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| "Blue Spruce," wc & ink |
A watercolor and ink painting of a big blue spruce. The oddly blue, oddly grey color of this species of spruce tree is difficult to capture. This one conforms to my usual practice of a graphite lay-in, then full watercolor, followed by accentuation of certain parts with waterproof ink.
This particular sketch is about 3.5 x 6.5, done in one of my sketchbooks.
Today is Independence Day in the United States, commemorating the signing of our Declaration of Independence from England nearly 250 years ago.
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| "Sam," after JCL, oil on canvas, 20x16 |
Happy Fourth of July.
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A little-known asset in downtown Des Moines is the Better Homes and Gardens Demonstration Garden. It's a working garden of the publishing company, used for various purposes including photos, events, and so on. As a working garden it's generally closed to the public except Fridays 12-2pm from May through September. It's a beautiful spot for lunch, sketching, garden browsing and simply for chilling out.
I go to the garden as often as possible during the summer months for all of the reasons I mentioned above. Today started rainy and dark, but by midday the sky cleared, so I spent an hour there. The sketch below of a sunny corner was the result.
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| "In the Garden," wc and ink on paper, about 3.5x6 |
I'm not certain why we love Santorini, the Greek island, but most people do. It's a hot, dry crescent of land, a rim of an ancient volcanic caldera. The other rim is nearly gone and the ocean flooded into what is now a big bay. There is little water, hot sun, steep cliffs, and high prices. But tourists and vacationers still flock to Santorini. It may be the model for Atlantis.
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| "Santorini Rooftops," oil on panel, 8x8, private collection |
Sketching buildings and other structures can be daunting. When I do that kind of sketch I look first for the big shapes--volume shapes, not simple shapes. That is, I look for cubes, spheres (or spherical shapes), and so on. If you start that way you can make the sketch more solid looking. Next I spend a great deal of time making sure of the perspective I'm using. Most times it's two point perspective, but sometimes different. I don't use a straight edge, just "eyeball" it.
Here's an ink and watercolor sketch of an apartment building in an old and funky neighborhood just northwest of downtown. Many of the houses are Victorian, but there is a smattering of 1930s low-rise brick apartments and houses. I chose this one for it's rather ornate facade. There was only enough time to do the left side but that provides enough information to complete the work if need be.
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| "Up on Sherman Hill," ink and wc, about 6x9 |
Glass is a fascinating subject to paint. Beginning painters are sometimes baffled by a glass subject and forget to address whatever is seen through it. Water can provide the same puzzlement. But unlike water, glass is at least solid and still. Glass is transparent but it's also often tinted slightly green by iron compounds, especially when seen tangentially.
Our human species has several cousins--most know chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. But few seems to know about bonobos. They've been called "dwarf chimpanzees" but aren't actually chimps. They're a separate species. Unlike chimps, they're matriarchal in social organization and generally peaceable. They prefer to make love, not war. But they're endangered because of habitat loss and being hunted.
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| "Bonobo," digital drawing |
One of the greatest things about the regular Saturday sketch group is that it provides a regular and somewhat structured opportunity to use different media--mostly watercolor and ink. A side benefit is the visual journal the resultant works have provided over the years. You can go back from year to year and even day to day to see what the world looked like then. You can see refinements and changes in painting methods. And you can simply look at the images as a way to document the world.
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| "Greenwood Park," wc and ink |
This week's Saturday sketch is a corner of Greenwood Park, a lush urban park behind the Art Center. The park connects to the south with the Raccoon River valley and thence to Waterworks Park. It's a semi-landscaped park that gradually gives in to wild ungroomed woods. There is an outdoor pavilion that's used for plays and concerts, too. I sat on a bench near the pavilion and sketched the path leading into the seating area. Out of view on the right is the stage and chairs.
This work began with a graphite sketch, then watercolors. I emphasized shapes and added contrasts with waterproof ink, then went back to accentuate shapes, colors, and values using more paint
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Although still life has always been an interest of mine, the output of nature mort from here has been small over the last few years. But when the weather changes this fall and the cold months return I plan on doing more still life. So last weekend I spent some time rummaging through older work for inspirations.
One of my favorite inclusions in still life is the human skull. It's an incredibly intricate set of bones. The skull is a group of bones, some fused together, some less so, not a single unit. There a innumerable nooks and crannies, openings, depressions, points of interconnection and more. It's one of an anatomist's ultimate challenges. In art, the skull has figured as subject matter almost forever. The most interesting is the use of the skull as a memento mori (remember: you will die) or vanitas ("vanity of vanities, all is vanity") to remind viewers of universal mortality.
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| "Risk Factors," oil on panel, 20x16 |
"Risk Factors" is a vanitas work of mine from over a decade ago. The title is derived from the medical term, a kind of laundry list of behaviors and circumstances that increase a person's chances of developing a particular condition. In this painting, we see a salt shaker, butter in a dish, a pack of cigarettes, a donut, and the skull with reversed ballcap. Prominent risk factors for heart attack include high blood pressure, high blood cholesterol, smoking, and diabetes, obviously implied here. The reversed ball cap is a comment on being unconciously silly.
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| "Vanitas Study," oil on canvas, 20x16 |
A companion to Risk Factors is the study (above) I did that included only the skull and cap. In this one two are perched on the same stand but it's covered with blue cloth. This one was simply a way to work hard at observing the skull and its intricacies.
This one, "Boulder" is the newest studio landscape I've released. It's partly imagined, partly reference-based. The subjects of moving water, reflected lights, hard vs. soft (stones/water) attracted my interest, but quite a lot of the result aren't in the reference photo.
