Wet Duck

Mallard and drizzle
04-30-14
conté pencil

Happy May Day!

What could be happier than a duck in the rain?

Hello Spring!

Small is Good

A small sketchbook is good in cold weather: the drawings take less time.

I hope you are feeling well and finding ways to enjoy winter. Meilleurs vœux!

White noise

Low water and a heron at the base of the dam
conté pencil 8/8/11

Yesterday morning I sat above the dam on the opposite side near the fish ladder. The sound of the water pouring over the dam canceled out most of the other sounds. The high-pitched bird songs got through but the growls of the commuters and trucks were subsumed in the white noise. I often wonder what the heron's experience is like fishing up close to the torrent. Does the white noise help it focus on the fleeting fish as they dart and dance before him?

Looking downstream toward the bridge. There was so much happening with the light and reflections! I fail every time to draw it.

Finished/Unfinished

A quick, partially finished sketch of the dam this morning
(6 April, 2011)

I found my blue crayon. It was in the pocket of some pants that I hadn't worn in a while. I missed it (!) and wanted to try it out again. Yeah, I missed a crayon. Life is weird; just let your imagination go wild!

Spring is definitely here --in a coy way to be sure. In a month or two, these drawings will have come full circle and I might be drawing this damn dam less frequently.  I will miss the herons and the families of ducks. I'll also miss the white noise of the water spilling over the dam and the coffee at the coffee shop.
Next summer (July 2012)  I have a small show at a nearby nature sanctuary and I plan to devote the year before it to work done in that place. So, if you can stand it, I'll be posting work from that upcoming series here as well. See? win-win! Here are some more recent renderings of this lovely place as it makes the transition from winter to spring.

another quickie done in conté pencil (30 March, 2011)

I like this one. It was done on one of the first slightly warmer days of the demi-saison. I curled up in some dry leaves, my back against a stone wall and just relaxed… and drew.
Colored pencil (18 March 2011)

a rare action shot

There's this Black Walnut tree here. Its lower branches are a magnet for fishermen's hooks and bobbers. By the end of the summer it looks like a Christmas Tree!
(25 March 2011, litho crayon)

In Wildness…

The Italianate Garden at Elm Bank

Thoreau's statement "In wildness is the preservation of the world" is frequently mis-appropriated as a call for preservation of pristine areas of forest and mountainous Nature. Thoreau, in some ways I believe, had little interest in preserving Nature for Nature's sake. What he was passionately interested in was preserving that part of humanity that wants to jump fences, tangled hair flowing with dirt under its fingernails. His call for "wildness" is a plea for the original, the uncouth, the very essence of what it means to be a human and to be a living human at that.



And so with this homely preamble I present you with a sketch of a formal garden in the rain. The people who tend it are just hanging on and it's liable to disappear or go feral in the next business cycle as funding dries up. You never know. Then maybe the fountain will fill with frogs and the hedges will grow out and owls may roost in them.



That is how this artist's life shall be: an unartful dialogue between domesticity and unpredictable behavior. In between all my posts here about ducks and dams and the sublime beauty of Nature have been ridiculous doodles of alligators, foxes, men in pointed hats and imaginary landscapes. One feeds the other. And so it goes: winter is approaching and things will take a turn to the imaginary in Sketchbookland (although I was thinking of getting some fingerless gloves to prolong my outdoors sketching a bit longer).

apotheosis

birds and flying bicycles