works of wanderlust

Category: art & photography

  • 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.

  • 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.