Meer early August, 13.08.07

Welcome to the throes of early August.  The weather has been incredible for the past week or so. Hot off the marvels of the JS Sargent exhibition, there is a sense of openness and tactile bravado in the sketches.

The first two are from a week ago.  At top, the Bad Tree. Done entirely with the tombo brush pen and a bit of waterpen on my trusty Stillman&Birn Epsilon sketchbook. I’m not sure the working positive/negative space within a form is helping me at present but it’s something that I will continue to use throughout this batch.  And below is the climb on the southern shore that i’m oft interested in.  some love and hate here.  The Kirby-isms are gone but the dappling remains.  The goal of this drawing was to see if i could get the shore to read.  So the concentration on the reeds along the water.  I really like the composition of this piece and the nice vertical and horizontal anchors.

 

I think that summer festivities around the boat house had driven me from my favorite spot which is why i returned to my island.  The unseating plus a migrant headache kept me to one drawing at this seating.  A chat with Barnaby Conrad last week reminded me of the need to start addressing the sky.  Even though at this point it’s a mechanical issue.  The lack of color and dismal range of value makes the sky a difficult issue.  I think this is nice though.  Lots of uniball in this one.  The goal was to show, again, the shoreline on the island and how that holds the island.

 

And from today, one terrible watercolor (not pictured) and two lovely ink drawings.  First is one of the trees from the pairing on the southern shore that i like to draw.  I’m liking this a lot.  Split a bit on the trunk.  This drawing actually occupies the same page as the island image above.  And lastly, a watermark image.  I don’t know if it’s evident in the drawing what I like about it so much.  The composition is wealthy.  The foreground/background vs positive/negative was a lot to deal with here.  The clump of copse on the right side of the page is rendered here as a mushroomy blob.  I’m glad for the abstraction and happy that I’d planned on losing it.  The eye gets drawn to the tree pair and the third smaller tree that sits centrally in the composition.  And I like the step up graphic element of the foreground reeds where the landscape circles back mid-picture.  All-in-all, it’s a more adult drawing.  

My tan is coming in nicely.  And loch hiss is abuzz with city life.  Teeming even.  Happy summer everyone.  I’ll continue to push forward on watercolor but promise to not share until something merits it.