Elizabeth Adams's Blog, page 78

Drawing #12

Elizabeth in her Choir Robe, pencil on colored bond, 7" x 11"

This fast portrait of a choir friend was actually done a couple of weeks ago; we were sitting in the organ loft, separated by the organ itself, listening to the sermon (that's a cord for her glasses you can see in the picture, not headphones!) Elizabeth, who is an Anglican priest as well as a choir singer, had her eyes shut and was sitting very quietly, so she was a tempting subject. I drew this on the back of the music schedule that I had in my folder, where I also always have a pencil  for marking my music. It's not a perfect likeless, but pretty close, and it gives you some idea about the voluminous robes we wear, which are becoming very hot these days!

I've been wanting to post this but kept forgetting to bring it home until last night. (This is a substitute for yesterday's actual drawing, which started out well but met with disaster!)

 

 

Drawing #11, Ascension -- with accompaniment by Purcell and Messiaen

Composition study after The Ascension of Christ, by Rembrandt. Conté crayon on paper, 11"x 8 1/2".

I've never made copies or studies of paintings, but this afternoon has shown me why it's such a valuable exercise: I learned so much doing this study! What interested me most about Rembrandt's painting was not the ascending Christ surrounded by cherubim, but this brilliant grouping of the apostles to the right, watching him leave. You almost don't need the figure of Christ at all: his light is reflected in the blond figure at the center and on the faces and hands. The range of emotions portrayed tells the entire story.

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We're having a particularly nice musical day tomorrow, in honor of Ascension Day (which was on Thursday.) It's one of our half-choir Sundays, so a smaller group (12-14 of us, probably) will be singing the following program, much of it by Purcell, for Evensong, which you can hear streamed live at 4:00 p.m. eastern daylight time. (The link is below.) Our organist and choir director, Patrick Wedd, is a leading interpreter of the organ music of Olivier Messiaen. On Thursday he played the entire work, L’Ascension, by Messiaen as a concert. But you can hear two parts of it as the prelude and postlude, during the live broadcast tomorrow.

PROGRAMME: 4:00 pm Evensong

The Cathedral Singers, Christ Church Cathedral, Montreal

(For live streaming via Radio Ville Marie, click here)




Prelude: Majesté du Christ from L’Ascension [Trotter: musicMe], Olivier Messiaen
(1908-92)

 

Introit: O God, the king of glory [text] [Brown: YouTube], Henry Purcell (1659-95)



Preces and Responses: [Westbury: YouTube] Richard Ayleward (1626-69



Psalm: 24 (Bamby)

 

Canticles: Service in B-flat [Pinnock: YouTube], Henry Purcell



Anthem: Ascendens Christus [text], Jacob Handl (1550-91)



Postlude: Prière du Christ from L’Ascension [Trotter: musicMe], Olivier Messiaen

 

I'm sorry you won't be able to hear a live performance of Couperin's fantastic "Motet pour le jour de Pâcques" ("Motet for Easter Day") which will be sung tomorrow morning by two of my friends, Cynthia Gates and Meagan Zantingh, both professionals in our choir. However, if you want to hear the piece, here's a YouTube performance of the same work, sung by Emma Kirkby and Judith Nelson with Christopher Hogwood on the organ. (Just ignore the drecky artwork!)

Hope some of you can join us tomorrow. It always makes me happy to think that a few friends are out there listening! Next week is Pentecost, so stay tuned.

(Publishing this one a day early, since I'll be in church all day tomorrow.)

A Drawing a Day: #10

Street musician across from Birks, Montreal. Felt pen and wash in an Omer de Serres sketchbook, 8"x 11."

Birks is an iconic jewelry store in the heart of downtown Montreal, right across from the cathedral (hence the churchy-looking wrought iron fence) on the corner of Union and St. Catherine. I did this ten-minute sketch, leaving out all the cars, signposts, and trash receptacles, while waiting for a friend yesterday afternoon. This morning I added some watercolor, and pretty much ruined it! Glad I photographed it first.

