Brian's Notebook

Grazing in the pasture

2009-12-08T03:25:18Z

I am a great fan of the work of Rogier van der Weyden (c.1400 - 1464), but I am so completely in awe of it that I tend to be reluctant to even try to copy it, because I just know I'll achieve little more than to insult the man.

But I made the effort to overcome my fear and, in a few quiet moments at work, made a sketch after a detail from his "Descent from the cross." Seeing as most of his surviving drawings are in silverpoint, I decided to use what I consider to be something of a modern equivalent, namely ballpoint pen. Like silverpoint, it gives a thin, even line that cannot be erased, and the overall result is perhaps somewhat similar, although ballpoint does not give the same light, lyrical tone. When using it without a preliminary drawing in pencil, as I did here, it is a terrifying and exhilarating medium, like the artistic equivalent of a roller coaster. Whatever mistakes you make, you just have to live with, or somehow work into the developing drawing.

I can see plenty of hideous errors here. But there isn't a thing I can do about them now, except to try to do better next time. My apologies to Mr. van der Weyden.

And what about the weird title of this post? It is a pun that only people somewhat versed in art history will get.

Back to oil

2009-11-14T02:51:16Z

It has been almost a year since I have last tried to do anything in oil. Withdrawal symptoms compelled me to take them up again. Only to find that I have become rather rusty, and had to relearn all manner of things. Still, in the end the thing didn't look much more or less horrid than all my previous attempts.

I keep track of how many oil paintings I do. This one is number 16. Another hundred or so and perhaps they'll start to look like something.

Charitable art

2009-11-11T13:36:33Z

I stumbled upon this link the other day:

Night of a 1000 drawings

They are collecting small art works by anyone, at whatever level of skill, to sell in order to benefit some or other charity. So why not get a bit of experience while benefiting the poor and downtrodden? Here is what I came up with; it was fairly loosely done from a photo I recently took of jacarandas in bloom in a street near here. This time of year, all of Pretoria is purple with jacaranda blooms. The sketch is A5 size, as they requested, in pen and ink with watercolour:

Recent sketches

2009-11-01T18:24:45Z

A few recent small watercolour sketches, all turned into greeting cards...

About 15cm x 10cm:

And about 7cm x 10cm:

Another Halloween edition

2009-10-31T01:31:58Z

Decorations for a Halloween-themed barbecue, rather loosely copied from Goya's "Saturn devouring his children":

and from Arnold Böcklin's "Medusa":

Both Goya and Böcklin are probably turning in their grave, but that's precisely what Halloween is all about, not?

Mike's massively muscled mamas

2009-09-17T04:19:24Z

I have something of a love-hate relationship with Michelangelo. His genius is undisputed, but his work can be pretty weird. I'm thinking specifically of his Sistine Chapel decorations, with all those absurdly muscled figures. Including even the women! Still, they make for interesting drawing practice, so I tried my hand at the Delphic sibyl, which is one of the more normal-looking ladies he painted for Pope Julius.

Alas, halfway through the drawing I got the flu, and spent the next week or two in bed staring at the incomplete drawing. Must have been swine flu too, since I haven't had common old seasonal flu in ages. I thought I'm immune, but apparently not. Anyway, by the time I felt like myself again, I was sick of the drawing and left it somewhat incomplete.

And another old master copy...

2009-07-24T22:33:23Z

Another one of my attempts to follow in the footsteps of the masters of old. This time, I tried out a copy of the Portrait of a gentleman, by Andy of the Chestnut, better known to art historians as Andrea del Castagno (1421-1457). It is entirely in HB mechanical pencil, so I did not get the darks quite as dark as they should be, but I think on this point I have good precedents on my side: in Castagno's time, lots of drawings were done in silverpoint, which tends to be a light, lyrical sort of medium. The original can be seen here, and here's my somewhat dubious copy; I think my drawing actually looks a bit better than this photo of it, which managed to make some dark lines look much darker than they actually are:

Copying after the masters is monstrously difficult fun...

2009-07-09T03:22:45Z

I decided to try my hand at a slightly more refined drawing than the quick and rough sketches that I usually do, by making a copy (or rather, trying to make a copy!) of an original by the 19th century French academic artist William Bouguereau (1825 - 1905). My drawing actually looks a bit better than the digital photo of it here, which somehow exaggerated tones and lines, and making the drawing look rougher than it is. But it is still pretty crude compared to Bouguereau's highly refined original, which can be seen here.

In short, I got almost everything wrong. For one thing, I failed to capture a likeness in the face, although I can perhaps forgive myself for that, because the head in my drawing is only 4 cm high, and it can be difficult to work on so small a scale. But I can see plenty of other problems here as well, some of which I only noticed now, and some of which I did notice while drawing but couldn't work out how to solve, or that I could solve but not without introducing new problems in the process. I do think the whole exercise was a very valuable learning experience though. As Ed Wood said of his awful movies, my next one will be better. Here is my attempt; it is about 25cm x 18cm, in pencil on cheap computer printer paper (which was of course mistake number one):

There is a perception amongst many contemporary art critics that Bouguereau and his academic colleagues were painters of kitsch for the upper middle classes, purveyors of mere polite pretty pictures. To those who hold to such views, I would suggest trying to copy some of his work, and then see whether there is anything at all "mere" about this level of technique and craftsmanship. I get the impression that much of the criticism against technically competent art is born from nothing more than simple jealousy, and that "kitsch" has become a word that means nothing more sophisticated than "highly skilled art that I somehow still don't like, and definitely couldn't produce myself."

