A Look Back - Part 2

Continuing remembrance and reassessment of 2019, Part 2. It is a good exercise for me and helps the work progress.

Hoff, "The Blue Spruce," oil on panel, 8x10

July The past summer was mostly highlighted by frequent trips outdoors to paint. The first tentative steps were (predictably for me) the environs of Druid Hill Creek, either from a deck outside the studio or on one or the other creek bank. Moving outdoors was eye-opening, particularly the opportunities for intense looking, observing deeply and minutely, spending more time on seeing than on painting. Sometimes even old dogs can learn new things.

Hoff, "The Discovery Garden, ISF," watercolor on paper, 5x9

August is the month of the famous Iowa State Fair, and as in the past several years I spent several days on the fairgrounds, looking and sketching. The daily forays provided many opportunities for watercolor sketching, and I filled pages in several sizes of sketchbooks. My new plein air easel arrived and was everything I hoped it would be, providing stability, portability, and ease of use. By the end of the month my reluctance and unfamiliarity with plein air painting faded, and outdoor work had become my primary way to make artwork.

Hoff, "Looking Northeast," oil on panel, 9x12

September in Iowa is still warm or even hot. Trees hold their leaves and the earth is sleepy but not ready to surrender to shorter days and cooler nights. That allows for more plein air sketching, so September continued to be a productive time. We spent about a third of the month visiting friends in Virginia, as we've done in years past, which gave me a lot of plein air opportunities in the Allegheny Mountains. The weather held during the end of the month, after our return to Iowa, and gave me some more outdoor painting time.

Hoff, Digital study after daVinci

While plein air work in oil and watercolor remained the focus of the summer, my daily digitalia habit blossomed into a blog of daily digital drawings. Increasingly my go-to sketch medium in the studio is a Wacom tablet and Sketchbook or ArtRage. These tools are quick, easy to use (after a significant amount of practice), and involve no cleanup, etc. You can draw faces, figures, anything really, in a very similar way to traditional media. And when switching back to traditional media the quality actually seems improved.

October became Inktober after I happened across a post about the history of that international event celebrating the now-uncommon medium of pen and ink drawing. Pen and ink was one of the mediums of the golden age of illustration over a century ago, and despite the popularity of ink-drawn comics by people like R Crumb the medium is considerably less popular. Inktober is an opportunity to draw something with ink every single day--a formidable challenge and one I took

Hoff, "Study of a Man (after Durer," ink on paper

up almost as a whim. The event has gained worldwide attention since being devised a decade ago. For those who can't find something to draw there is a suggestion of topics and there is an extensive archive on the site. The idea is to do the drawing and post it. I managed to do more than a drawing a day and posted them all here.* It was interesting to do both original drawings and copies of masters like Albrecht Durer (left).

"Tree roots (after Constable)," silverpoint

In all of that I also found some time to do metalpoint drawings and posted a couple. One of them was a copy of an old drawing by Constable of tree roots (right) that seemed suitable to the medium. (Although the date on the drawing says September I actually completed it some time during the first week of October.

"Early Snow," watercolor on paper, 9x5

November has been the month of Fall color here in Iowa during my entire time here, and this one was no exception. The trees began to change in the middle of the month and were brilliant for perhaps a week or so until a hard, killing frost came and finished everything. Luckily there was still time for some outdoor work with watercolor, and I managed a post about Fall on Druid Hill Creek. And digital dailies continued, although the most interesting of them were done from Roman sculpture busts--a form of realistic portraiture that was highly valued. There is much to learn from such work.

"Pompey" digital, from a Roman portrait bust

The remainder of the month was occupied with drawing and the beginnings of studio paintings.

December isn't over but it began with a bit of a retrospective posting of drawings in five separate media, a reminder of the diversity of this year's work. That reminder sent me through a review of the year, which is not quite over. One of the conclusions is I've done much drawing, less painting. The second is what painting I've done has been much watercolor, less oil. The plan, then, is to resume more oil painting over the winter, using natural light in the studio. Probably a lot more exploration of still life is yet to come.
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*Inktober posts
Inktober Plan
Another Shot of Ink(tober)
More Inktober
Halfway Through Inktober
An Inktober Update