Paper and Threads

This week the "weekday" Urban Sketchers NYC group met at the Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation.  This is a little known gem in the Village only several blocks from Washington Square.  Chaim Gross was a sculptor and painter in NYC from his arrival from Europe after WWI until his death in 1991.  After raising two children on the Upper Westside of NYC, he and his wife moved into a new home at 526 LaGuardia Place which served both as their home and studio.  It is open Thursdays and Fridays from 1-5 and artists are welcome. 

http://www.rcgrossfoundation.org/ 

This is the first floor, just inside the entrance:

Overlooking the studio - with an incredible number of pieces and everything left as it was when he died:

The second floor contains his private art collection which is amazing, and special exhibits.  The 3rd floor has paintings from his contemporaries, and a huge African Art Collection.

My sketches:

Two heads - one black and white marble and the other beige - and 4 of his wood sculptures on the first floor and studio.

Yoruba beaded wooden sculpture and several other African art pieces on the 3rd floor. 

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We are still drawing and shading with graphite in my FIT Drawing Class.  This week our in-class assignment was to draw and sketch this plant - dark green with light pink veins on the leaves.  The class sits in a BIG square, at drawing desks, at least 6-8 feet back from the central table.  A bright standing lamp is directed at the object to create shadows.  As before, I finished drawing the plant and vase, and then thought only about my watercolor paints!  And as before I remind myself that this is my first drawing class and I need to concentrate on the requirements of this course and use graphite to shade instead of paints to add color!

I finished early and was bored again, so I added 3 classmates to what will probably become a crowd! 

I bought beautiful tulips for our apartment last week in anticipation of the first day of spring.  My husband worried that they would be wilted by Saturday/Sunday.  Here they are in a quick painting. 

And here is the view from my Window at 6AM on the first day of Spring. 

We had 4.5 inches of snow in Central Park by the time the snow ended!  And we are all still wearing heavy down coats with hoods up! 

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Sketchbook Skool Semester 3 overlapped with our vacation last Fall, and I still want to do homework assignments from Weeks 3 and 4.  I was too busy, that is my excuse.  But really that is subterfuge.  Both Mattias Adolfsson and Jean-Christophe Defline assigned us homework that required drawings from our imagination.  YIKES!  That is not easy for me - I draw what I see.   I can combine my subjects into new compositions, but I rarely draw anything completely from my imagination. 

So for 6 months I've been periodically thinking about my first day of school - many, many years ago for sure.  I had no specific story to tell, I can't even remember my kindergarten teacher's name.  But I did have an image of a corner of the room, with a rug, tables, chairs, and toys.  And I knew that my mother walked me to school and dropped me off in the classroom on my first day.

So I finally just sat down and started drawing.  I knew my hair style, and my Mother's hair style and the clothes I probably wore.  So here, finally, is a story about my first day of kindergarten.

Our second homework assignment from Mattias is to do a meta-drawing.  I think I need to let that roll around in my brain for awhile too, but hopefully not for 6 months.  I am even confused about the exact meaning:  Meta-film is a film about making a film.  Mattias elaborates on the assignment by calling it a drawing with enhanced reality. 

Posted by Shirley at 1:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I'm posting two completely unrelated Sketchbook pages today.  My friend Pat and I went to two Asian Art Auction Previews on Friday.  Sotheby's had a terrific preview for their Modern and Contemporary Asian Art Auction.  Over the last two years, I've discovered several Indian artists whose work I LOVE, and there were many paintings by each of them (Husain, Prahba, and Souza).  Christies was a disappointment for those of us who weren't there to see Asian ceramics, jades, brass sculptures etc., because they had 1600 art objects from one collection to auction!  But the paintings on the Chinese scrolls definitely made up for it.  I took lots of pictures so I can try to learn from the brush drawings of roosters, tigers, herons, camels, and chickens. 

I sketched one painting, and one detail of stylized cows from another painting at Sothbys, on one sketchbook page, to remember the day.

Yesterday I watched a video called The Life of an Artist (2012) by Adebanji Alade that was very inspirational. 

The Life of an Artist  http://adebanjialade.blogspot.com/search/label/video 

I paused the video while he was sketching on public transportation and sketched him, so I could remember his advice, "Sketch, Sketch, Sketch and Draw, Draw, Draw."   Oops - misspelled his first name on the sketchbook page!

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This was our second week of drawing and shading.  I haven't had a drawing class before, but this one seems to be moving VERY Slowly.  There was a still life bouquet for us to draw and shade, and then hard-boiled eggs that we each brought in from home.  One of the best parts of the exercise was having an amazing standing lamp lighting the flowers, and vase, and casting shadows.  This was an 11X14 inch drawing that was photographed.

The egg looked so small set up on the central table, and was harder to shade than I anticipated.   

Then I got bored while everyone was still working, so I sketched one of my classmates. 

Posted by Shirley at 10:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)