Figure Drawing Practice & Coming Home To Myself

Earlier this year, I started attending a figure drawing session at Sanchez Art Center in Pacifica. For a couple of months I attended weekly, then took a break for the summer, and came back this fall again for weekly sessions.

I will be posting more selections from my work as I look back at these drawings (now sitting in a pile on the floor of my studio or in a large drawing pad), but here are five from yesterday’s session.

If you’ve been following my Instagram or Facebook posts, you’ll know that I had a weeklong period of rest during October, brought on by a serious respiratory virus that knocked me down completely. I found myself feeling extreme gratitude for even one breath. Everything slowed down. I could not “do” anything except focus on breathing for several days.

The gift was that I became aware of a deeper current running through my life and my work right now. I remembered the reason I make art. I felt my soul’s hunger for the food of nourishment provided by PLAY, which is the quality that led me to my visual art practice in the first place, back in 2013. Continue reading

My Gettysburg 2017 sketchbook

I’ve had a whirlwind summer of travel, and now I have a few weeks to catch up and review what I created!

My return trip to Gettysburg this year was delightful and busy! I was a visiting teacher at Adams County Arts Council, where I had the joy of teaching a weeklong Sketchbook Journaling summer camp for youth, ages 10 to 13, as well as an adult creativity workshop entitled, “Hope for the Late-Blooming Creative”. I also did an Instagram takeover of Destination Gettysburg for the week, posting three photos a day on their account. On top of that, with the generous support of Lynda Taylor, Monica E. Oss, and J. Jay Mackie of Gettysburg, I was able to transform the lobby of an old bank building into a pop-up exhibition space for one evening. All in one week! This left me few large swaths of time to sketch on the battlefield, but instead compelled me to capture smaller moments around town when I could.

Here are the results.

First some airport sketches: I was astonished that this father was carrying two backpacks (one in front, one in back), and three suitcases through the SFO airport. His partner carried one child in a front pack and a toddler walking next to her. They were not smiling.

Brief layover in Chicago, drawing some faces from memory…

Noticed that the Susquehanna River through Harrisburg was brown with high water, reminding me of some of the swollen rivers I had seen in Southeast Asia.

Then my first meal of the day, with rain pouring outside, at Food 101 in Gettysburg. Delicious! I got caught up in all the ceiling tiles and never got around to sketching my food.

Morning sketch of the Evergreen Cemetery gate on Baltimore Pike in Gettysburg:

Sketch from the back patio of Ragged Edge Coffee House:

And a quick sketch of my food from Ragged Edge:

Quick 10-minute pen and ink sketch (colored in later) of the flowers in the back garden of my airbnb:

My afternoon sketch of the Pennsylvania Monument on the Gettysburg battlefield — almost three hours in the sun doing this one!

I find a shady spot to capture the Gettysburg Hotel, and happen to sit in front of this Ford Model A:

And a report on the magic unfolding, as it always does for me, in Gettysburg:

I am driving around, chasing the sunset, when I catch this view of the Eisenhower Farm, and I pull my car over to sketch from the side of the road.

Wandering around the Soldier’s National Cemetery before 100 Nights of Taps, I notice the bronzed words of the Gettysburg address at the base of this statue.

I take some rubbings in my sketchbook, and I look forward to using them in a future piece:

My students receive a surprise invitation to visit the attic of the Seminary Ridge Museum and sketch the views from there. I manage to snag a 10-minute quick sketch in between taking photos of them.

Every morning as I walked out the back door of my airbnb to go the half-block to Adams County Arts Council, I saw this view of the Thaddeus Stevens log cabin on Middle Street. One morning I finally took out my stool and sketched it.

More food notes and sketches.

At the end of my trip to Gettysburg, I had one afternoon to spend in Harrisburg before leaving on an early morning train to Vermont. It was a gorgeous day, so I luxuriated in a sketch walk around the capitol building and riverfront, followed by dinner at Cork & Fork.

Harrisburg State Capitol Building, with a lime green dome (!):

Study of a historic mansion’s roofline on Front Street:

Wanted to find a way to quickly record some of the architecture and the presence of the river on this walk, so I attempted an illustrated map:

At dinner, I sat outside and could not help being inundated with the loud conversation of the table behind me. I embraced it as a illustration opportunity and created this collage of phrases overheard:

The food was excellent, and I had to create this mini tribute to Cork & Fork Harrisburg:

Visit my Facebook page for photos of my students at work, and stay tuned for stories and images of my time in Vermont!