As I wrote to another artist recently, I've pretty much stopped using sketchbooks. I find I prefer to carry loose sheets of papers I like, bound with rubber bands between stiff boards all cut the same size. Then I can just choose a sheet and work on it, without the problem of a fold, and the paper can be of better quality. Lately I've been working on Stonehenge, a nice multi-media paper from Maidstone/Rising Line (the same paper I used for the big Icelandic drawings), and on Arches hotpress watercolor paper. When I tried to use this sketchbook yesterday I was really unhappy - the paper is comparatively absorbent, and awful for watercolor or any kind of washes. If I decide to use sketchbooks again, I'm going to continue to make them or buy a Stillman&Birns specifically for wet and dry media. What I do like about sketchbooks is their diary-quality, which you certainly don't get with cut sheets  (unless you post the results to a blog!)

A Drawing a Day: #9

Taking off from the portrait of my mother-in-law, I was wondering where could be done with the basic facial structure. I did a bunch of these; they're sort of calligraphic. These were the two I liked best:

 

This second one is less of a likeness, but a rather satisfying drawing. It makes a difference in the feeling of the portrait to include the eyes, doesn't it?

A Drawing a Day: #8

Marjorie. Pencil on paper, 6" x 9".

Drawing, slowly, I caress her face as I never did in life, feeling the bones under her fine thin skin. Her birth, 100 years ago, give or take a few; Armenia, Alexandria:
implausible route to another birth, the body known like my own.

My mother-in-law's birthday was yesterday, May 8, and I wanted to spend my drawing time with her. Originally I had thought of drawing a still life based on some of her things, or things that remind me of her, but then I looked at some of my husband's beautiful photographs of his beautiful mother, and decided, instead, to try a portrait.

While doing this drawing, I studied her face as I never had in real life, and afterward, I realized I had learned it in a new way. Later, in bed, I looked closely at my husband. What are you doing? he asked. Comparing your face to hers, I said. And there's not much resemblance, really. No, he said, I think I look like her father, my grandfather. Yes, I said, a combination of his face and your own father's, but narrower.

Curiously, both my mother-in-law and father-in-law had those deep set hollows in their cheeks.

She was a wonderful person; I miss her. Because she was a refugee from Armenia as a young girl, there was no birth certificate, and she insisted that she never knew exactly how old she was. But she would have been about a hundred yesterday. I miss her loving presence in our life; her laughter when delighted that made her face look like a little girl; I miss her love of fine handicrafts and color and flowers, her commitment to peace, her intelligence, her fierce caring for her family. And I miss her cooking: the taboulleh and kibbeh and yogurt soups, and especially her sambousek made for all birthday celebrations except her own. She's been gone for about twelve years; I'm glad we were fortunate enough to have her with us for so long.

Tomorrow: further explorations of a face.

A Drawing a Day: #7

At the Vietnamese Resto. Fast sketch in brown felt pen on crummy paper out of my purse, about this size.

It's becoming clear to me that keeping up this pace is going to be impossible if I do "finished" drawings each time, especially the ones with watercolor added. So there will be some days with fast sketches like this one. Good thing I didn't use the placemat, because a few minutes later we spilled a cup of sauce all over it!

A Drawing a Day: #6

Top of the Craftsman Tool Chest. Pen and watercolor on paper, 9"x6".

Sheer silliness here, but I hope some readers will be amused. Quite a few bike-related items here. Maybe another good title would be "STP."

This was good practice too: drawing all those compound shapes, none of which were lined up in the same plane, and trying not to get so stuck that the drawing lost all it energy.

That object with the dial and knurled valves is, ironically, the regulator from my old airbrush compressor. Haven't used that for its original purpose for a long time - we use our compressors (we have two) for cleaning delicate photographic equipment, and blowing up bike tires.

A Drawing a Day: #5

The first bouquet. Pen and watercolor on paper, 6" x 9". Lifesize detail below.



I wasn't planning to do pretty flower pictures, but I brought home this little bouquet of violets and a dwarf tulip from the garden today and put them in a small, heavy Victorian glass vase with a gold wash on the rim - and they ended up calling out to be drawn more than anything else in the house. I love the busy but delicate shapes of all the members of the violet family, from Johnny jump-ups to pansys, but these ordinary field violets are probably my favorites. I wasn't totally into this drawing - I was rushing because we had to meet someone - and had some trouble as a result. (Perpetual note to self: Beth, don't rush!)  Anyway, it's all OK, this is practice!

