A Good Drying Day

We’ve gotten a fair amount of rain the past several days (1.30”), but today was a good drying day for laundry. Here’s my pajama top and a t-shirt, sketched with Inktense pan colors.

The Artist's Way

Since my mother died I’ve been journalling a lot, early morning, three pages, morning pages style. There is a lot to process and writing the same old stuff over and over is a) helpful, b) kind to my friends, c) a palette cleanse for the day.

I tried doing the Artist’s Way back when I was living in Cambridge, Mass, and again in Santa Barbara, and got stuck (like so many people) in the middle. I liked the morning pages and I even liked the artist date, though I rarely did it, but it seemed like a Reaganite version of self-actualization with some new age gobbledegook thrown in for good measure. But I can journal, so I’ve been doing that since I got home, first thing in the morning like a good little artist. Rewriting what happened with my mother and the time I spent in Maine has at least spared my friends the endless repetition of it all…

But then a couple of videos about the Artist’s Way popped up on my YouTube feed and I decided to watch one of them. Like me, they balked at the God references; like me, they were half-assed about the artist dates. But they said they got a lot of value out of it anyway, and this has made me wonder whether stopping wasn’t a form of self-sabotage.

So I’m not sure I’m recommitting but I’ve read through chapter 1 and this time had a whole load of critics and many, many more champions to name. (I even wrote some cringy affirmations.)

My issue isn’t that I don’t think I’m an artist, though I genuinely don’t have aspirations to have my art hang in galleries. I like to make things and give them to others. My issue is that I value all of this so little that I don’t make time for it. This is what I’m going to be focusing on over the next however many weeks it takes. Stay tuned…

Fruit Bowl

We have a complete set of 24 of the Derwent Inktense paint pans, and I have been testing them out a bit. Here is a sketch of some apples in a fruit bowl using the Inktense pan colors.

Zettelkastening Comics

I was interested to read Numenius’ blog post from yesterday. I am drawn to movable pieces, whether written or drawn, and wonder how this might help in construction of a comic.

An important feature of a comic is that there be sequential panels, whether or not anything is written on them. But the number of panels, their size relative to each other, and even where they appear (cliffhangers work better if positioned at the bottom right hand of a recto page, at least in Western traditions, for instance), can all be worked through if ideas and panels are assembled as movable pieces.

I have a lot of index cards and at least three projects currently in the works on cards, held together with rubber bands. None of them is very large which helps. But this is giving me a lot of ideas about how to work, specifically with how to structure thought.

Jazz Band

This is my urban sketch for this past Sunday. I went over to Central Park where the biweekly Davis Craft & Vintage Fair was taking place. The local New Harmony Jazz Band was playing at one end of the fair, as they often do.

I am getting used to sketching in this 7”×7” sketchbook. It’s a little bigger than what I’ve been sketching in previously, but this lets me be freer with the sketches. I like the combination of fountain pen fine line work with a gray Pentel brush for bolder ink strokes. I am still pleased with the Derwent line and wash kit. It was nice to have that bold Inktense yellow handy for the tent canopy. And I figured out how to mix skin tones with the paint pan set: I used a combination of poppy red with the mango Inktense colors.

Collective Revisiting

Looking through hundreds of old photos with three generations of family members is an interesting experience. Perspectives change, what’s important changes, so many details are now lost to history…But we had a great time this afternoon sorting through some of my mother’s photos. There are more to go, but for now we are savoring the time we have with her, mining her memory and adding ours.

The photos above are the prints I’m keeping so far. I already have a lot of photos of our camping trips and of my parents in Bodega Bay and Spain. In this age where digital photos are at the end of your thumb and a smartphone, the magic of seeing old prints was a joy. More anon.

Back From Boston

I came back this afternoon from my short Boston outing on the train. Yesterday I took a ferry trip with a friend from the North Shore to the North End, Boston’s original neighborhood whose ethnic identity has changed from settler to wealthy Bostonian to red light district to Irish to Italian, though I doubt that many or even half of the people who live there now are of Italian descent: it’s turned into boojie wealthy, though unwise to own a car if you live here.

This morning my friend Linda and I went birding on Plum Island, where we saw a lot of migrating songbirds (including some warblers I haven’t seen for a while). Batteries? recharged!

New Daily Sketchbook

I started my new daily sketchbook today. For my weekend sketching outings using this sketchbook I’m going to be doing general urban sketching. Today’s sketch was of a house on G Street not far from the food coop.

My new sketchbook is a 7”×7” softcover Stillman and Birn Alpha sketchbook. My previous square sketchbooks were 5 1/2” × 5 1/2”, so there’s a bit more area to cover in each sketch. In today’s sketch I used my gray Pentel brush pen for accents; maybe I’ll be doing more of that in this sketchbook.

A Trip to Boston

I lived in Boston for eight years before I moved to California. I’ve been back to the east coast many times over the past 30 years but rarely to Boston proper. Today I went south on the train and took myself to the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum and the Museum of Fine Arts where I found a lot of old friends and at the latter saw the astonishing Rachel Rausch exhibit. Recharged the batteries for sure, maybe at the cost of sore feet.

Dried Plants

I’m visiting Maine with minimal art supplies… and that’s great.