Drawing

Did some portrait drawing with Señor Mclean the other night.

Another Fourth of July...

I spent my Sunday attending a figure drawing session in Los Alamos, a town one hour North of Santa Fe where they've designed and built nuclear weapons for about sixty-seven years. It's a small mountain town that every time I visit seems to resonate a strange and ominous energy in my chest and ears. The majority of the cities population is employed by the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), which has a total staff of somewhere around twelve-thousand five-hundred people. One lady drawing with us had worked at the Lab for over twenty years.

I drove up from Santa Fe through rain and snowfall at around nine in the morning with fellow artists McLean Kendree and Sean Closson in tow. I spent my time drawing multiple sheets of paper until around three in the afternoon (with a one hour pause to devourer some lunch and coffee). This image is the sketch I devoted the most time to. It's interesting to see our (predictably) different interpretations of the same model in the same pose.


Around one to one and a half hours, 11" x 14" Wolffs-Carbon pencil on white Rives BFK.

And onward...

Just playing around a bit to get the muscles working again. They can not teach you the juggling act that is adult living in art schools.

After Curtis: Haschebaad Mask

Never finished this one.
Time to move on.

After Curtis: Old Woman

Harder to depart from the source, in this one. The photograph had enough drama in it's own right.

Wolffs-Carbon and White Charcoal pencil on gray Rives BFK paper, 16" x 22"

The Evening Redness in the West

Snapped some phone shots of a few quick little Nu-Pastel character studies of Judge Holden from Blood Meridian. I haven't settled on his actual look yet, the finals will probably contain none of the sketch designs. It's going to be a major challenge to depict the ultra serious, old testament quality of the book in picture form.

"The judge was seated upon the closet. He was naked and he rose up smiling and gathered him in his arms against his immense and terrible flesh and shot the wooden barlatch home behind him."

After Curtis: Hopi Dancer

I've been inspired some of the Edward Curtis photographs that we have at the gallery I'm working at (not to mention inspired by living in the Southwest in general) so I decided to do a series of studies.
Sometimes it's nice to have the source material and just take off running, and sometimes it's hard to let myself depart from what I'm looking at and let the drawing be spontaneous. This was easier in most of the previous drawings that were created straight from my head and hand through a process of feeling it out and leaving the history.

Wolffs-Carbon and White Charcoal pencil on gray Rives BFK paper, 22" x 30"

Bent.

Quick sketch on Bristol paper, Wolffs-Carbon pencil.