Drenched Wine Festival

The Virginia Wine and Craft Festival is held every May in Front Royal, a mountain town about 50 miles west of Washington, DC. I've been to this festival year after year since 1991. I missed the last two, in 2013 and 2014, due to family obligations in Massachusetts but I was determined to make it to the 2015 festival. As I arrived I saw ominous grey clouds moving in but went on wine-tasting as I usually do. In all those years of wine festing it has never rained on my visit. Well, I was wrong this time. In between wine sips the sky opened up with a violent deluge with high winds and thunder and lightning. The exhibitors either folded their awnings and fled or held on frantically to keep them from blowing away. I huddled under an awning which gave little or no protection from the torrents and despite having an umbrella I was soaked. Even so, people were buying and drinking wine in the rain! Many vendors must have taken some losses though. I was able to buy a very wet bottle of Mattaponi Vineyards Chambourcin red which I loaded into my soaked backpack.

Black technical pen ink on sketchbook page, about 4 1/2" x 6", May 17, 2015.

Rust Belt Industrial Patterns 6

Here I am again, back at the abandoned steel mill with Photoshop on my desktop. Or in my hand. I want the Cintiq drawing tablet, which can go anywhere with the quality of a desktop drawing. The iPad doesn't have the drawing power that the Cintiq has. But I don't have $1800 for the mid-range Cintiq either. My Swedish art idol Simon Stalenhag does all his surrealistic scenes on one of these techno-slabs. OK, if someone commissions me to do a digital piece with enough money to afford a Cintiq I would go for it. At the moment I'm working in "traditional" paint, that is, wet acrylic slime.

Brown technical pen ink on sketchbook page, 5" x 4", colored in PhotoRust, May 16, 2015. 

Hawkmistress Frontispiece

I still have lots of black and white vintage art you haven't seen. This is the frontispiece for the DAW Books edition of Marion Zimmer Bradley's HAWKMISTRESS, published in 1982. In those days the title of the book had a cheesy exclamation point added to it. That's my art on the cover. I wonder if anyone remembers this. The frontispiece depicts main character Romilly, a girl who has psychic abilities to communicate with animals, and her hawk, "Preciosa." 

Black ink on illustration board, 6" x 10", summer 1982.

Dreary hospital building

Hospital and clinic buildings, in my experience, are always dreary and devoid of character. Here in the USA the modern ones are built of brick, concrete, and glass, like an office building with no business going on. Well, health care is a business but you want to pretend it's there to heal you. I accompanied my mother for an MRI in this building, which is in Concord, Massachusetts. It was a Saturday and the building was almost completely deserted, as if no one were sick or injured on Saturday. I got lost in the building looking for the cafe that was supposed to be there. After finding the eatery, which was surprisingly open and staffed, I got lost on the way back. I did this drawing while waiting for the wheelchair wagon that would take us back to the rehab facility where Mother was lodged. Mother has had 5 hospital stays in 2 years, due to falls and broken bones, gastric problems, and heart problems. This is "par for the course," as the saying goes, for upper-middle-class elder care in the USA. 

Black technical pen ink on sketchbook page, about 5" x 7", April 11, 2015. The dreariness of the building was alleviated by the unintentional rudeness of the patron's name, "John Cuming."

Industrial Patterns 5

This complexity of iron I-beams and other metalwork is from an early 20th century German steel mill, long since de-commissioned and designated a "historic site." The iron framework supported a monorail train which brought raw materials to the blast furnaces. I would have loved to see this whole complex in action, especially by night when the furnaces would glow from within like volcanic craters.

Brown technical pen ink on sketchbook page, 8" x 3", May 13, 2015. Darker areas added in Photoshop. 

Industrial Patterns 4

I've been so distracted and drained by the family needs these days that I have not managed to produce drawings or doodles on the pages of my sketchbook. Right now my dwelling is strewn about with things that I brought back from my stay in Massachusetts and dropped on the floor. What kind of things, as my mother would say. She has a way of "interrogating" me for specific details on any generalizing statement I make. Well, there's dirty clothes, books, reel to reel tapes, hotel swag such as coffee packets, soaps, shampoo and conditioner bottles. There are palette trays, overnight and tote bags, magazines, toys, shoes and boots, and piles of collected mail and bills. 

Nevertheless I insist that art be made in this mess and so I am processing all this stuff bit by bit, while resuming working on the projects that were interrupted for a month and more for the parent care mission. And the parent care mission is not by any means done. I have to explain to an increasingly senile mother that she needs a live-in caretaker lest she forget to take her pills or have a fall or forget to eat. Just because thousands, perhaps millions of offspring all over the developed world face these challenges taking care of aging parents, does not mean that my own attempts are any less difficult. 

So I'm back to the studio for the moment, and I'm filling in my sketchbook with illustrations. I left places on the pages to put a drawing while I added my journal entries. The subject of the illustrations has nothing to do with what is going on in my journal, so I can put anything there. The 2015 theme is "Industrial Patterns," so here's another one.

Brown tech pen ink on sketchbook page, about 4" x 4", May 11, 2015. Blue color added in Photoshop.

Pill Bug War Wagon

On the battlefields of the far future the war materiel will be biomorphic. This armored personnel carrier is based on a segmented "pill bug" with caterpillar legs. The wagon can move over rough terrain that would give wheeled vehicles trouble. In the near air space above are anti-gravity drone spheres and a small three-vaned attack aircraft. No one in these vehicles knows what the war is about but they keep fighting nevertheless.

It'll take some time for me to rev up the By-Product again so apologies for missing a day or two. I need to draw up some more sketches and put them in the image queue for quality.

Original drawing in brown tech pen ink on sketchbook page, 3" x 3", April 25, 2015.