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Category: sketching

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Artistic license

The Veteran in a New Field, 1865, Winslow Homer
I’m preparing a drawing of a wheat field with hail damage. I started by considering the greatest wheat field painting I know. Winslow Homer’s The Veteran in a New Field is surely one of the iconic paintings of American history.
Homer painted this in the summer of 1865, immediately following the end of the Civil War and  President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. We understand the farmer to be a Union veteran by his jacket and canteen at the lower right. Holding his scythe, he is at once the Grim Reaper and the man returned to civilian life. He grieves, and yet he has returned to life. There has been no greater work ever painted on the wages of war.
My sketch for a wheat field with hail damage. Homer’s painting tells us me that it doesn’t need to be complicated; in fact, I’m not sure a painting of a wheat field can be complicated.
You learn something every time you look at a painting. Surely no wheat has ever reached the height of that in this painting. Even Timothy-grass, the tallest component of hay, seldom reaches these heights in the Northeast, but the golden color of the stalks tells us this is no hay-field.
Another favorite field painting: Jules Bastien-LePage’s Haymaking (Les Foins), 1877. The look of blank exhaustion in their faces is recognizable to anyone who has worked hours under a hot summer sun.
And I was just worrying because in my next sketch I’m pointing something that faces east decidedly to the north. Well, if Homer can get away with wheat that tall, perhaps I can reconfigure the Maine coastline.
Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Third time’s a charm

My sketch for painting of lye tailings in Rockport, ME.
After attempting this twice and failing dismally both times, I decided to back off and look at a painting that’s currently on the easel of my friend Brad Marshall. This unfinished painting  uses a tremendous diagonal to set the stage for a scene of Lake Maggiore in the Italian Alps.
Why Brad’s painting? It’s excellent, first off. But I was just looking at it, and it was on my mind. 
My first step was an art-student approach—I printed a copy of Brad’s painting-in-progress and sketched a fair copy of  it so I could understand why my diagonal kept bisecting my canvas. That made my problem clear: the water needed to be rendered as a midtone, not a dark (no matter that Goose River is peaty and brown), and the whole shebang needed better foundation garments. In other words, it was sagging too low in the picture.

The next challenge is to make this accumulation of rusting barrel hoops, lye tailings, and new growth into something beautiful. Well, if it fails, it fails.
Also, I threw my graphite sticks across the room and went back to my #2 mechanical pencil. My prior sketches were too high-contrast to be workable. Sometimes you can get just too sophisticated for your own good.
Easy peasy from there. But the sad reality is, I’m only good for two hours of work a day, maximum, right now. Very frustrating for the Energizer Bunny, but this too shall pass.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Even failures are not a waste of time

Can’t quite cope with that diagonal bisecting the picture, but I’ll try again.
When I do a drawing like this, I try to remind myself that even failures are not a waste of time, because one needs to pass through the problem to arrive at the solution.
How I managed to convert the lovely diagonal arrow in my sketch into the overwhelming bisecting diagonal in my drawing, I don’t know. But this is the most difficult of the sketches on my list, and I will repeat it tomorrow and wrestle it into submission.
It worked so much better in the sketch.
Midcoast Maine is full of limestone deposits, probably laid down as seashells. When limestone is burned, the carbon-dioxide burns off and quicklime is left. This is an enormously useful material, used to make plaster, paper, mortar, concrete, fertilizer, leather, glue, paint, and glass.
By 1828, there were 60 lime kilns in Midcoast Maine. By the Civil War, the region was producing more than a million casks of lime a year. It helped that Midcoast Maine is heavily forested, fueling the kilns and building the casks used to move the lime to market.
Quicklime had one big problem for the age of wooden ships: if it gets wet it catches on fire.
The master needed a keen sense of smell. The odor of lime being slaked by water was an ominous danger signal… Every crack and crevice through which air might get into the hold and the doors, ports, and smokestack were quickly sealed with plaster made from the lime. Then the craft was headed for the nearest harbor and anchored some distance from the shore and away from other vessels. For at any time she might burst into flames. The schooner was stripped of all movables and the captain and crew sat down to await developments. Sometimes three months would go by before their patience was rewarded and the vessel saved. If, however, the fire could not be smothered, the vessel was towed to some secluded place and scuttled.(W.H. Rowe, The Maritime History of Maine)

Lime tailings on the Goose River at Rockport, ME
A devastating fire in 1907 put the final spoke in Rockport’s lime industry, but the ruined lime kilns are still there. More than a hundred years later, great piles of lime tailings are still visible along the banks of the Goose River. Nature slowly attempts to cover this wound, but it is a slow process.
Uninterested as I was in wading across the Goose River or trespassing on private property, I was unable to photograph the lime tailings at an easy angle for drawing. But I think adjusting that diagonal will suffice to fix compositional problem, and the painting will work just fine.


Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Something sketchy

Sketch for painting, 9X12, #2 pencil on vellum.
Having assembled my reference photos for my upcoming project, it is time to do something with them. I am still only good for about three hours of work a day, but I mean to take advantage of those hours. 
The apple tree was an icon in our neighborhood, a gnarled old thing that produced bushels of delicious fruit. Years ago, the homeowner told me I could pick any apples I wanted. He is gone now, and one frigid day earlier this month we awoke to the whine of chainsaws. The first casualty was this tree, whose grace would not be apparent to someone looking for conventional suburban plantings of juniper and euonymus planted in unyielding 3-5-7 formations.
I took a single photo for my own sentimental reasons, never intended to paint it. However, my husband pointed out that it dovetailed with my current project. I had cropped my snapshot, and so my sketch was largely about imagining a different composition as well as thinking about what might have been outside the frame. To this purpose I added two other reference pictures: the orchard photo I posted Friday and a shot of a dead tree I found on the internet.
My initial sketch. That big ugly line across the bottom is my crop.
I quartered my original sketch and loosely gridded it onto my drawing vellum. To me this is the most important point: that you transcribe the big shapes from your sketch and not from a photo, unless you’re just intending to transcribe a photo (in which case you can skip this step and move directly to gridding on a canvas).
Once the large shapes were in place, I flipped between my three reference photos, adding details and allowing the movement of the final composition to emerge in its own time.
The shapes are positioned not from the photograph, but from the above sketch. At this point the diagonals of the composition are attempting to assert themselves.
I will set this drawing aside and repeat those steps for each of the paintings I intend to do. Partly this is about allowing my ideas to mature outside my consciousness. Partly it has to do with avoiding yanking my easel around so soon after surgery. When I’m done drawing (hopefully at the end of this week) I can proceed to making small oil studies of the finished paintings.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Another Roadside Attraction

Sketch of a commercial building somewhere in Binghamton, NY, done from a diner window. Sadly, I could never find it again, and they had really good pie.

Yesterday I was flipping through a used-up sketchbook, and came across this little watercolor done many years ago. It’s another roadside scene en route to New York City; however, this one wasn’t memorized across the steering wheel.
I spent several years driving back and forth to the Art Students League from Rochester. I had a little bolt-hole near the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and a Ford Windstar wagon. (Gas was cheaper then.) I drove that route through snowstorms, ice, and flooding , which in the Susquehanna River watershed is the most terrifying of driving conditions. When I was too bleary to drive, I would pull off in a rest stop and sleep in the back of my van.
One early Spring evening, the Windstar died with a colossal bang in that no-man’s-land between Binghamton, NY and Scranton, PA. The tow-truck driver set me down at a diner where I sat with my sketchbook and pondered the situation. All’s well that ends well: I got a cheap hotel room, sold the carcass to the tow-truck operator for $600, and went to New Jersey to test drive one of them new-fangled Priuses.

The trip to Maine is more interesting driving than the Rochester-Manhattan loop. If you’re interested in joining us for a fantastic time in mid-Coast Maine this summer, check here for more information. There’s still room in my workshops.

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There just might be something to this.

Early spring morning, Piseco Lake, oil on canvasboard, 12X16

Yesterday, I wrote about a Stillman & Birn Alpha Series sketchbook that Jamie Grossman gave me, and my first attempt to pre-sketch my paintings in it in watercolor.
This morning as I walked my appointed rounds, I carried the sketchbook and watercolors instead of my camera. The first thing I noticed—of course—is that it took rather longer to make my circuit than it usually does.
I’ve had my eye on this lovely house set on a hill for a few years, and there being a convenient bench, I sat down to sketch it. (I decided that it will be a better painting when the leaves are leafed out.) From there, I moved to a tree in the deep woods with a triple trunk, which proved to be very difficult, but which was good observationally. In both cases, I was approaching the project too much like real painting, which just irritates when all one has is one small brush.
My sketch, a bench.
This last sketch I did much more quickly, just ripping off a pencil drawing and then flooding the sheet with a color map. And it is frankly more satisfying than either of my earlier sketches (which you can’t see because I finished my day after dark and forgot to photograph them).
Transcribed directly
to canvas
Because I didn’t have a toned canvas, I decided to underpaint my finished study in alkyds. (By this point, time had ceased to be a meaningful constraint.) And it was a good day for them, too—the wind whipping off the lake dried them in no time. My alkyd painting is a simplified but direct rendition of the watercolor sketch.
In the end, this painting took me about four hours, and that is about what I’d expect for a field sketch of this size (12X16). So whatever time I spent on the watercolor sketch was saved on the final project.

