works of wanderlust

Category: notes for a sketch

  • of a hundred little bugs.

    Did I mention that I have a biology degree? It factors into this post, so it’s worth mentioning now. Bachelor of Science with a specialization in molecular genetics and minor in entomology, convocation 1999.

    I can’t say that I’ve used it much in my career, though having it has opened numerous doors.

    And occasionally it rears up as a useful bit of dormant knowledge in my head such as when I need to help my daughter study for a science exam, or I decide to open up my sketchbook and draw an insect.

    A couple weeks ago we were roaming around New York City and I was busily drawing urban sketches of the parks and the buildings and the people. We visited all sorts of sights worth seeing for any nerdy, arty sort of guy, including not only museums but also the 5th Avenue branch of the New York Public Library.

    They have a gift shop.

    And I bought a gift. For myself. A gift that was both arty and nerdy.

    I bought a leatherbound sketchbook made with lush Italian paper with an embossed logo from the library on the cover. It looks and feels like I pulled it out of the golden era of philosopher scientists, as if Charles Darwin himself might have lugged it around in his satchel to record his evolutionary observations.

    But what to do with it?

    phylum arthropoda

    As a photographer I have collected hundreds of backyard bug photos over the years. This has come useful in the last few days as the weather turned bitterly cold and the only insects to be found are the occasional housefly who doesn't know better than to knock himself against the icy window pane. Bugs are beautiful subjects and present an amazing opportunity for artists of watercolour. Some will tell you that flowers are the way to go, but the diversity of the insect world is equally as vast and colourful, and leaps beyond blossoms in complexity and interesting reference material. Recreating intricate body designs, dazzling hues and sheens, detailed hairs and eyes, or the feathery hint of translucent wings is a challenge that can be rewarding for any who attempt to paint a bug. From butterflies to beetles, dragonflies, bees, and ladybugs, even a swarm of ants can make an interesting subject.

    The obvious solution (that took me a mere two weeks to spark upon with a golden eureka moment) was something dutifully scientific.

    This afternoon, having paged through ten years of photos and plucked fifty or so macro pics of various kinds of local arthropods, I painted the first of many pages in my new notebook: a ladybug sitting upon the bark of a tree in my backyard.

    I added the name in both English and Latin as a finishing touch.

    And I love the result. Paintings of nature. Of insects. Maybe plants. Possibly even some flowers here and there. Ultimately a kind of quasi-scientific collection of art linking me back to that otherwise unused university degree. Darwin might have been proud.

  • from the big city.

    I alluded in my previous post that November had us primed for some travel afar and away, and in as much I had picked up a new sketchbook for that specific purpose.

    Over the recent long weekend, the family and I flew across the continent from our frozen little Canadian city, to the big city, the big apple, Manhattan in New York. It was a weekend filled with adventure, food, walking, Broadway shows, museums, more food, parks, and tall buildings. Five days of urban vacation fun, punctuated by no less than seven sketches by yours truly.

    I tried to be bold when I sketched, too.

    On the Sunday morning, while the family was still snoozing away the early hours, I packed up my gear and walked the few blocks north of the hotel and into Central Park.

    Over the course of three hours on my own, I found breakfast, drank a coffee, and stopped three times to pull my sketchbook and pen from my pack and draw what I saw.

    The last of these, the feature image of this post, was drawn while sitting on a bench around Central Park West and 66th Street, a long street running along the west edge of the park and lined across the avenue with beautiful and expensive condominiums. Literal million dollar views.

    pens and ink

    I've been reluctant to dive in headlong with ink-only sketches, almost always warming up my blank page with at least a few pencil shapes to build some confidence for those more permanent lines. That was a luxury I didn't give myself on vacation, tho, whether because I often had a family sitting nearby waiting on my art or just because I was trying to fill the page in the minimum of time for a dozen other reasons. I had thought such haste would leave me unhappy with the final results, but I have been finding a new confidence in ink-only drawings and a life and vibrance that is emerging on accident of only having a single chance to draw the scene rather than tracing over my pencil lines. And I like it, and think I will do more of it.

    My bench wasn’t worth nearly so much, but it proved a creatively fertile outpost.

