Praeterita

Here's three new small collages from my sketchbook, as yet untitled:   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

During my travels in July and August, when I was away from my studio, I took a big Moleskine sketchbook, some scissors, glue, and crayons, and made some collages using bits of magazine pages I found wherever I was. The imagery all goes back to industrial buildings, mines, and so on from my childhood. When I got back to Chicago, I added some bits of text to heighten the narrative somewhat. Here are some results (you'll probably have to click on the images and embiggen them to see the text properly):   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Joshua Tree National Park, California, 1997 “We should talk less and draw more. Personally I would like to renounce speech altogether, and like organic nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches.”—Goethe.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

On the road into Granada, Spain, 1991 “As in the fourteen likes of a sonnet, a few strokes of the pencil can hold immensity.”—Laura Knight.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Patty and I taught the ninth Journal+Sketchbook class of the semester last Thursday. The assignment from the last class was to produce two self-portraits, one in words and one in images. Most students brought in drawings for the visual self-portrait, but a student called Jessica Humphrey brought a sculpture, shown above (cell phone picture - not very hi-def). Considering that this is primarily a writing class, with the sketchbook being used as an aid to see story and scene more fully; and considering that this student doesn't have much prior art training, and was very unconfident in her visual art skills at the start of the semester, this was a big deal. Jessica has been producing more complex drawings in the past few weeks, indicating that her confidence was growing, but when she gave us the box containing this three-dimensional piece, I was just completely bowled over by how good it was. It's a plastic carton, cut in half and covered with coloured clay. The dreadlocks ...

One of the tools I teach the students in the Journal+Sketchbook class is contour drawing. It's a technique where you follow the contours (edges and insides of objects) with your eye, and try to draw what you see without looking at the page and without lifting the pen from the page (or lifting the pen as little as possible). Expressiveness rather than accuracy is the aim, but often you get semi-accurate drawings that are also very interesting too. Above is a contour drawing from my sketchbook, done while I was in a meeting on Friday afternoon.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

William Blake, Title page to 'Songs of Innocence' (1789) I talked in the previous post about writers who drew, or painted, and I suggested some reasons about why writers would deviate into visual art. What about artists who write? For some reason, there are comparatively few artists who turned to writing in the same way that writers turned to art. Maybe if you go back to Renaissance Italy, you find painters and sculptors who wrote poetry as part of their cultivation of a rounded personality. Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo wrote sonnets that are still anthologized:  Michelangelo: Sonnet with marginal drawing Vasari, who wrote the unreliable but entertaining ‘Lives of the Artists’ was himself a painter. William Blake is perhaps the greatest example of an artist turned writer. He was apprenticed to a printer and ground out a living making reproduction prints for years, while writing poems in his notebooks. The version of ‘Songs of Innocence & Experience’ with his own h...