A Drawing a Day: #4

Study of Quebecois braided palms. Pencil on paper, 8 1/2" x 11". Click image for larger view.

It's pretty crazy to sit and draw something like this, but I've been wanting to use these palms as part of a painting or a large drawing, and knew I needed to make a detailed drawing of them first to get their structure in my mind. I've been putting it off, for obvious reasons, but once I got going I enjoyed doing it.

We've had these now-dried braided palms in a brass vase since Palm Sunday a year ago, and I just love them - the original green has faded to a light straw color, and the forms are very pleasing to me. I had never seen this technique before moving to Quebec. I learned how to make them from a friend who has been braiding them since childhood. It's the same basic braiding technique as the plastic four-strand lanyards some of you may have made in summer camp as kids. But it's a different story to draw them! First I sketched in the proportions and placements for the study, and then started with the most detailed cluster, at the top, drawing a light outline of the whole shape and then dividing it into four sections to contain the two top row of curved segments and the two rows on the side. Then I counted the actual number of loops, and drew the basic structure with a very hard pencil, then went back and added the shadow detail with a darker, softer pencil, and finally used the harder one to add the midtones and a more definite, firmer edge. By the time I'd drawn this first cluster, I had "gotten" the structure in my head, and could then draw the others a lot faster without having to constantly refer to the object itself. At the end I added the background detail of the taller palm fronds.

It's that way with a lot of things that occur in nature or have some sort of repetitive pattern - you have to study how the pattern works and then you can reproduce it, but if you don't figure it out you can't see why your drawing isn't working, and then you're just drawing by rote, which is totally exhausting. A pinecone would be a another good example, or the whorl of seeds in the center of a sunflower. It's like solving a little visual enigma.

If I use these palms again I may want to draw them very freely - and that would be impossible -- for me, anyway -- without going through this exercise.

I remember once having a professional job of making business cards and a brochure for a woman who did creative knitting. She wanted a background image of a piece of knitting - mostly straight stockinette stitch - but with some increases and decreases that created curved areas on the flat surface. At the time we had an employee who was quite talented in design. I asked her to draw the image, lifesize, using the knitted sample as her guide. She produced several samples, but they were all wrong -- as it turned out, she couldn't "see" the basic structure of the knit stitch. Even when I explained it and showed her, in a simple sketch, where the thread went and what went over and what wentunder, she couldn't reproduce it. I think that was because she really couldn't "see" it. This was a sobering realization for me, and it made me question some assumptions I'd always made about visual perception and intellectual understanding - perceptions based on how my own mind works, obviously. It was also a lesson for me as an employer -- I had asked her to do something, under a deadline, that she couldn't do easily at all, and she had ended up feeling frustrated and like she had failed, even though I tried really hard to backtrack and not leave her with that impression. I've always felt bad about that, and I know what it feels like: the physical sciences and certain aspects of technology have at times reduced me to tears, and my inability to grasp basic concepts embarrasses me the most when when well-meaning friends who do "get it" are trying to explain the subjects to me. I hate feeling stupid or inept; is it any wonder we avoid the areas where we don't have natural aptitude, and gravitate toward those where we do? Different people's minds are simply different.

I still wonder, though, if it's possible to teach someone to see this way, and how much of the disconnect between hand and eye that makes many of us feel that we "can't draw" is the result of bad experiences of not "doing it right," how much is temperament, and how much is a difference in our brains. No matter how expressive we may want to be, or are encouraged to be, for most people drawing still starts with attempts to reproduce what they see. A good teacher can do a lot, I think, to help overcome the fears and frustrations, and to help the pupil learn to see visual relationships and structures. I've always felt that most people can draw far better than they think, but it does take practice and patience -- and kindness.

 

 

A Drawing a Day: #3

Time to Clean the Terrace. Pen on paper, 6"x 6"