Travel and Time Travel – Back from Havana
So we’re back from a few weeks of drawing in Havana. This was our second trip. The city remains a fascinating portrait of dystopia. It’s exuberant, ornate, ultimately over-reaching glory, now in slow motion collapse.
Once home to imperialists, pirates, gangsters, and revolutionaries – and the people they ruled, robbed and re-educated. Testament that nothing lasts forever. It’s hard not to become philosophical wandering through a city of once-opulent structures, crumbling before your eyes.
People are clearly working to turn things around, but everywhere you look is erosion and faded glory. I’m glad we went back so quickly (it’s only been a year). You can see changes everywhere. Eventually all the decay might be cleaned up – but what we see in a few years might only be a faint hearted replacement, sanitized for the tourists.
I’ve brought back a fat stack of sketches from the streets. I’m very excited about the work ahead. We have great plans for the paintings I’m hoping will come from the location drawings. Though I normally show work as fast as I make it – this time I’m going to keep it under my hat for a few months. I’ll be working on scaling up the drawings, and executing some studio work based on the research.
Not to worry though. It’s turning spring here in Montreal – so I’ll be posting some work from the home-turf soon!
Just to tease for the upcoming paintings, here’s a sketch I did *before* I left. Just a warm-up drawing, getting me in the mood for the location I enjoyed the most – the Necropolis Cristobal Colon. We did indeed go back there, and found a few more pleasantly Gothic views for you. But more on that later :)
Mount Royal Cemetary
Today was a rare winter treat. Cold, but brilliantly clear. Not something we get that often. We’ve just had a fresh 20 centimeter snowfall, along with some freezing rain. That combination creates a beautiful effect, snow clinging to the windward side of trees, huge icicles everywhere, windowsills and roof lines softened with stiff snowy blankets.
It seemed like a perfect day to visit the Mount Royal Cemetery.
I’m not a huge fan of winter, but I have to admit, it can show you an unmatched beauty. There were photographers and hikers on snowshoes passing by all day, enjoying the amazing transformation. This was about a 90 min sketch, done from the car. I’m glad my friend Shari introduced me to Urban Canadian Car Painting. I might not be so happy with the drawing, had I tried it ‘en plein air’.
Nuit Blanche 2012 Draw till you Drop at CCA
Hey – Just to let you know – I’ll be representing Urban Sketchers, drawing live at the Canadian Center for Architecture’s Nuit Blanche Drink n’ Draw party – 7 PM 25Feb to 2 AM 26Feb.
Come down and join guest artists from En Masse and Drink n’ Draw Montreal – we want everyone’s help with drawing a huge collaborative mural.
There’s a bunch of other stuff going on: Live Tattoo artists – Skin Jacking, DJ K-Lord (Sons of Warsaw, WDWD) and Goose Hut, and tours of the exhibits in the galleries.
Tomb Raiding!
This weekend I made a daring raid on a trove of Mayan artifacts. I thought I was going to get away with it – but suddenly, a guard spotted me. I made a run for it, evading dogs and searchlights, slipping under the wire only seconds ahead of my pursuers. I managed to lose them in the dense jungle on Yonge Street.
These are the only sketches I could smuggle out of the tomb.
[10×14″, ballpoint and brushpen sketch, water colored after the fact]
What actualy happened is, I learned the hard way that Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum does not allow drawing in traveling exhibits.
At least not without pre-arranged permission. Which cannot be arranged on a weekend. They don’t have a problem with you sketching in the permanent collection – but since they don’t own the work in the temporary shows they don’t allow photography, and apparently, no sketching either. So, let that be a lesson – just because they say sketching is allowed when you buy your ticket – they may not mean in all areas of the museum. Next time I’m going to make an Urban Sketchers Press Card to tuck into my fedora.
Sketching King Edward from the Hudson’s Bay
The Hudson’s Bay is a genuine bit of Canadiana. It’s just a department store now, but it goes all the way back to the founding of the nation. People came here in the 1600’s for fur hats and canoes. And you can still buy them at any Bay store. Our downtown Bay has a window overlooking Phillips Square. A small park featuring a statue of King Edward. By the time Edward Prince of Wales visited Montreal, the Grovernor and Company, Adventurers of England, Hudson’s Bay Trading Company had been making fur hats for 200 years. Well on their way to becoming our favorite national retail chain.
The figures around the base of the statue represent the four founding nations of Quebec (French, Scots, Irish, and English), and includes a allegorical figure of Peace holding aloft olive branch. She also has a sword hidden in the folds of her robe – because, you know, sometimes those founding nations didn’t quite get along.
Surviving the winter, cannibalizing my old sketchbooks :)
I feel the need to assert my status as ‘still alive’. It’s been so long since last posting, that you might reasonably wonder if that’s the case. The truth is, I’ve managed to land a few weeks of freelance work and am now neck deep in deadlines! Nothing has changed in games – still the same crazy schedules :_
But, overall that’s a good thing I suppose. It’s slowing me down right now, but in March I have a week long drawing trip to Havana planned. A suitable reward for being chained to my computer for a bit. It’s too cold to draw outside anyway.
