Golden Vineyard Light

Don and Tracy Kirkman own a vineyard in Lovettsville, in beautiful Loudoun County, Virginia. They don't make wine with their grapes, they sell the fruit to wineries. I met this family at a winery and when they saw that I was a vineyard artist they invited me to visit their home. This is the scene looking over the lawn to the vines on their trellises. At the left is a metal whirligig and a bank of autumn-blooming sedum flowers. Tracy works as a business manager for the Virginia Vineyards Association. She took me on a tour of the estate which has multiple gardens, barns, and the vineyard, as well as a pasture with sheep. There is a group of wandering chickens and guinea hens. Right now the vineyard is full of fruit and harvesting begins next week.

At this time of year the evening sunlight turns everything in the near landscape to golden green while the distant hills are still blue. It is a glorious colorfest and I tried to capture it with my colored pencils, sitting on their deck. There are plenty more places to draw and seasons to draw in. Tracy says the place is just as beautiful in the winter and perhaps I'll visit when the gold and green are gone.

Colored pencils on sketchbook page and some re-working in Photoshop, 10" x 8", September 6, 2015.

Baby Grapevine

I do portraits on commission. I use a photograph and carefully trace it on my light box, then re-create it using fade-proof colored pencil. This grape baby is the daughter of a winery family. I debated whether to show it here and decided that I could as long as I mentioned no names or locations. She is holding a soft toy in the form (I think) of a stylized bee. She will grow as fast as a grapevine and this picture will commemorate vintage 2015.

Colored pencils on illustration board, 9 1/2" x 11 1/2", August 2015.

Leafy Lane 2003

Here are two views of the same marker sketch. This was done in water-based markers whose dyes fade even when not exposed to light. The one at the top is an older scan and the one at the bottom was done just now. The older one is more like the actual drawing but the newer one is clearer and looks better in my opinion. Markers are difficult to scan anyway. I had to add sky color in Photoshop to restore the newer picture. This is one of the most elaborate on-site marker drawings I've ever done and I've waited seven bloggin' years to post it. Maybe I waited too long with the fading markers. 

Ink and markers on sketchbook page, 9" x 6", August 5, 2003.

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.