    Given another hour, a day, a lifetime it felt like something I could have sketched in the most brilliant of detail and complexity. But I sat down for a mere thirty minutes, give or take, and quickly tried to capture the late-autumn scene. Shapes. Lines. Feeling. Warmth. Movement of the hundred or so people who walked by me, many looking down at my page and a few stopping to ask for directions that I was scantly able to provide. My pen moved as fast as it could across my sketchbook resting on my lap, trying to store that moment into a few lines of ink on paper.

    In my little city home there are a million scenes that could be sketched, but being somewhere new and vibrant and alive in a way that New York is just so unlike where I live, it was gnawing and crunching as creative fire.

    Travel was my muse for five days, and more than once lit something inside that I think I’ll find hard to rekindle at home… especially with half a meter of snow on the ground.

  • looking across the river.

    Breaking in a new sketchbook is a daunting moment. It’s not as if they are outrageously expensive, but after investing thirty bucks into a new Moleskine watercolour folio, peeling the plastic cover off, and quietly considering how great it was going to look full of lovely urban sketches, I couldn’t help but hesitate to put a first mark on the page.

    I bought a new sketchbook because we’re going on a plane in about three weeks. We’ll be wandering around Manhattan for the better part of five days and I plan to sit and sketch for at least one picture per day. I’ve been falling into the habit with the last few sketchbooks I’ve bought to “theme” them. I have a book of little watercolours of objects. I have a notebook that is exclusively for sequential journaling. I have a sketchbook for people. I have another for pen drawings of scenes. I have yet another that is reserved for full watercolour layouts.

    I did not have a book for urban sketches.

    I figured New York would be a great place to have exactly that.

    But then the idea of taking a completely blank canvas on a big vacation and finding myself sitting in some square in the heart of the Big Apple, overthinking that first mark on that first page… it was not just a daunting moment, but a paralysing one.

    loose lines

    Filling a sketch with life and vibrancy is a collection of a million little choices, but never in my wildest imaginations did I come to realize that half of that million choices would occur not just in the seconds of my sketches but in the microseconds. The choice to do more than translate the scene onto the paper comes from feeling the very soul of a space and an object and the various subjects of your work. Life is not made up of perfect lines and regurgitating the symmetry of a world that doesn't really exist means that we are too often drawing symbols of how we want the world to be than letting the world flow into our pens at every micro-moment of ink on paper contact. There is a looseness of letting the universe jitter and jiggle through our fingers, as if the quantum uncertainty at the edges of everything and all matter is amplified to expression on the page, and the result when done right in inescapable momentum towards art and away from mere documentation.

    My solution for overcoming two kinds of new sketchbook daunting…um… ness was simple.

    First, just draw. Now. Find an on-theme picture or scene, and just mess up at least one page. I mean, now that I’ve messed up one I may as well mess up a couple more before we leave, but that fresh, newly-unwrapped watercolour folio is now good and broken in with at least one lovely painting. With at least one drawing in that book, and possibly three or four if I get my act together, when I pull that sketchbook out onto my lap in Central Park next month, THAT drawing will just be another drawing in just another notebook. Not daunting at all.

    Second, and a tip I picked up randomly from YouTube, never start on page one. I opened that new folio right to near exactly the middle and drew on that page. Sure, I labelled and dated it, but sequentially chronology is for meeting minutes from my office job, not my art… right. Page one is so significant and weighty, so why add to the pressure of not only drawing A page, but drawing THE page… the FIRST page. So, I didn’t. I drew page forty seven or something unremarkable. Page forty seven is not daunting.

    Drawing in a bound notebook, in public to boot, is supposed to be fun and relaxing. What ways do you find to reduce the stress, even just a little, so that you can focus on the moment and not the silly details that shouldn’t be filling you with extra stress?

  • of a million little leaves.

    The autumn weather and colours brought me on a long wandering walk this past weekend through the rolling single-track trails of our local river valley. Fifteen minutes of brisk strolling in the direction of the parklike preserve finds multiple opportunities to step into a wilderness that changes with the season.

    For a few days, literally only days, each year the trail is a glorious canopy of oranges and yellows, and on rare days it is all set upon an upwards sky that acts as a azure blue backdrop to the autumn changing of the leaves from life into litter.

