Cerrito Blanco

Cerrito Blanco
Metalprint (aluminum)

After a sketching trip to the village of Abiquiu I made an etching based on one of my charcoal sketches. After taking the etching through several phases, I scanned the most recent version and made an 18" x 22" digital version to be printed on aluminum.

Wine and Cigars in Abiquiu

Doug Coffin, wine, and Romeo y Julietta in Abiquiu
Digital print, 18 x 12 inches, on high-gloss aluminum, black wedge frame

To celebrate my birthday Robin and I recently spent the day in Abiquiu, a village just an hour north of Santa Fe, former home of Abiquiu's most famous resident, Georgia O’Keeffe, and current home of other awesome artists. After doing some sketching in the area and sharing a Monk’s Ale with Robin at Bode’s General Store, we enjoyed a birthday dinner at the Abiquiu Inn with artist friends Teresa Toole and Joe Hall. After dinner we went to artist Doug Coffin’s house for dessert, champagne, wine, and fine cigars. Robin and Teresa passed on the cigars while I discovered that more than half a cigar is more than I can handle. But, more to the point, it was an amazingly beautiful and satisfying day of geezerness celebration. And it inspired me to move on to some projects I’ve been thinking about. One of those projects was to make an etching of a charcoal drawing I had done recently of Doug in his studio. After taking the etching through several stages (soft ground, then a couple of stages of dry point) I scanned the printed proof, then created a digital print, shown above. Nothing says “artist” like high-gloss aluminum. But maybe that’s just me. 

Black Wrist Band

Black Wrist Band

After you’ve named so many poses things like “Reclining Woman,” “Seated Nude,” and “Kneeling Model,” it gets harder and harder to name drawings something descriptive. I mean it’s not like I can use names such as “Woman in Plaid Shirt,” or “Model in Blue Dress.” The Wednesday night model was thoughtful enough to wear a black wrist band. Thank you!

Mystical

St. Patrick’s Day

Last Tuesday night’s drawing group happened to fall on St. Patrick’s Day which also happened to be my birthday. Although the model wasn’t Irish, she did remind me of how St. Patrick was accused of seducing money from wealthy women for his church. And, coincidently or not, there were absolutely no snakes anywhere to be seen during the three hours of poses. Freakin’ mystical!

Hands

Hands of a Model
Charcoal on newsprint

After drawing the model for over two hours in various poses, with varying degrees of inaccuracy, I spent the last part of the last pose just drawing the model’s hands. Looks just like him, I think.

Waiting for a Table

Waiting for a Table at Harry’s Roadhouse
Metal print (aluminum)
14 x 11

Woman on a Pillow

Woman on a Pillow
Charcoal on newsprint

Some of our best models are really good at making a pose difficult to draw. You get used to seeing (and drawing) a head on top of a body with arms and legs in pretty much the usual places. Then all of sudden the model does something like this and nothing looks familiar. But these unusual poses sometimes turn out better than the more ordinary poses, probably because they force you to concentrate more on the relationships between shapes and lines. This might be another one to add to my etching series of life models.

Missing Stool

Missing Stool
Charcoal on newsprint

I’m just now getting a chance to scan some drawings from a couple of weeks ago. I think her right foot was elevated on a stool that I didn’t have time to draw. Or maybe I just lost touch with visual reality and totally failed in the drawing apartment. That happens a lot, but for now I’ll go with the missing stool version.

Waiting for a Table

I don’t sketch as often as I should when I’m out and about. But on this particular night (years ago) we took an out-of-town guest to Harry’s Roadhouse for dinner. The place is very popular, both for food and Santa Fe atmosphere. Which also means lots of people go there and at peak hours and you might have to wait for a table, especially in the summertime. I had been encouraging our guest to draw, so I took a sketchpad and while we were waiting for a table I made a quick sketch of Robin in her table-waiting pose. Skip forward about 10 years and when I ran across a scan of the sketch on my iMac I decided it would make a good etching project that I could keep loose and experiment with in various stages. The version above went from sketch to soft ground etching, then to a small amount of dry point etching,  then to digital print. 

In the next step, below, I added more tone and digital texture to the background, and also lightened some areas of tone to create highlight areas.  

   

From the Back

Quick Sketch from the Back
Charcoal on newsprint

I’m always surprised how foreshortened poses can make such interesting shapes. I’m also surprised when a quick two-minute sketch of a foreshortened pose turns out to be half-way decent. I think I’ll add this one to the series of etchings that I’m working on.

The Gaze

The Gaze
Charcoal

Mastering “the gaze” is essential to being a great model. 

It usually takes a lifetime of modeling to perfect it. 

Last night’s model, however, was a natural.

If my drawing was as good as her gaze, I’d be famous.

   

Last Pose

I usually sketch on newsprint because I like the silky way it feels with charcoal, but newsprint is treated with utter disdain by some artists whose opinions I respect.

