Road Trip

I just got back from a road trip for combined personal and business matters.  I enjoy being on the road, but it's also good to be home again.

Janis and I went up to northern Baltimore first to visit family.  I have a 97-year-old aunt up there, along with a cousin, her son, and his family.  We hadn't all been together in quite a few years, so it was good to see everybody again.

The big reason we went at this time was my aunt.  She's still in good physical condition and living in an assisted living facility.  She gets around really well with a walker, which she thinks she doesn't need.  She's definitely not bed-ridden.  And she can carry on a conversation with you all day long.  It may not always be fact-based, but she's a full participant.  For example, she told us about how the man in the apartment below hers didn't like it when she walked around in her room.  The problem is that she lives in a one-story building.  But if you just go with the flow, she's right there with you.  Kinda/sorta.  We took her out to lunch one day and dinner another and she had a great time. 

Catching up with the cousin and other family members was really good, too.  Spent lots of time talking, getting to know the two small kids, checking out modifications to the house, that sort of thing.  Janis and my cousin went to Nordstrom's one day, a treat for J since there aren't any within a couple hundred miles of home.

I went over to the Baltimore Museum of Art one day to get my art fix.  Spent all my time looking at their collection of paintings from old masters like Titian, Raphael, Rembrandt, and van Dyck, to Matisse and Picasso.  There's a painting by Rembrandt of his son that I really enjoyed.  It was in a room full of formal portraits that were all perfectly finished, so perfectly that there wasn't a whole lot of life in them.  Rembrandt's portrait of his son was very casual.  He was sitting in an awkward position with his head tilted and a slight smile on his face.  You could see where Rembrandt tried three different positions for his thumb, but never really resolved it.  As I was looking at the face, something was a bit off.  When heads are tilted, artists have a natural inclination to try to straighten things out.  I certainly do.  So when looking at a tilted head, we'll draw the head at an angle, but the eyes will be level with the canvas or paper.  Same the nose, only over a little bit.  The mouth, too: level with the canvas/paper, not with the tilt of the head.  I do it all the time and it drives me nuts when I realize what I'm doing.  So I'm looking at Rembrandt's painting, and see that he painted the nose straight up and down, not tilted like the head.  What a revelation: the greatest portrait painter of all time can screw up just like I do!  And here's the painting to show what I'm talking about.  Click on the image to see it larger.

At the end of our visit, Janis flew back to Asheville and I headed south.  I spent the night with old friends in Annapolis.  The next day, I drove down to Richmond, Virginia, to get ready to do a painting at a wedding.  That afternoon, I visited the Gaines Mill Battlefield Park.  One of my great-great-grandfathers fought there in the Civil War and I was able to find the area in which his unit operated.  He was a brave (and lucky) man to have gotten through that battle unscathed.  On Saturday morning, I visited the Petersburg National Battlefield.  A different great-great-grandfather participated in the defense of the city during the Union siege.  Nobody has a very clear understanding of where his unit was stationed, since they moved around a good bit, so I wasn't able to say "he fought here".  But I did get a much better understanding of what he endured.  It was hell.

The wedding went really well.  The bride was SUPER excited about having me create her wedding painting.  I had at least a dozen people tell me variations of "she told me she's getting married and she's having a wedding painter at the reception!"  Wow, no pressure there, huh?  But all went well.

So I'm back home and getting back in the swing of things.  Got the Alfa out of the garage again and it was happy.  Got the wedding painting going in the studio.  Got a lot of catch-up paperwork to do.  Life is good!

Revisions

During my recent effort to inventory my artworks, I rediscovered a bunch of old charcoal drawings.  They had been stacked up years ago and left to get moved, smudged, and eventually ruined.  Some of them, I immediately tore up and threw away.  But some others weren't too bad.  I wondered if they could be reworked with pastel into "keepers".  So I gave it a shot.

And learned something interesting.  My way of working in charcoal and pastel lately has been to do a rough sketch in charcoal and then do most of the development with pastel.  It's an impatient method that assumes the black-and-white structure of the drawing is solid.  If it is, great.  If not, then making necessary changes is very difficult.  A lot of my works have gone into the trash because the architecture of the drawing and the accuracy of the likenesses weren't strong.  Adding color on top of that just gilded a pig.

By contrast, these old figure drawings were already fully-formed.  They're all done with vine charcoal with white highlights on toned Canson paper.  Vine charcoal is very easy to work with: it lays down a gray line or area and is very easy to erase and correct.  I had already worked out the composition, structure, and likenesses with all these drawings and they were good enough at one time for me to keep them.  So all they needed was some pastel to bring out the color.

Almost all of them came out well.  One was totally unsuccessful and is now in the trash can, but four look pretty good.  Here they are:

I took the lessons learned from this approach and applied them at our weekly life session last night.  Rather than dive into the pastel at an early stage, I worked for most of the session on the charcoal drawing, then only used the pastel during the last 45 minutes or so.  It looked pretty good when I left the studio last night.  Now I need to see it with fresh eyes before deciding whether it's a keeper or not.