    I strolled with the dog and paused every few steps as a new splendour tempted my phone camera as a reference that pleaded to be put down on paper in vibrant watercolours.

    persistence and time

    While I cherish the idea of quickly sketching a few lines onto a page and leaving behind a breezy, airy form that captures the imagination, I have also known since my early art days that not every work will come so easily.  Eagerness to stamp a date and a signature on the bottom of a piece and flip the page to the next project is often overwhelming for me, so occasionally finding myself with a challenge that requires literal days of iterative work forces me to think long term, in layers, and across the trudge-like march towards something that will always seemingly benefit from a few more perfectly placed spot of colour.

    Painting leaves turned out to be a massive challenge.

    One at a time, I have drawn and coloured many of them in the past days and months.

    But thousands. Millions, maybe, like an abstraction of light and colour and life and warmth and magic all at once? Capturing that with my amature skills was almost an impossible task.

    I will admit, as I put down the first couple layers of paint and left them to dry I had a sinking feeling in my heart that I’d be either tearing the page from my art book or leaving it there as some kind of reminder-like testament to an ego-driven error.

    I went to sleep that first night, a Saturday, a little humbled by the paint’s ability to break me so thoroughly.

    Sunday morning I woke up and in my morning stupor dabbled a bit more into the piece. The drops of spattered colour had the right hues and shapes as they had fully dried and there was nothing to lose by adding a few more of them. Rather, I resumed my droplet art with some deeper reds and greenish yellow to act as a contrasting underlayer.

    By Sunday night, I was feeling a bit better… but still had a vague sense of… meh.

    Monday, more paint was added. And yet by Tuesday I had decided to be bold and deepen the contrast of the tree branches which were starting to fade into the background blurs of yellow and pinks and reds and greens.

    There wasn’t really a moment when it popped, but at some point I started to feel the persistent meddling in the finality of this piece had begun to pay off, transforming the random shapes into something closer to what I held in my mind’s eye, that reference image captured in my memory as I stood on a river valley trail gazing up into the orange canopy of leaves overhead.

    It just stuck, somehow. Worked. Though I couldn’t explain why.

    It was still imperfect, yes, but definitely not more litter for the autumn trash heap.

  • of nature studies and pinecones.

    Autumn arrived like an express train, passing between the trees with a gust of chilly wind and leaving behind a noticeable change in the mood. The leaves changed colour with its arrival, folding from a mature, ripe green hue to patterns of orange and red and yellow and brown.

    These are colours to which I have learned this year to give new names: ochre, umber, rust, and olive.

    While I spent hours of my weekend dabbling in the autumn colours of my watercolour paint sets, looking to match warm hues with the visuals I held in my mind and on the photo roll of my phone after a meandering walk through the nearby river valley, I found a better success in the simplicity of the lingering remains of summer.

    Between snapping epic photos of billowing autumn leaves patched against azure skies, I’d also gathered a small collection of photos of oblivious little pinecones still hanging (or recently fallen) from the boughs of the various evergreens.

    studies and collections

    Repetition is the king of practice, though painting the same thing over and over again could quickly become tedious. The notion of a study unlocks the frustration of repetition from the benefits, at least I think so. A study as I've defined it, is the tackling of a set of similar subjects with a common theme, similar characteristics or some other factor in common. For example, I took a stroll through the local park and snapped a half dozen photos of various pinecones. Some were dangling from branches while some were on the ground. Some were young and green while others were dried up and cracked open.  Four of those photos became the basis for my study, creating four individual paintings with four similar styles. Yet in the spirit of repetition, I mixed one set of paint, used one spread of paper, and painted each in quick succession taking the micro-lessons learned from each go inform the next.

    Groups of things intrigue me, because whether it is leaves or rocks or pinecones, the mind plays a trick on us that makes us create a kind of symbolic idealism for them in our head. It is a default mental state that almost any who do art need to overcome at some point: not painting or drawing what we think we see, but actually painting or drawing what we do see.

    Take a pinecone for example. In my mind I have an idealized image of a pinecone. It’s shape, colour, and texture are all locked in as a mental symbol of a pinecone.

    I didn’t draw that symbol. Rather I drew four pictures of the pinecones I found in my park on my walk, not a one of them really even matching the symbol I held in my head of what I was drawing. And those pinecones were not brown; the hues I used were sepias and ochres and olives and umbers, warm autumn shades that pull the cool breeze out of the air and remind those standing among the scattered remains of summer that winter is just a different shade.