Magnolias and Strange Fruit

I am still working on the portrait drawing of my son and waiting for the first of the fixative/matte medium/adhesive/leafing/varnish layers to dry.  In the meantime, I have started a full-size preliminary sketch for my next drawing (48 x 25 inch drawing on a 60 x 40 inch sheet of paper). I usually sketch on large sheets of Canson Vidalon Vellum (a high grade tracing paper that comes in a 36-inch-wide roll) that I overlay and shift around until I am satisfied with the composition.   When the preliminary sketch is finished, I transfer the outlines to my sheet of watercolor paper and start the final drawing.  (Thorough details about the papers I use and why are located in my blog on paper).

This next drawing stems from my grandmother's death last year, my obsession and disenchantment with the "Old South", and the sense of identity that originates from my native soil.  And, as such, it will have plenty of magnolias and a little bit of cotton.

I have been reminiscing on All That Is Southern; this fixation has partly to do with the subject of the newest drawing, but in truth my reminiscing happens every summer.  Perhaps it is the summer heat that reminds me of my childhood in Georgia as well as my ancestral family homesteads in North and South Carolina.  Perhaps it is the fact that I am excited about my upcoming annual visit southward and the recharge that I get from being back in my beloved hometown of Athens, Georgia.

At any rate, as part of the reflecting upon my grandmother's death and all of this reminiscing on All That Is Southern, I have also been thinking more objectively about my grandmother.

Well, I have always been a little objective about her...she was the embodiment of the Old South in ideology and in belief:  truly, if she had not died in March of last year, she would surely have keeled over on the morning of November 5^th.  We had many vehement disagreements on politics and social issues through the years that led me to hold a lot of anger towards her, but all in all she was my grandmother and the only grandparent with whom I was close.

This conflict of love and hate has become the springboard for the newest drawing.

Now for a relevant and visually influential southern tangent: two scenes from the 1955 film noir classic Night of the Hunter: a flash of Robert Mitchum's "LOVE" and "HATE" tattooed hands as well as the vision of Shelly Winter's floating hair as she rests in her underwater grave:

Ah, the South.  It is an enigmatic place and although I have been north of the Mason-Dixon line for over a decade, I have not lost my sense of connection to its complex history and the dual, dueling nature of love and hate.

While cleaning up my studio and organizing reference photos, I have shuffled through years of my own photographs documenting the nooks and crannies of the Deep South.  And, it has dawned on me that some of these images are a little amusing, a little strange, and visually rather interesting. So, for the next few months I will have sporadic posts of Magnolias and Strange Fruit:  these will be musings about Southern artists, places and things, random observations, and a few oddities ~ all of those places and things that influence, intertwine, and underpin many of the drawings that I create.

In the meantime, I simply have to muse on one* thing that I miss about the South: the purely magical and delicious fragrance of a blossoming magnolia tree on a cool night breeze.

I always pick the magnolia's flowers even though they quickly bruise and do not last very long.  I have also photographed them until they literally are falling apart:

Now to start drawing them...

*Only my yearning for proper barbecue surpasses my yearning for the magnolia tree

A quick thank you to Traci D for dragging me to the theater to see the restored "Night of the Hunter" all those years ago - the movie still gives me chills...and the references appear in the most magnificent places.

Portrait ~ update work in progress

The leaves are nearly finished:

I thought the leaves/branches would only take me a few hours...I am a bit of a delusional optimist because it was more like 15 or 16 hours.  Next I will finish some details on the leaves, work on the portrait a bit more, and then cover the entire white background with 2B or 4B pencil.  Then, the piece will be sprayed with fixative.

Leafing will come next - first a layer of matte medium on the background (not the leaves or portrait), then the adhesive, then the gold leaf, then the sealant.  All in all it will take about a week to finish - every layer will require about a day to dry.