However! cold dark winters are a good time to go back into the sketchbooks. Here’s a couple more experiments with digital watercolors. I’ve had these two old favorites pulled out for a while now. Been wanting to do something with them for ages. The drawings were done at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco a few years back. This was a traveling show, so you won’t find these suits of armor there now, but the permanent collection is well worth a drawing trip on its own.
These are (as with the previous post), scanned watercolor sketches layered under the original black line art, and contrast tweaked in photoshop. In this case I’ve done a tiny bit of opaque sketching on top. Basically what I would have done with prismacolors in the old days. I really like this effect. As much as I love painting – I also love the pen and brush – those rich blacks and squiggly lines! So why not fuse them together?
By the way, 8×10″ prints of these are available in the sketchbook pages section on my Etsy Shop. It would be wonderful if you stopped by and maybe found something you’d like to own. It would help out with our travel expenses for the upcoming sketching trips :)
It’s not all chocolate cake
So, new years eve, no particular plans – just having a good time doing nothing. I decided I wanted to go out and find an awesome dessert. To eat and to sketch. To sketch first that is.
BUT. It was supremely cold, and many places were closed, and the will to make this happen got fainter the further from home. Ultimately we went to a humble cafe on the corner of St. Denis and Mount Royal. Chosen, not for the superlative chocolate cake, but for the corner location and the big windows. The weird color is my rendition of sodium vapor light. Not quite on target – but hey, it’s festive :)
Happy New Year!
Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue
The other day my friend Shari took me on a sketching tour of St. Anne de Bellevue. It’s a scenic town on the western tip of the island. I had no idea there were places like this around Montreal. I’m from the prairies, so what do I know?
Shari introduced me to painting from the car. This is a good solution for the cold Canadian weather. And it’s the urban sketchers equivalent of a detective on stake out! Street sketching is already somewhat like spying. Might as well get into the role.
Sainte-Anne felt a lot like a New England fishing village. Lots of narrow curving streets, small shops and eateries and the water always close by. I’m sure I could find some boats around here if I poke around.
Up in the back streets you’ll find a few of these interesting pre-war houses. Plenty of big brick mansions not too far away – but I was struck by this cute green and yellow ‘dollhouse’. I’ve been seeing a lot of talk about people returning to small homes like this. They’re efficient to construct, and don’t grab more space than a person really needs.
Old Favorites Brought Back to Light
I’ve been experimenting with a “new technique”. Well, a slight variation anyway. These might not look that new at first glance :) Actually they’re quite old! Some of my favorites from San Francisco. So these must be at least three year old drawings. What I’m playing around with here is a trick to allow me add watercolor to my old sketchbook pages.
A lot of my early on-location drawings were ballpoint pen and brush marker on ‘cover stock’. Sort of one step above photocopy paper. I really like this combination. Black and white line is great for a rapid sketch, and the smooth paper is very nice for drawing. Pens just zip along the surface. For a few years I was carrying a stack of this stuff everywhere.
But when I get a pen drawing I really like – I regret not being able to add much color. You can paint on cover stock if you’re careful – but it won’t take much water before it buckles.
There was a time I might have been tempted to color sketches digitally. That can have a nice effect – but it’s not what I’m looking for these days.
What I’ve done here is print a ghosted image of the original sketch on a 140lb watercolor paper (using my new Epson 4900 printer’s manual feed). Then I tape it down and watercolor over the faint line drawing, as if I was painting a pencil drawing. I scan that back in, and composite the original black line drawing on top of the new color image. (Using a multiply layer in photoshop). I can also experiment with tinting the line drawing – I used a bit of a purple line on these. And it’s possible to significantly enlarge your drawing while doing this – if you scan it at 1200 dpi for example.
I’m going to try a bit more of this to see what else I can come up with.
Return to the Redpath
One of the things that I like the most about art blogging is the network of like-minded artists that you collect. All the fellow sketcher’s blogs out there are tremendous motivation for me. The constant stream of new art keeps me engaged – always seeing new ways to go at things, maybe pick up some tips and tricks.
I recently met Montreal artist/designer/educator Shari Blaukopf through her sketch blog at http://shariblaukopf.com/ where she’s taken on the Sisyphean task of a *daily* sketchblog. I consider myself obsessed with art – but I’m leery of committing to a daily. That’s quite a challenge! Check out her deceptively light sketches. They look simple at first – but they’re so casually perfect, you can tell she’s got the designer’s eye for composition, as well as the painter’s touch for mark making.
We decided to hit McGill’s Redpath Museum for an afternoon of sketching. Sketch artists socializing is quite a funny thing. We get together for the purpose of ignoring each other for 20 minutes at a time. Whatever works I guess. Even anti-social art types like to hang out :) It’s always neat to see the other person’s version of a place.
The Redpath is a kind of museum they just don’t make any more. The Victorian idea of the Cabinet of Curiosity inflated to a whole building. There’s everything from Japanese armor to Dinosaur skeletons crammed into one large room. My favorite thing is the taxidermy animals. This is essentially a creepy thing – having a wolf just sitting there in your living room. At least these ones are fairly sedate – no dramatic recreations of predators pouncing on prey. Worse luck! I found myself enjoying the way this poor wolf was held back by a little red rope, eternally watching the caribou go by.
When I’m rich and famous I’m going to fill the house with taxidermy animals. Don’t tell Laurel – we’ll just add a few at a time. Maybe she won’t notice.
Citizen Sketcher 