Sketches

Tuesday and Monday studies. I also did a New Yorker-style cartoon as bread-and-butter note for Marissa's parents. The weather's a little scared here. I lay awake between three and four, thoughts flying faster than I could catch them, but not letting me go. Everything had too many exceptions, qualifications, and implication. Reminded me of a bad acid trip of forty years ago. Deep breathing and a body scan finally let me drop back to sleep.

Drawings, Aches And Pains, And The Second Worst Bank In The World

I've been icing an aching back. What I think is a cramp started in my hip, and migrated to just a little southwest of my left shoulder blade. At one point I was afraid the Stillwater police would have to stick their oar in, because an old guy, in distress, was trying unsuccessfully to lie down on a riverfront picnic table. Beautiful day in a beautiful town: antique downtown buildings; sailboats moored nearby; frisky young dog chasing a tennis ball.

Barbara, executrix of her mother's will, learned in conversation with the Distelfink, PA, Recorder of Wills, that her mother's bank was "the second worst bank in the world." What is your obligation, if you are an employee of the the second worst bank in the world?

Above, four drawings done in Monday and Tuesday drawing sessions. Between the two, I made eight drawings, only one I would call "good," the reclining nude. The unfinished clothed model, whose hand grasps the tubular chair, is typical of the eight. I was making an effort to measure, and get everything in its right place, a skill that comes and goes with me. I abandoned this attempt when I realized that different parts disagreed. The portrait and the standing nude are two middling-quality examples. The portrait is a near likeness, and is a little overworked. The standing nude is fairly solid, which I like, and is a decent likeness, but has some real proportion problems, a dinky left hand and the top half's being too small for the bottom being most obvious.

Tuesday Night Sketch

I decided to try yer basic Ticonderoga Number Two. These things bring out the worst in my drawing: Because they lend themselves to modeling, and because of that pink thing the other end, they make me unsure of myself. Next pencil will be a softer one, one whose value range goes darker. Scary.

Peace-38

Sketchbook Pages

I've always been torn. Part of me is optimistic, believing ours is the time in human history during which we take active control of evolution, and integrate with the rest of the world. The other half is paralyzingly pessimistic. It's natural to think that the time when humans quit fooling around and consciously find our niche(s) in the ecosystem would be perilous. Buckminster Fuller's Utopia or Oblivion comes to mind. The material wealth that has made our global and empirical understanding of our situation nominally belongs to individuals and groups of individuals who can't afford to integrate.

Reading Constant Battles truly freaked me out. I can't write my way out of the puzzle it presented, and I don't want to pollute anybody else's thinking with my dire fascination. So I'm shifting gears.

I've changed sketchbook size, so I can get whole pages onto the scanner. The way I work sketchbooks is to use permanent markers, with no under-drawing. I make a mark on the page, and it suggests something. I draw that suggested something, then ask myself why that particular something. I add entourage to illustrate the subject's raison d'what. Sometimes the drawings are good. Sometimes less so. I'd like to think that I'm channeling something in my drawings, something meaningful that I can't reach otherwise. Sometimes, the drawings seem merely inane. I keep moving.