Work In Progress ~ Portrait

I have abandoned my second clayboard "tree" drawing for now, and have moved on to a pencil on paper drawing.  My rule of thumb is that if I do not enjoy the drawing that I am currently working on, or if I am too focused thinking about the next work that I become disengaged with the one that I am currently working on, then I need to just start the next piece (I will inevitably go back and finish the other piece later).  I am not a suffering artist...I like to draw, and I have to like what I am drawing. For the first time, I am drawing a portrait of one of my children (my oldest son, age 8).  I have used my children before (metaphorically), but not any of them individually as a portrait.  This is an interesting world of subject matter, and I have a lot of thoughts, but not for today.  Here is the piece, in progress:

This drawing actually has a horizontal format (24 inches high x 32 inches wide) with limbs of a dogwood tree coming in from the left in the negative space behind his head, and the background will be gold leaf...unless I change my mind after I finish the pencil.  With the leafing and the sparse composition, the drawing may be Asian in feel and I believe I will like that, but I do not always fix a course for a drawing in my head as I am working...the drawing will determine the finished stage.

This one will be completed within the next week or two; I have a lot of studio time next week - which is a relief because the months of June, September, and December are always a struggle and a distraction to working  in the studio (school, school, holidays).  Ah, but, life is more important than art.

Currently reading: Neil Gaiman's American Gods

Currently listening to: Doves Kingdom of Rust; & Akron/Family Set Em Wild, Set Em Free

Macro Fun in the Garden II

Alas, I am still plodding away on my latest drawing and counting down the days until my kids are in summer camp (which of course means exponentially more time in the studio). The odd thing is that the less time I have to draw in the studio, the more time I have to disconnect and think and sneak a few sketches.  With all of this repressed creative energy combined with thinking, I have no less than four drawings that I have started to compose (sketch, plan, resketch), three of which are elaborate narrative portraits.  I think this is a record for me...usually I only plan one or two drawings out from the one that I am currently drawing.  I do not work in a traditional " series " where I explore a single idea - rather I evolve through a continuum...which means that one or two of the planned drawings may be scrapped or totally altered by the time I get to actually rendering the final pieces.

I have plenty of studio time on the horizon, so I know the drawings will emanate soon, but out of frustration I am feeling the need for instant gratification visual stimulation this week, so here are more macro garden photos.

Clover:

Thanks to all the rain, there is a fungus amungus...and this one looks like the classic toad stool to me:

Hey, Hey, Hey, is it me or does this mushroom look like Dumb Donald from Fat Albert?:

More daylilies...they are so beautiful and sensual...I thought the veins in this one were rather womb like:

Nasturtiums, again...the red ones are also quite suggestive and have an almost prodigal lushness:

Macro Fun in the Garden I

Although I do not usually chitchat about weather, I have to say that the rainy weather has been a touch ridiculous.  Out of the past three weeks there have been 3 partial-days of sun.  This is not Seattle, so I have come to expect a little more warm and sunny spring/summer weather during the month of June.  As a result, my yard has been getting out of hand and the wisteria has begun an aggressive creep into the neighbor's yard (yes, I do know that this is the worst of the non-native plants to put in your garden, but I absolutely love the spring blooms and I usually keep it pruned back). My garden has been the source of many reference photographs for drawings, and I use a very low-end digital camera to photograph plants, bugs, and rocks.  I have discovered that it actually makes very nice macro shots and with a little practice I can really push the quality of the photos.  This is not like a digital SLR where I can manipulate depth of field and all those other good photog tricks (which have become a little hazy since I put my 35 mm in the closet a few years back), but the results are not bad.

Since my drawing has been at an awkward stage for over a week (in other words, it is not at a point to show in-progress images), the next couple of blogs are macro photos of the micro world in my garden.

Geranium:

Daylily:

Nasturtium - this is one of the yellow ones; I have a spectacular little display of red ones that I will post in the next few days.  Did Georgia O'Keeffe paint nasturtiums?  I do not know, but they certainly have a certain, well, suggestive quality:

Rose (I was photographing the rose for an upcoming drawing...planning ahead, working out the composition...)

This little guy (some sort of small parasitic wasp) was hanging out on the rose bush:

A newly emerged baby grasshopper - he was so delicate and small that this was just a lucky find since he happened to be sitting on a leaf right next to the thorns that I was photographing:

While I am working in the studio, progress has been very slow ~ the usual distractions around the end of the school year (oh, and that whole adinovirous-swine-flu-tummy-bug thing that has kept a rotating schedule of stay-home kids to pamper...such a studio time killer).

More macro photos soon.