works of wanderlust

Category: art & photography

  • on a winter getaway.

    It’s a long weekend in Canada and so with neither work nor school for anyone on Monday we skipped off to the mountains for some nordic-style fun in the alpine climate.

    We travel out there quite often. To that point, I had bought a “travel” sketchbook that I’d intended to be for travel sketching but after the fifth time I brought it to the local mountains and drew pictures of wildlife, flora, waterfalls, pine trees, and (of course) mountains, I officially called that book my “mountain sketching” book and am now intent on filling it up with the same.

    This past weekend was no exception.

    Except.

    Except it was winter, and I’ve written in the past about my lack of patience for drawing in the snow. So, instead I was back to drawing from my day’s photos from a table in our hotel room.

    messy

    Splats. Dribbles. Drips. And spatter. There is something to be said for the abstraction that evolves from a carefree mashing of paints onto paper. I took another online course in February where the instructor emphasized this particular style. She didn't teach it, per se, but rather she left it hanging there in between the lines, so to speak. She alluded to it as a technique that she enjoyed, a carefreeness of paint upon the page that was as much deliberate and purposeful as it was accidental.  Messy does not mean random. Messy does not imply carelessness. Messy is as much about painting with physics and chaos as it is about painting outside the lines.

    One of our weekend activities was a mountain hike.

    We walked up through a frozen creek bed, between towering rock cliffs cut into the side of a mountain, bracing against the cold and occasional gusts of wind. We walked nearly four klicks up and then the same back down. I took lots of video and a few photos, and warm and dry and full of supper that night I pulled out my watercolours and tried to evoke the mountains as much as the feeling of the mountain hike, blustery, chaotic, and busy with life and people and shifting weather.

    The result was painting outside of the lines, and a bit of chaotic physics.

    I have a lot of learning to do about this style, and while I’m not ready to declare a victory here, also I’m not sad about the result for my first attempt.

  • of a fictional nature.

    One of the struggles any artist will eventually face, I think, is that of defining a personal style.

    What do you draw?

    What medium do you use?

    What feeling are you going for?

    How do you want to be seen?

    A lot of learning comes from imitation of someone else, watching the technique of others and trying to replicate it. But that’s just all it is: technique. At some point a whole bunch of pieces need to come together to define art: style, form, message, you.

    rust and decay

    During the pandemic I got into painting miniatures. Specifically, I bought a 3d printer, downloaded a set of designs for one of those big table-top strategy dice games, and then printed as many of the pieces and scenery objects as I could. And then I painted them. The style was post-apocalyptic dystopian, and I found that painting one particular feature of that was quite satisfying: decay.  Rust is abstractions of reds and browns and oranges. Overgrowth is organic shapes made of green and yellows. And somehow decay adds to the depth and feeling and story of whatever you draw.

    A while back I went through a steampunk phase. Steampunk is an alternate universe kind of technology, the idea that progress marched on in the absence of electronics but that humanity figured out a way to build all it’s gadgets anyhow powered by clock-works and gears and kinetically powered motions. There is a lot of grease and brass and smoke and wood.

    Adjacent to that I’ve been dabbling in art that extends along a kind of steampunk-futurist-apocalyptic mood: drawing pictures of steampunk-ish robots that have been left behind.

    I like to draw and paint buildings and scenes and trees and animals that I see in reality.

    I’m fascinated by drawing and painting science fiction scenes that never existed.

    And it makes me wonder if my own style will evolve, or already had started to, from something that is as much a fascination as anything else.

  • after a run day.

    I’ve been playing with a deliberately loose style, and I’m discovering that it’s a fine line between messy and interesting.

    My writing here does not usually mention that on some days of the week when I’m not trying to be an artist, I’m trying to be a runner. It also doesn’t really mention that I’ve been struggling with that latter goal for about seven months after a knee injury.

    On the other hand, things have been improving and today I went for a pleasant winter training run with my friends.

    I have also been recording some video for a little series that I’m putting together, and between shots another friend of mine nabbed my camera and suggested that she take some video of me “for a change.” Sadly, she didn’t quite figure it out and instead took a few still photos…. but photos of anything but stillness. She held the camera behind her back and snapped a couple seconds of failed-video but successful pictures.

    loose and fast

    Trying to capture motion is a tricky thing.  When I drew cartoons, I could easily emphasize motion by a few little woosh-lines behind the character. But when sketching, I've been playing with the idea of quick and simple drawings, fast squiggly sketches that ignore certainty in their lines and definition in their shape. I painted this simple drawing with a big brush and sloppy edges and a broad dynamic range of colour depth, trying to blur the edges in a way that a camera might, and in fact did in this photo, to suggest the subject was moving too fast to capture more accurately. I think it's a skill I need to keep working on.

    After I downloaded my camera I discovered her mistake (and my gain) in the form of a trio of blurry photos of myself running down a suburban street and another friend making faces to the camera beside me.

    Subject matter for a sketch journal should not be boring, static scenes, but instead capture the fluidity of everyday life. I plan to let this picture fully dry and then do some writing around the edges to fill out the page, just like have for a dozen pages before it.

    And I think the subject of being able to run again is very appropriate… and just like the painting, a little messy around the edges.

  • from a cold winter walk.

    It’s been a few weeks since I posted a sketch.

    In fact, it’s been a few weeks since I painted or sketched anything of any worth.

    That’s what happens when a beloved family member, even one who is a hundred and one years old, falls into a three week decline leading to their passing. Grief can be creative muse, but it was not mine.

    I went for a lot of walks in January, often taking nothing with me besides the dog and my phone.

    My phone has a camera, of course, so I took lots of photos. Photos of the snow. Photos of the dog. Photos of the dog in the snow.

    snow is not white

    Winter around here is nearly six months long, so any hope of avoiding painting the snow or snow-filled scenes goes out the window with my choice of residence. that said, snow is not white. Or rather, snow is rarely white. Fresh snow in the sunlight is blue. Snow along a path is speckled brown. Snow in the shadows is grey or purple or deep shades of blue. Snow reflects the light. Snow mottles with shadow and shape and prints and tracks. Snow glints and shines. Snow shapes itself to the ground or to objects, it clings in random shapes to branches, hanging, drooping, piling, mounding, or globbing. Snow melts into puddles, smooths into ice, and does a thousand other unexpected things, each that makes it a challenge to paint.

    I didn’t paint any of this until yesterday.

    My motivation to paint was low in January. My motivation to sit in the snow and paint in January was zero.

    I have no qualms about painting from a photo, of course. Plein air sketching is of course a lovely way to spend some time during a walk, but watercolor requires water… not ice. So plein air en hiver has not turned out to be compatible with this hobby so far.

    From a photo it was then…

    And my dog, as complex as she is to get right in blobs of browns and shadow, is even trickier when she features in a thumb-sized rendering like in this small-format sketch in my 3.5×5.5 inch moleskine folio (to give you a sense of the size of the original work.)

    Lacking any other motivation for creativity, I took it though. And I’m not unhappy with the results.

  • 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.