Alkyd underpainting, transcribed from
watercolor sketch.

 Marilyn Fairman has joined me in the hermitage, and we spent the afternoon painting intensively. Tomorrow, we have all day to paint. What a joy that will be.

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Experimenting

Cloud moving in over Oxbow Outlet, Oil on canvasboard, 16X20

I stopped to see my pal Jamie Grossman last week, and we fell into a conversation about sketchbooks. We both use them religiously, but (unlike Jamie) I tend to use the cheapest sketchbooks available and fill them with scribbled notes. Ever generous, Jamie gave me a Stillman & Birn Alpha Series sketchbook and suggested I try using it with watercolors, gel pens, acrylics, or ink instead of simply drawing with a pencil or graphite stick.
Sketch #1, from the seat of my car.
Jamie does lovely sketchbooks that hover on the line of being artist’s books—very lovely, very lively. I’m not interested in going there, but I can see the value in doing color sketches instead of pencil sketches. And all mental stretches are a good thing, right?
Balanced sketchbook on top
of my pochade box. 
I like to sketch whenever I have to sit, so I brought it with me to church last Sunday. However, a dynamic young rapper named CuevasWalker was preaching, and he defied capture in any form except the loosest gesture drawing.
I am in a self-imposed hermitage this week, which seems like the perfect opportunity to test Jamie’s idea. I brought only a #2 pencil and a Cotman pocket watercolor kit (with its one brush). My reasoning is that if my sketch kit expands beyond what I can put in my pocket, it’s useless.
Sketch #2. I still can’t bring myself to
paint across the spread like Jamie does…
Obstacle number one was apparent as soon as I reached my location: sketchbooks don’t fit on easels; they need to be balanced. My first sketch, therefore, was done from the driver’s seat of my trusty Prius—and I worked very fast because I was parked in a fire lane.
I tried again, balancing the sketchbook on top of my pochade box. That worked just fine, but I don’t think this sketch told me more about my composition than a pencil drawing would have.
Bug repellent… a necessity in
the spring in the Adirondacks.
Then I moved to oils. And that ended up being one of those transcendent experiences where one is totally engrossed in the process of painting, and whether it turns out well is immaterial (although, looking at these sketches, I do wish I’d worked from my original vantage point). 

I will try this process again today. Marilyn Fairman joins me to paint for two days. I’m both excited to paint with her and sad to see the solitude end.

P.S. Sorry about my month’s absence. We were marrying off our eldest, and that was an amazing project in itself, one which left no time for other creative ventures.

The place itself…
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Sketchy

In church

This is the second year I’ve bought into the Sketchbook Project and then felt my muse desert me as soon as the package arrived in the mail. It’s ironic, because I carry a sketchbook everywhere I go, a habit that started in elementary school.

My school notekeeping was a total fail from an academic standpoint—full of drawings, with notes occupying a very minor role. My current sketchbooks look exactly the same.

I now realize that drawing in school allowed me to cope with undiagnosed ADHD at a time when school was extremely regimented and bad behaviour still punishable with a ruler to the knuckles. And I received my share of thwacks for drawing in class, believe me. But as a parent and painting teacher, I encourage both my children and students to do the same thing. Unfortunately, most teachers are still opposed to it.

I know it works (as long as the information being presented is verbal and not visual). For some reason, it’s perfectly possible for the mind to listen, learn and retain a lecture while drawing something entirely unrelated.

For me, drawing takes the place of the anxious fidgeting that is part of ADHD. Educators have begun to recognize that allowing such kids to move paradoxically makes concentration easier. But they don’t generally recognize that drawing can achieve the same goal.

I bring my sketchbook to church, to appointments, on errands—in short, anywhere there’s a possibility I will cool my heels. I make no pretence to style, and don’t think about content or composition. (To do otherwise would interfere with my listening.) My goal is simply to record what I see. It’s totally process-based; I never think of the sketches as anything other than practice strokes or visual notes. Which may be why the Sketchbook Project never works for me: it can’t help but turn process into product.














(L-R) In a pinch, you can always draw your own jacket thrown over a chair; couple in church; gesture drawing of horse at Walnut Hill.







(L-R) Or, you can draw your non-dominant hand; people almost always have a few ears hanging around; patient at the neurologist’s office.












(L-R) Quick value study of a path (I could paint it from this); man in church; my son’s big foot, at the pediatrician’s office.















(L-R) I’ve pretty much mined my dentist’s office for subject matter, but there’s always the woodwork; poofy gown from a shopping excursion; man in church.