the row of shot glasses, I could not see the difference in the intensity of the colour in each glass. They all looked the s...
Read more

Self Portrait - 2025 08 19

Image
  Self portrait - pen and ink, pencil crayon, crayon on paper - 9" x 12" - blind contour - 2014 06 22 Over decades I have practiced self portraiture as a process to make meaning and to practice and explore drawing styles and technique. Blind contour has fascinated me from the beginning. First, it astounds me how accurately the contour lines convey a likeness. Second, the distortions of lines flying off in space add a psychological dimension to the portrait - funny, curious, revealing of something not easily articulated in any other way. During the 2014 series, I was determined to treat the drawing with serious shading and tone, no matter what the drawing from the blind contour exercise looked like.  The process of making the blind contour is an exercise of close looking at my own face, looking deeply into my own eyes, an objective study of my hair, my nose, my mouth and my chin. It is a process of diving into the indoctrination of a lifetime of dictates to be 'feminine...
Read more

2025 12 28 - Re-drawing

Image
  Eddy - graphite, pencil crayon, acrylic ink wash on paper - 9" x 12" Finally I have been able to re-activate my drawing practice. We adopted Eddy at the end of June, just in time for my Mom's Celebration of Life on June 30. The combination of these two events distracted me from my own creative pursuits over the summer. Then, in the fall, I had household projects to take care of, causing further delay for getting to my drawings.  Once enough time had gone by, I lost my focus on what I might draw, even if I were to sit down to make a try.  Things have settled down now enough that I can conceive of making a drawing and I have started up a practice of putting something on paper everyday. This means that the day a drawing is started, I put the date on the page. Thereafter, as I add layers of graphite, pencil crayons and acrylic ink washes, the drawing evolves with each additional layer. The start date remains constant. The end date is unknown. A key question was a daily obst...
Read more