Fresh Picks

This was done in my nearby Giant supermarket where I was sitting in a little bank office. Markets are great for drawings but I don't have anywhere to put my sketchbook down on so I can make a drawing. The bank office had a desk. I've seen portable desks offered to artists, you can use them as a kind of cantilever for your sketchbook but I've never tried one. Someone of a "certain age" with European experience might remember "cigarette girls" at theaters or restaurants, who bore a little platform braced on their midriff and supported by straps over their shoulders. Cigarette samples were on the desk, and she would offer you one, saying, "Have you tried Rothmans?" Now with more civilized or at least cautious attitudes these girls have disappeared. Or are they still around? Not in the supermarket. I suppose if I really wanted to draw in the bread or vegetable department I could sneak a small board in there and balance it on a shopping cart handle. But I'm just not that desperate to draw groceries. The Fresh Pick here was seedless red grapes, whose oval packages you see in the display, $2.49 a pound.

Black ink on sketchbook page, 5" x 5", September 3, 2015.

Plant Stand 2003

This intriguing roomscape, almost an industrial pattern, is made up of a disassembled plastic plant stand, metal bars of another plant stand, and folded up blankets. The central squarish shape, with its phallic tower, is the base of the white plastic stand. Other plant pots are hanging from the metal square. I had that plant stand for years, until it got too mildewed to use any more. The metal stand and the top two blankets, the light one and the black one, are still in my collection, but the bottom one was donated. Shortly after I did this study, I took the job at Trader Joe's which lasted 11 years. Sometimes I wonder how things would have been had I not taken that job. I don't feel like talking about it just now.

Black tech pen ink on sketchbook page, 6" x 5", September 4, 2003.

Industrial Patterns 9 Rand

I'm filling in the empty spots in my journal, using the double-entry date system. Most of my pattern elements come from the heroic photography of Bernd and Hilla Becher, a German couple who recorded steel mills, mines, and other industrial sites all over Europe and North America. I am enthralled by the three-dimensional complexity of these structures, which have by now almost disappeared, at least in the West. There are hardly any "traditional" active steel mills left in the USA. I so wish that I could see one in action. I have distant memories of a visit to Youngstown, Ohio in 1973 where I saw the last of their steel mills before they all closed and disappeared.

I have the same rapturous feeling about heavy industry that the notorious Ayn Rand expressed in her Biblical testament, "Atlas Shrugged." In her text she rants lyrically about this feeling in a visual set-piece I would love to illustrate in a moderne Art Deco style:

"...He was looking at the city past the taut, slender figure of a woman whose head was lifted eagerly...the sight was flowing into a feeling then words for which were: THIS is the world and the core of it, this is what made the city - they go together, the angular shapes of the buildings and the angular lines of a face stripped of everything but purpose - the rising steps of steel and the steps of a being intent on his goal - this is what they had been, all the men who had lived to invent the lights, the steel, the furnaces, the motors - they were the world, they, not the men who crouched in dark corners, half-begging, half-threatening...."

Rand writes the same way about railroads, and I share this rail rapture. Someday I will get the chance - or, like an Ayn Rand Hero, create the chance, for me to draw trains and rail yards and elevated stations and the industrial landscapes which surround them.

Brown tech pen ink on sketchbook page, September 1, 2015. This tiny picture is only 4 1/2" x 2 1/2".

Ox-Eye Vineyards Tasting Room

Staunton, Virginia is an old industrial and commercial town which is being turned into a tourist attraction with hotels, restaurants, shops, and wine-related places, such as the "Ox-Eye Vineyards" tasting room. (An "Ox-Eye" is a familiar white-petaled daisy flower with a  yellow center, which grows at the vineyards.) This neat place was once a scale house where loads of coal were weighed near the railroad tracks. The oddly shaped little brick building, with its archway underneath, was unused for many years but in the last few years it has been re-created as a wine tasting room. I visited on a beautiful day and sipped their wine while sitting and drawing in the archway shadow. The brickwork of the old industrial building has been painted yellow. There is room for another wine deck at the other end of the archway space. The other drawing depicts the Klotz building across the street, which was originally founded by the brothers Klotz, itinerant Jewish businessmen who settled in Staunton. By the way, though it looks like it should be pronounced "Stawnton," the town's name is said as "Stanton."

Brown tech pen ink on sketchbook page with colored pencil and some Photoshoppage, 8" x 11", August 22, 2015. Click on image for larger view.

Trivial Stuff Only Artists Worry About

I keep an illustrated journal and have for the past 47 years. I am not making that up. I started it in 1968 when I was in high school and have kept it ever since. Most of my journals have illustrations, doodles, and scribbles in them. Once I became a professional artist though, these journals got "organized" and I put sketches in them that might be preliminary drawings for larger work. Or they were "reality" drawings depicting things in my world like glassware, stacks of books, flowers, buildings, or coffee machines. The "reality" drawings had to correspond to the journal entry near it on the page. Lots of famous artists like Van Gogh or Turner used to do this, so if it was good enough for them it was certainly good enough for me.

But what happens when there's too much reality and not enough journal? Or the other way, too much journal and not enough reality? I've had that problem lately with my 2015 journal. I write in it and put my daily entry in (usually only a couple of paragraphs), and then I either forget or run out of stuff to draw in it. I had a "theme" for my journal in 2015 that it should have my industrial patterns and other complex small drawings done in brown technical pen. The winery and architectural and on-site stuff was done elsewhere. So I reserved space for the mini drawings in my journal notebook. And I didn't draw'em. There are holes in my closely written pages where these drawings are supposed to go. Grumble! I'd better do more journal drawings! But they don't correspond to any reality I was writing about. What to do? I must RE-Date these drawings so I will know when I drew them. Thus this little piece, drawn on August 31, appears over the written entry for July 18. That's reality for you, temporal and artistic dislocation in the service of an artist's vanity. 

Steel mill structure looks like a castle! "Industrial Patterns 11" is brown tech pen ink on sketchbook page, about 3.5" x 3.5", August 31, 2015.

Draw Model 1975

I thought I didn't have much formal art training but after looking back in dozens of old sketchbooks I guess I have. I did lots and lots of life drawing from models. Many of these are in pencil and the paper has faded and yellowed so this image is as good as I can get from the archives. It was a perspective challenge too since the model is sticking her hand out toward me and I see her head first. I think this is a nice drawing for student work and I wonder if I could do so well nowadays. 

Pencil on sketchbook page, about 5" x 6", 1975. 

This 1975 sketchbook also contains a copy of a letter dated April 29, 1975, by Marver Bernstein, then-president of Brandeis University, requesting that students stop occupying Pearlman Hall in a protest about, uh, something about a "transitional year program" for "minorities." As I remember, every year in springtime students would get all outraged about something, and they would do political action which involved taking over an administration building and partying a lot. Pearlman Hall was the sociology department and they would always support the student cause.

Barren Ridge

I can't resist these Blue Ridge vistas. Look at the brilliant blue of those distant hills. I could sit on this deck for hours watching clouds go by. And look at that big meadow. Not a gas station or McDonalds to be seen! Have a sip of Barren Ridge wine. Of course the place is anything but barren, there are plenty of grapevines and they are loaded with grapes right now. Harvest begins in a week or two. I enjoyed their "Red Barren" blend. This spot here is one of the finest views I've seen from any winery in Virginia. 

Brown ink and colored pencil on sketchbook page, with some wicked Photoshop enhancements, 8" x 11", August 21, 2015. Click for a larger version of this jaw-dropping view. You'll never believe what wine can do for....