Location sketch

Day at the museum

I’m on a new-ish schedule at work, in which Tuesday and Wednesday are my Saturday and Sunday. So yesterday I spent a few hours at the LA County Museum of Art. It’s the first time in about a year or so that I’d been there. There’s currently a great, albeit small, exhibit of Gustav Klimt’s original paintings, which were more inspiring than I was expecting, for some reason. The landscapes were my favorites – he had a very technically free and yet compositionally controlled painting style, with less regard for light and perspective than for surface and pattern; and yet he pulls it off without seeming mannered, or self-conscious or overly clever. All the paintings had a great sense of honesty to them. I guess I’d never really seen a Klimt up close, and I suppose I had been selling him short. This exhibit really was a pleasant surprise.

The Japanese Pavilion is a strange building – and my usual favorite part of the museum. I sketched it above. Inside all the art is lighted by natural light diffused through shoji screen like windows. You follow a gradual, serpentine path down through the building, criss-crossing an indoor stream that follows a similar path. It’s great. Very relaxing.

May 31, 2006 0

Emma

Visiting us with her family before moving to another state.

May 27, 2006 0

Roll top desk

My dad (who knows these things) says it’s more than 100 years old. Joan bought it from a friend in Hollywood a few years ago. Notice the large portrait on the top right. That’s the home now of the ancestor photo I blogged about a while back. I’m still reading Danny Gregory’s amazing book, which prompted me to draw this piece of furniture that I’ve become so accustomed to that I don’t even see it anymore. Mr. Gregory is a positively evangelistic about drawing, and has a barely containable enthusiasm that is infectious. I’m finding myself looking around at things all over the house as potential subjects for sketching.

May 23, 2006 0

Bug Fair

On Saturday we all piled into the car and went to the annual Bug Fair at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History. We go every year, seeing as my son loves bugs and has since birth. At one point I thought he might become an entymologist, but now I’m not sure… Anyway, now we’re brand new owners of three “ironclad beetles“, one of which is named “Bridget”.

May 22, 2006 0

Signal light

I scribbled this at lunch about an hour ago. Working again on a Saturday – crunch time.

I was doing some visual research yesterday on city stuff and accidentally came upon some interesting information about the inventor of the traffic light system that’s used throughout the world. I am constantly amazed about the things we take for granted. Sitting at a red traffic light, watching the cross traffic, well, cross, it’s interesting to think – somebody had to invent that traffic signal. I suppose we all kind of think, yeah, some giant corporation somewhere came up with it, etc., etc. But in reality that’s rarely the case. Usually these things are invented by one person and it goes corporate after that, not the other way around. In the case of the traffic signal, it was invented by an American named Garrett Augustus Morgan – a man who’s remarkable not only for the fact that he also invented the gas mask, but that his parents were former slaves in the Confederate South. A brilliant and creative man who became wealthy by his wits, and whose ideas affect virtually all of us several times a day, nearly 130 years after his birth.

May 13, 2006 0

Random sketches

She was looking up at me, noticing that I was looking at her and making marks in my book. She’s got the “what is he looking at?” attitude.

This guy was reading a script at the table just in front of me. I liked this pose of his and would have drawn more, but he got up and left. Part of the fun and risk of sketching from life. The subject has the power to pick up and leave without notice.

May 2, 2006 0

Sunday breakfast before work

Less than an hour ago I was sitting outside and inside the venerable S&W; diner. A co-worker and I were going to have breakfast there before starting to work, but I think he forgot. No matter, there’s always the trusty sketchbook!

April 30, 2006 0

On the roof

This is one of those mysterious things coming out of most of our homes. It’s a 1930s-era electrical power terminal, I’m pretty sure, seeing as the wires go to the telephone poles in the backyard. It’s one of those things you see all the time but never really look at, if you know what I mean.

April 26, 2006 0

My studio

I sat down in the backyard while the kids were running around and sketched my studio (click to enlarge, if you want). Note the Texas barbecue prominently positioned for maximum use (I love to barbecue). The strange shape in the lower left is part of a kids’ slide. I was inspired to draw this from reading a book, The Creative License by Danny Gregory. Monica, a reader of this blog, was kind enough to recommend it to me a short while back. The book came in the mail on Friday and I spent a good portion of the weekend reading through it and enjoying every minute of it. Mr Gregory is an entertaining writer and a real proponent of drawing – as a way of seeing, as a tool of discovery – and of journaling too. It lead me to want to draw even more than usual, just for the fun of it. I’m not even finished reading the book either. Ha.