So I switched to white paper for the last half-dozen poses of the night. Most of the white-paper drawings were hideous, but on the last pose of the night I made two attempts (before and after the model's five minute break).  The second drawing at least made me rethink my plan to dump the whole white paper pad into the trash bin on the way out.

Last Drawing of the Last Pose of the Night
Charcoal on white paper

Profiled

I’ve ordered this print as a MetalPrint on aluminum, but I think it would also look pretty good as a huge canvas. Hanging in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Next to a Toulouse-Lautrec. 

Could somebody please make that happen? 

Or even the Tate Modern in London. 

Thank you!

Joey Profiled
10 x 14 inches
Digital print on aluminum, from a charcoal on newsprint life drawing

Love Seeds

Love Seeding
Digital print
20 x 30 inches

We don’t always have angels posing for us on Tuesday nights. Sometimes it’s just a goddess who’s in charge of an upcoming holiday, like Valentine’s Day, for example. I’m not sure everyone realized what she was up to while in this pose, but her spell worked pretty well on most of the men and at least half of the women.

Black Choker

The Black Choker

I’m spending more time in the Etching Studio and slowly learning how to combine various techniques. And trying improve basic skills like inking and wiping a copper plate. This digital image, based on a scanned etching, which was based on a drawing from a Tuesday night drawing group, combines soft ground and drypoint techniques. The original etching is 6" x 5". The digital print shown here is 12" x 15", which doesn’t include a 1" border of plain white paper all around.

New Etchings

Female Study
Copperplate etching
6" x 5"

Stack of Pillows
Copperplate etching
5" x 6"

These copperplate etchings (soft ground method) are based on charcoal drawings done at the famous Tuesday Night Drawing Group at the famous Argos Gallery & Etching Studio in Santa Fe. I scanned the etchings, then made digital prints of the etchings.

Charcoal to etching to digital. Or, Tinker to Evers to Chance. That’s an expression often used to characterize a process that happens with smoothness and precision . . . if you’re old enough to remember the three baseball players who became famous for their skill at making double plays for the Chicago Cubs in the early 1900s (491 double plays between 1906 and 1910).

I wouldn’t know who they were except for the fact that nearly 50 years ago I worked with a copy writer at an advertising agency who came up with a campaign for a client called “Great Combinations.” One of the combinations featured in the series of ads was Tinker to Evers to Chance. 

Their fame was equally due to a poem written by a New York Giants sports writer after watching the trio play against his home team Giants. The poem is known as Tinker to Evers to Chance. It’s also know as Baseball’s Sad Lexicon.

These are the saddest of possible words:

“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”

Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds,

Tinker and Evers and Chance.

 Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble, 

Making a Giant hit into a double.

Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble:

“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”

A gonfalon (line 5 of the poem) is a pennant or flag, or, in this case, the National League championship (represented by a pennant). The poem was so popular that it was credited with getting the three players into the Hall of Fame. 

For almost 50 years I’ve never been able to forget their names. You probably won’t be able to either, but good luck with that. 

Prayerful

Prayerful
Charcoal on newsprint

Prayerful. That’s probably not the word most would use to describe the ambience at the Tuesday Night Drawing services. But we are thankful for such great models and for the artistic fellowship of the Tuesday night congregation. And we’re grateful that Argos Chapel — I mean Gallery — provides an inspirational venue for artists whose souls thirst for drawing (and etching) fulfillment and artistic meaning.

Nothing else to say, I guess, other than “Amen.”

Stack of Pillows

Stack of Pillows
Charcoal on newsprint

One of the charcoal sketches from last Tuesday night’s life drawing group. I’m go to the Etching Studio tonight and tomorrow so I can make an etching of this drawing. 

Etching Better

Just Posing Again
Etching

Now I’ve progressed or regressed into a process of drawing a life model in charcoal, using the drawing to create a traditional etching, then scanning the etching to manipulate it in Photoshop. Very cool (I think) because I end up with an etching and the possibility of virtually unlimited variations for digital prints. Fun stuff.

Etching Bad

Crash and Burn
Etching
6" x 5"

As I mentioned before, I’m learning how to etch. You can't tell by this etching, but I’m making progress. Part of making progress is learning from your mistakes. This mistake pretty much falls into the Epic category. Just about everything bad that happened here happened at the stage of applying a soft ground coating to the copper plate: the ground is too thin, unevenly & sloppily applied; fingerprints and smudges along the edges. A real crash-and-burn etching scenario.

But wait—I sometimes spend hours in Photoshop trying to make images look this grungy. I’ve paid money for backgrounds this ugly. So rather than throw the plate and print away, I scanned the bad etching, used Photoshop’s clone tool to remove the most distracting blobs and blotches, then (most importantly) pretended I created this effect on purpose (a secret trick used by famous artists). 

Ten years from now I fully expect for someone to say “I know that image. Ten years ago my art teacher used it as an example of incredibly bad etching technique.” 

Genius is seldom recognized in cases like this. However, I do feel like I’m starting to get that tortured-artist feeling. I think that’s probably a good sign.