Skip to main content

Millard observation.

 Another scrap of watercolor paper resting in the pages of my sketchbook. This time not premeasured for an empty picture frame but this time the left over scrap from a previous project.
With my time in France starting to come to an end I have taken to sitting at French cafés while I am still able to. Sitting. Observing. Filling up pages in the sketchbook with little observations.
While sitting at the Tavarne watching art school students in their non symmetrical hair cuts and leopard print this older mad walks over and begins to hunch over while sitting at one of the small café outside tables. Rolling his own cigarettes as those french like to do. Flat cap and a red scarf like Jessye's. Collar flipped up.
As with the girl drinking coffee in the wind I was having troubles thinking up a background. The original setting just didn't seem like it would work properly. I find a good collection of Victorian wallpapers on the internets. Millard. Something to fill up part of background.
While working I watch a BBC documentary on the Art Nouveau. The idea of constructed paired with nature sends me looking at photos from last weekend when I wondered around town and came across an old building abandoned with an interesting slopped stone wall next to it. A beautiful tree paired next to the building. I get lost in the architecture with the small area of perspective available and I forget the tree. I think I would like to spend some more time observing nature. Some up close details. What makes a leaf part of the whole of a plant. Painting little details to make the whole.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

French underworld tattoos at the turn of the century. The man sports a tattooed mustache intended to foil the prohibition of facial hair in the Foreign Legion. The World of Tattoo by Maarten Hesselt van Dinter. I can only dream of being anywhere near that combination of badass and crazy. Though at that point the Foreign Legion was probably still the best place for criminals to get their record cleaned so perhaps he is as well quite legitimately scary upon all of that. I find myself flipping back to this page time and time again to romanticize the French underground from around 1900. Give him an accordion, a beret, and some braces. Prostitutes who could easily kill you if you ever come up short and tattoo the names of their ‘actual’ lovers between their breasts, close to their heart. Tattoo ‘Je mother fucking t’aime’ in a tattoo cursive along my collar bones.
Post a Comment
Read more

Windy Coffee. [part 1]

Fulya was looking at my sketchbook the other day and remarked that she liked the random sketch that I had made of some girl that I saw walking along with a little plastic cup of coffee during the wind storm a few weeks past. As I still have some small pieces of very good watercolor paper [that I had sized to be used for some small frames I had collected but did not have anything to put in them yet], I thought that perhaps I could transfer a little sketch to a little piece of paper to play with techniques. Namely the layering of water colors. Something that I know I have been working on a lot, but practice makes perfect. I also wanted to see how using my new mechanical pencil filled with blue graphite would work in hiding my lines as I initially worked. I forgot to take a picture of the transition between not having the girl inked at all to inking her and starting the background. I was having a hell of a time trying to figure out a setting in which to put her. At first I was th...
Post a Comment
Read more
I finished the painting of the girl and her accordion enough to take it in for the critique in painting class. I still kind of want to darken the background a bit more to make her stand out more as well as add detail to the ‘speaker’ on the accordion, but perhaps I also just need to be finshed before I ruin it. The critique was a bit of a disappointment. The reactions from all the other students was that it was kitsch and not a true represenation of France. The professor added in that it was painted well, but in a style that has been outdated for almost a century. Again the language barrier prevented me from defending myself adequately. Although after class I went up to the professor to ask if he had any recommendations on contemporary artists I could look up, which I hope helped him see that I am not an idiot.. So now I would like my next painting to be a bit more ‘modern.’ I have another piece of cardboard in my room that I think I would like to use of this new idea, but as ...
Post a Comment
Read more