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| "Boulder," oil on panel, 14x11 |
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| "Stormy Savannah," oil on panel, 11x14 |
Like most, I love spring. The weather is warming, the light grows warmer too, and flowers are bursting with color. It's a great season for plein air work, regardless of one's medium. Many Saturdays I join the sketchers group for a few hours of outdoor drawing and painting. Our group is predominantly watercolorists but several are pastel painters and at least one sketches in colored pencils.
Around Des Moines there are abundant locales for sketching. In winter and early spring we've spent profitable times in Waterworks Park and across the road at Gray's Lake. The Botanical Center on the bank of the river is another favorite. But this week we went to another park, the big greenspace that surrounds West Des Moines' public buildings, in particular the Library. There's a small, graceful lake and sculptures here and there, but at the end is a beautiful footbridge. I sat on a bench at the end of the bridge and sketched.
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| "Footbridge at the Library," wc and ink on paper, 6x8 |
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| "The Yellow Umbrella," oil on panel, 9x12, private collection |
In "The Yellow Umbrella," the setting is the financial district in New York. The yellow umbrella of the title is a common sight in Manhattan, part of a yellow and blue color scheme of a well-known hot dog company. I painted the majority of this in a monochromatic palette but chose to emphasize the umbrella and a few soda cans as if a bar of sunlight has found its way onto the cart.
Putting texture into a drawing or painting can be a difficult task. When drawing, especially, texture is most commonly added by altering one's marks. That is, smooth line or rough line, continuous line versus interrupted lines, and so on.
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| "Mailboxes," ink on paper, 11x14 |
Notice that the lines follow the contours of the mailboxes. The posts and fences called for a different approach to emphasize the cylindrical nature of the posts and flatness of the planks.
I had a chance to visit the Better Homes and Gardens demonstration gardens in downtown Des Moines today. The gardens are a part of the former Meredith campus (now Dotdash Meredith) where the magazines shoot garden features and so on. The gardens, being commercial working space, only admits visitors a couple of hours weekly, on Fridays. The various parts of the demonstrations include microclimates of sun and shade, areas displaying garden designs and even small vegetable areas.
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| "Japanese Maple," watercolor and ink on paper |
Today the Japanese maples at the northern end of the gardens were spectacular. At midday the sun catches the tops of the impossibly-red foliage so that it seems to glow with an inner fire. I sat on a bench in the sun and sketched one of the maples. It's probably thirty years old, with gracefully branching limbs and twigs below and that bright red umbrella above.
There is simply no way that dull pigments can reproduce the exhilarating, almost neon color of these trees. The best I could do was indicate it.
There is a section of the city known as Sherman Hill because a brother of the famous Civil War general lived there in the late 19th century. The area is dotted with Victorian mansions and apartment buildings. Here and there on well-traveled thoroughfares you find small businesses that have seen better days. This is a former drugstore that has been everything from a New Age shop to a trendy bistro.
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| "Sherman Hill Scene," ink and wc |
Sorting old ink drawings today I ran across this pen an ink drawing of a truly scary rooster. When I was a boy in Oklahoma we had one of these birds who would chase me all around the chicken yard. That eye!
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| "Rojo," pen and ink wash on paper |
One of the disciplines many artists follow is simply working every day. Daily work means daily practice of whatever art the person pursues. A musician either plays a gig daily or simply runs through various parts of his repertoire. A writer sits in her desk chair and writes; a drummer drums; and so on.
In my own art practice, I use various strategies to hone my work. For one thing, daily digital drawings and paintings are an ongoing constant. But there's a risk of growing stale if you do the same things over and over, so I also do watercolors (my Saturday group), graphite and ink drawings, and sometimes other media like metalpoint. Variety makes a difference.
Here's a recent graphite study with chalk highlights. As is often the case, this is a head and face, snagged from an online reference. It's about 8x6 on toned paper.
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| Hoff, "Head of a Man," graphite and chalk on paper |
Across the boulevard from Gray's Lake is Waterworks Park and a beautiful arboretum of spring flowering trees. Last Saturday the sketch group went there to draw, but the weather wasn't very cooperative. Just as I drove over there the rains came and continued for the entire time. You can't really do watercolor in the rain, of course, so this particular 8x10 was started and finished in the car.
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| "Rainy Afternoon in the Arboretum," wc/ink on paper, 8x10 |
The watercolors used here seem bright but in comparison to the intense color of the trees they're quite dull. There are avenues of flowers above brilliant green grass. I was hampered in this particular work by a near lack of water, and no way to replenish. That means the paint was applied pretty thick, for watercolor.
Water is becoming one of my favorite subjects. Especially interesting to me is moving water in all of its forms, from ocean tides to ripples in a puddle. Clarity or murkiness is another feature of water that I find fascinating. And so on.
I've painted water on the spot, outdoors, and recreated it from reference photos. Obviously, painting moving water en plein air is tougher, at least for me. An important lesson from an old teacher is "don't try to paint glass [or water]. Instead paint what it does to the things behind it." That is, clear or transparent material like glass or water distorts and alters the image of whatever it covers. In "Streambed" (painted outdoors) I tried very hard to be aware of soft, blurry edges and reflections in the water. The stones dotting the stream made great, solid counterpoint to the moving water.
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| Hoff, "Streambed," oil on panel, 6x6 |
Unlike "Streambed," there have been quite a few works in my past that showed the actual bottom of a stream. "Mountain Stream" is a relatively large studio work, created from imagination and several photo references. In this one my interest was showing convincingly how a stream of water could be reflective, transparent, and refractive. The stony bottom of the stream was a great challenge.
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| Hoff, "Mountain Stream." oil on canvas, 18x24 |
Finally, in "Bottom," was the challenge of showing varying color, value, and transparency of moving water. This work is from a personal photo of a crystalline stream in far southwest Virginia.
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| "Bottom," oil on panel, 12x16 |
