The short answer is, “The paper made me do it.” It is oblong (approximately 5×8 inches). I had to fit my features within this constraint. I have also started wading into my new book, Paul Klee: Irony at Work, by Angela Lampe, Michael Baumgartner. There are a series of portraits at the beginning that captured my […]
One of the books from which I expect to derive inspiration is Paul Klee: Irony at Work by Angela Lampe and Michael Baumgartner. It is from 2016, but new to me. Here it is on my bed.
I am inspired by the line drawings of Paul Klee, the icons of Joan Miró and lines and color patches of Vassily Kandinsky. The study below is a portrait of myself with an eye open to the dreamscape that I visit nearly every night.
Below is another watercolor that I began with a curve that reminded me of a skull (see It Happened So Fast). I built the rest of the figure from there. The swatches in the background toward which the runner proceeds were inspired by Paul Klee’s work. I’m afraid his influence stops there. The trailing edge of […]
Before I began this sketch, I thought of the round-headed characters that are so prevalent in the work of Paul Klee (i.e., Error on the Green, Senecio, Pierrot Lunaire). I drew the head with fine lines of a watery liquid frisket; I created a circular patch with a thicker frisket, that I envisioned to be […]
My readings by, and about Paul Klee, Bauhaus Master, have caused me to seek to draw the simplest possible line that would express what is inside me. Klee said that ‘art does not reproduce the visible but makes visible’. I take this to mean, art is a process through which one’s inner reality is brought […]
In the study below, I used a collection of icons that represent my brother Mike* and me. I’ve also been looking at some of the line drawings of Paul Klee, and marveling at, not only their simplicity, but their flawless placement on the paper. I think this piece stands on its own but I don’t […]
In this study I reduced a portrait of my brother Mike* to a line drawing, borrowing a bit from Paul Klee, Bauhaus Master and Painter from the early part of the 20th century. On the left side of the paper, I drew the same line drawing, first with white pencil, with the hope of creating […]
I’m always thinking about how to portray abstract figures that tell stories. I continually think of Paul Klee’s work and try to imagine placing rounded heads with geometric features; angular, querying block heads among tweeting birds; or stick figures in some kind of Rube Goldberg invention, in a variegated, muted, textured background. Of course I […]
I don’t remember precisely, the name of the first painting I saw, of Paul Klee’s rough grids of colored squares. Here are some of Klee’s paintings in the style to which I refer: Ancient Sound, Abstract on Black; Coming to Bloom; Altimetry of Stripes; Rhythmical, Glass Facade. I looked for patterns of color, but could […]