Yosemite backcountry sketchbook 2017

Once again, this year I had the opportunity to go to Yosemite National Park in July for twelve days (see here for my 2016 trip stories and sketches). Four nights, five days of wilderness backpacking followed by seven days six nights of volunteering for Yosemite Conservancy. Below are the images from my backpacking trip.

I used a small, handmade sketchbook using landscape shaped scraps of watercolor paper, painted cardboard box covers, and nylon yarn as binding. My tools were a Pigma Micron 01 pen, a Pigma Sensei 06 pen, Aquash large and medium size water brushes, and my own mini palettes of Daniel Smith watercolors (sixteen total colors). The last three pages I finished coloring when I got to Yosemite Valley on the afternoon of Day Five. The rest I completed on site, in the backcountry. All except the rout map were painted from memory or en plein air, not from photographs.

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I also returned to an old favorite format: 6-inch by 6-inch squares, which I brought on my 2014 trip to Yosemite while I was completing work for the 50|50 show, a 50-day process of creating fifty works, all measuring six inches by six inches. I love the small square format, and Fluid Watercolor paper from Global Art Materials, Inc., comes in a great portable block that fits in my front pack in the backcountry. I love the Fluid “Easy Block” because it’s easy to remove finished paintings in the field (a key feature for backcountry sketching). Also, the paper is acid-free and archival, meaning the finished pieces are ready to be mounted or framed.

Stay tuned for images from my Yosemite Valley week…to be posted after I get back from Gettysburg!

Yosemite Series: Day Eleven

Day 11: Friday Finale, Milkweed Beetles, & Food Upcycling

Today’s forecasted high is 103 degrees. It is the last day of work for the volunteer crew. Two other times in the past, I’ve participated in the picnic table building, so I remember certain things quite well. The vice grips used by one person to hold the head of a stripped bolt, while a power drill is used by another to unscrew the nut from the other side. Moving wood planks and metal hardware into position, placing nuts and hitting them with the power drills. Recharging the drills. Painting the wood planks. Lifting, flipping, and carrying the finished tables.

This year I don’t do any of that. It’s Randy and the other eleven volunteers who pile into the van each morning and drive over to Lower Pines campground, near the amphitheater, to do this work. Continue reading

Yosemite Series: Day Ten

Day 10: Starting Out Early In The Morning

Thursday. I am well aware that I have only this and one more morning in which to get out early enough to sketch and paint before the baking sun begins to saturate the Valley. I’m on my bike by eight o’clock. Sara Midda’s South of France sketchbook pops into my head, with her delicate vignettes depicting details, colors, and memories of every season of the year in southern France. I decide to make vignettes of the smallest details I can find this morning on my bike ride. I’ve been trying to stare at massive granite walls and follow the contours with my eyes and hands. Now I’m going to notice the minutiae. Continue reading

Yosemite Series: Day Nine

Day 9: Made in the Shade

Wednesday is the volunteers’ day off. In years past, we have spent our Wednesdays doing such ambitious hikes as Mount Dana, Mount Hoffmann, and Four Mile Trail. But two years ago, knowing we had a backpacking trip ahead of us, tacked onto the end of the work week, we decided to take it easy. One of the other volunteers lent us his inflatable raft. We took the shuttle bus all the way to Happy Isles, and found a spot to put in near Sugar Pine bridge. The water was so low we were sitting on rocks for much of the time, but we did manage to make our way all the way to our home base, just past Sentinel Beach.

This year, having already worked hard on our backpacking trip, and with the exceptional heat (today’s high forecast to be 103), we have a very unambitious agenda. We get on our bikes and see if we can catch the ranger program at 9:30. Turns out it is cancelled. We head just beyond the Yosemite Museum to the Yosemite Cemetery. I never knew there was a cemetery until Ranger Karen mentioned yesterday that the only sequoia trees in the Valley are the ones planted around the tombstone of Galen Clark, Yosemite’s first park ranger. Continue reading

Yosemite Series: Day Eight

Day 8: Geo-Mythology, Ranger Karen, and Lisa-Chu-rri Sauce

I am up before my 5:45am alarm again. Today’s breakfast menu is hash browns, scrambled eggs, sausage patties, and the leftover black bean and corn salad from last night’s dinner. I find out Mary Lou has never made hash browns from boxed or frozen potatoes…only by grating fresh ones.

“Trust me, it’ll work,” I say. We have picked up a carton of dehydrated shredded potatoes from Yosemite Lodge, and I am ready to go at them, testing my hash brown flipping skills on a larger scale than I’ve ever done before. The skillets we have are the size of backyard garbage can lids. The spatula is the size of a Kindle reader. Mary Lou is a skeptic all the way until the moment she tastes the cooked hash browns. Continue reading