Here’s a quick watercolor/charcoal/pencil sketch of my brother Dave’s hands. It is a wonderful experience watching his hands in action at the piano. I would love to do a series of detailed drawings and paintings of his hands frozen at different times during a performance.
I did not sketch the study below from life. I watched my brother play the piano yesterday and tried to absorb the experience. Yesterday’s watercolor was meant to capture Dave’s graceful motions of his hands. Today, I reconstructed his posture from an angle that I had not observed. I think it shows stability and groundedness […]
My younger brother is visiting us this week. It is really good to see him. We’ve been talking up a storm about music, performance and visual arts. Dave is a pianist. He’s given me insight about expression within the constraint of the page of written music that, in the case of some pieces, has been […]
I used my broad-tipped nib again to begin today’s study. It takes some determination on the cold pressed paper, as there is a definite tooth to it. As I drew the short lines, I spaced them as the black keys of a piano. The design progressed from there.
I have a lot of Celtic Harp music. I used to love playing Irish fiddle tunes with other musicians. When I listen to Irish music, I can barely keep my fingers still. I think I put them to good use as I listened to harp music the other day. With a dip pen in my hand, my pen followed […]
I was very, very nervous the night before I was to go away to college for the first time. Even though this was more than 45 years ago, I still remember how agitated I was. I had a recording of some of Bach’s organ music. The pieces that helped me the most were Toccata And Fugue […]
I’ve mentioned before that both my parents loved music. Dad let my older brother Mike* play on the piano and I’m sure they played classical music records all the time when he was around. For a time Mike responded. I’m told he could hum entire movements from symphonies. By the time I came on the scene, Mike […]
Today’s watercolor experiment: Two factors influenced my artwork today. First, one of my favorite artists, Paul Klee, described a way to ‘make visible’ one’s inner state was to take a pencil point ‘for a walk’. Although I’m not clear about how to translate my inner state to the paper, I believe the practice of ‘taking a point for […]
Today’s watercolor experiment: I began today’s study simply: I applied several yellowish pigments to a completely wet watercolor paper. In Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, he equates forms with colors. Yellow, to use today’s example, is one of the ‘keen’ colors that is consonant with a sharp, or triangular shape. I wanted to see what would happen […]
My wife, Joy and I just started watching Mad Men. Frankly I was a little bit leery about rehashing the 1950s and its prevailing attitudes. Drinking, smoking, antisemitism, treating women badly was the norm back then. The protagonist, Don Draper, is a mysterious, emotionally empty Madison Avenue ad agency creative director. Little by little we […]
