Pen and Ink Drawing 4

The source for this drawing is a collage of textures. The idea is to develop dark and light values by using stippling, hatching, lines, squiggles which look like letters, etc. This was done on wallpaper with two different sizes of Sharpie. I had a lot of pleasure trying to develop my texture vocabulary! Last night at our class looked at slides of the drawings of Leonard Baskin, Vincent van Gogh aand Jack Unruh who illustrated The Art of Birds by Pablo Neruda. These three are masters in pen and ink textures and they also use the power of black and white so dramatically.

Pen and Ink Drawing 3

This is a part of a larger pen and ink drawing. I used the previous posting for a source and did the drawing on printmaking paper. The washes did not buckle the paper so much this time and I enjoyed using the Chinese brush and my pointed nib for drawing.

Pen and Ink Drawing 2

Our assignment is to work from one drawing to the next...making tracings, adding collage elements and using a variety of lines and washes. This is yesterday's drawing created originally from a series of blind contour drawings. Today I am working on another drawing using this one as a model on a smaller sheet of paper.

Pen and Ink Drawing

This pen and ink drawing was done in Nicole's kitchen. She had some interesting pieces of paper left over from a workshop she taught in bookbinding. This piece of Maidstone paper (the replacement for Stonehenge) was folded already in a concertina shape. Then she had these little offcuts. We had so much fun drawing on these "throw-away" kinds of paper - not so precious and it is terrible to be intimidated by your school supplies! I started a class - Pen and Ink Drawing with Wendy Welch at VISA - and so Nicole and I did a review of what we did in the first class last week. First we took objects and drew them, then a drawing from the first drawing, then pouring ink on paper and creating backgrounds, etc. We had so much fun and I was surprised at this last drawing - it is of a wrench - but not an ordinary kind. It was her grandfather's and had with a gentle Ess curve in it. A beautiful tool and it was a beautiful day spent drawing avec mon amie...

San Francisco

Here's a few more pictures Neil took on our big trip to San Francisco - shadows on the sidewalk on a hot sunny Friday afternoon in Sonoma; the big sale window at Rosalie's wig boutique in North Beach and the Blazing Saddles bikes lined up so neatly. We were surprised by so many things! When we went to City Lights Bookstore I was amazed at the number of people in the poetry room on the top floor. And the number of poetry books! I bought two books of poetry there and a CD of spoken poetry. Mary Oliver's Red Bird and Behind My Eyes by Li-Young Lee. It was exciting to see that so many people are interested in poetry. We were also taken in by the architectural beauty of the SFMoMa gallery and the enormous size of the exhibitions and the space. And then when we went to Sonoma we found the linear quality of the vineyards to be so rhythmical as they rolled along the side of the highway. We think that it was wonderful to walk around and just look at things - like the vegetables on stands in China Town and listen to the seals barking their heads off......

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

This is an image taken by Neil last week at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It is taken looking up at the walkway created by one of Olafur Eliasson's immersive installations. When you walk through the passage you are surrounded by reflective material which creates a spectrum of colours. If you stop in the middle - you can look backwards and see different colours from what you had first seen. Hmmmm....could this be a metaphor for life? This was an exciting week for us. We spent two days at this Museum mainly looking at the work of Lee Friedlander and talking about his photos. On Saturday we went to the Annie Leibowitz exhibition at Lincoln Park. We also enjoyed going to Crown Point Press and seeing the work of contemporary printmakers like Laura Owens, Shahzia Shikander and Julie Mehretu.

Spring!

Today is a gorgeous day and the cherry blossoms are blooming as well as the tulips and daffodils! This quote was done in Neuland - a typeface created by Rudolf Koch. Enjoy the day!