My sketch below is an abstract portrait of my older brother Michael. Mike is autistic, very low functioning and nonverbal. My eye is peering at him, as I have my whole life, trying to understand. Several of my earlier posts might better explain (or at least elaborate upon) my lifelong obsession with Mike. As one […]
The study below was inspired, in part, by my recent birthday as well as by Joan Miró. My mother always used to say, “May you live to be one hundred and twenty.” By her reckoning, I am just past middle age. I don’t feel old and yet, by many standards, I am. I get a […]
I started today by trying to sketch a two dimensional representation of a hyperbolic parabola. When I was a kid, my dad brought me a fiberglass model of this shape. He told me that it had the same form as that of a saddle. Unfortunately, my sketch didn’t work as I intended. I used my compass to draw […]
Paul Klee, the famous Bauhaus Master stated that the duty of an artist is not to reproduce the visible but to “make visible”. I’ve always had the ambition to paint or draw the way I am feeling. I admire Klee’s work, so I hope this is what he had in mind. Today I was feeling tangled. […]
Today’s watercolor was an experiment with curves and a plane. I began with a free-form pencil sketch with certain shapes in mind. Then I created a plane superimposed on the design, that appears to recede into the paper. To do this, I drew a grid with non-parallel lines and used cool colors to represent the areas furthest from […]
I’m always on the lookout for interesting things to photograph. Shiny things are on the list. I am particularly attracted to fire plugs as sculpture. I have an extensive series of photographs and drawings of fire hydrants and other water distribution systems. Here are some of my posts featuring fire plugs and standpipes: Fireplugs, the Beginning, What Luck!, […]
I present my abstract today without delving into process too much. I will say that I still include tokens (expressed as iconic forms) of the influence my brother Mike* had (and still has) on me. Here are the recent posts that document the development of some of the symbols I use in this series of studies: Seeking Inspiration, […]
I let my pencil point out for a walk today. I admit I had a plan about which areas of the paper it should traverse, based on my work of the past couple of days (Motor Tic, Planes of Unreality, Abstract Double Portrait). I wanted the terrain to include hands and brains, particularly my brain […]
I used the shape I discovered yesterday to construct today’s composition. This squashed kidney bean became my older brother‘s* head in his particular plane of reality in that study. I expanded on my Miró-inspired shape by superimposing and rotating that shape to form the basis of another head. I included Mike’s hands, which he uses […]
The stick figure in my composition below was inspired by Miró. On half of the paper, I incorporated my brother’s wandering eye and a freeze-frame of his hands, shown in positions where he typically held them. [Note: my older brother Michael is autistic, low functioning and nonverbal.] On the other half of the paper, divided by […]