It is of course true that Bouguereau painted for the rich, and that his paintings are mostly on the polite side. What else was he supposed to do? It took at least several weeks to complete a painting of this level of refinement, and such a painting then had to be sold for the equivalent of several weeks' worth of salary, or no artist would be able to make a living. Only the rich could afford to pay that kind of money for paintings, and hence it was inevitable that artists had to reach compromises between what they wanted to paint and what the market wanted. This is still true today.

Now had it been a mob of desperately poor peasants that complained about the bourgeois style of the academic painters, one might understand their vehemence. But the irony is that the people who accuse Bouguereau of being a mere propagandist for bourgeois values, are for the most part themselves as blandly bourgeois as you'll find anywhere on the planet. I have yet to meet an art critic who doesn't live in upper middle class comfort. That these people have the nerve to complain about how the academic artists didn't "challenge the status quo" is pretty rich, considering that neither they nor the artists they frequently do promote do anything of the sort either. People who really do challenge society end up in poverty, prison or both. They don't live comfortable middle class lives or get paid millions for their work like, say, Damien Hirst. So if it is not a sin for a contemporary artist to produce whatever the rich (and their favourite art critics) want, in order to make a decent living from his or her work, I wonder why it should be considered to have been such a sin for 19th century artists, especially ones that went to the trouble of acquiring actual skill at something other than postmodernist pseudo-philosophy.

But enough ranting. I have to get back to the drawing board, so to speak...

And two more sketches

2009-07-03T03:25:58Z

Quick, small sketches in pen and watercolour, both about 10cm x 14cm. Both done from reference photos; I am very far from being able to do this sort of thing from life, seeing as animals have the annoying habit of moving around all the time...

And now for something completely different

2009-06-29T04:52:33Z

Yesterday I watched the 1992 film Bram Stoker's Dracula, and noticed something rather cool. In Dracula's castle, there is this old portrait of him hanging on the wall:

And here's another view, of the count himself, his latest victim sitting at the table, and the portrait in the background:

So does that painting look familiar to anyone?

It is of course based on the self-portrait by Albrecht Dürer, painted around 1500:

Always nice when film makers put little touches like this one in their movies. Next project: see if I can work out whether that sculpture behind the count is also based on some famous work of art...

Pretoria Botanical Gardens

2009-06-14T16:14:02Z

I visited the botanical gardens in Pretoria today, for a picnic with friends. I wonder why I don't go there more often. The place is quite delightful, and filled with enough sketchable plants to last one for years. As it turned out I was lazy, because there are very few soporifics quite as effective as a mellow winter afternoon in Pretoria. But I did get around to making two small sketches in an A6-sized sketchbook, and also made time to take a few photos until the camera's battery gave up the ghost.

Here's a type of aloe:

Quite a number of species of these spiny succulents can be found in southern Africa, and they range in size from about 30 cm tall such as the one I sketched, to sizable trees.

And then a quick sketch of a smallish Strelitzia:

Larger specimens are also common in the garden, and I took a close-up of one of their quite exotic-looking flowers:

Here's a type of Euphorbia:

The genus Euphorbia is quite large and the plants range from small herbs, to medium-sized trees such as the above one, to quite large trees. Just about all of them contain a milky latex, and in the case of these tree-sized ones, colloquially known as candelabra trees, the latex is a quite potent skin irritant that will make you break out in red welts. It has traditionally been used as a fish poison (poured into rivers or dams, it stupefies the fish so that they can be caught by hand) and also to kill maggots in open wounds on livestock. So these trees are not to be trifled with. When I was in primary school I once went on a school camping trip, and when we arrived at the camp, a bunch of kids from another school were just leaving. One of them looked like he had had an altercation with a blowtorch. Well, it was one of those junior paramilitary type camps; in those days they were more or less compulsory. I have no idea what the situation is nowadays. Anyway, one of the things you were supposed to do was to learn how to camouflage yourself. The standard way is to simply smear your face with mud. But this poor city kid got creative and made a paste of soil and Euphorbia latex for his facial camouflage assignment. Some things you only do once.

Last but not least, the dry fruit of a wild teak (Pterocarpus angolensis), found in the warmer areas of the country. This time of year the trees are quite attractive, covered with these large pods. On my screen it shows up about actual size; two match boxes would just about cover it.

The wood of the wild teak is of high quality and can be used to make furniture.

That's it. Next time I'll take new batteries for the camera, and a bigger sketchbook.

And yet another quick sketch

2009-06-11T05:59:00Z

As I mentioned before: I simply can't bring myself to create any 'finished' drawings. They all end up looking terribly cramped and tentative. Quick sketches seem to be more fun, and however amateurish they might look, I seem to nevertheless have more success with them than with attempts at something more professional looking.

This one was very roughly copied in pen and ink with watercolour, from some or other 19th century oil painting by an artist whose name I forgot to make a note of, so now I have no idea whom to credit for the original. Hint to web masters: make the artist's name part of the file name.

Anyway, the original, typical of works from the era, is a marvel of rich, subtle colour and light, quite unlike my rather modernist version, which looks like it belongs on a greeting card. Which is in fact exactly what I turned it into by gluing it to a piece of card. I'll be the death of Hallmark's yet.

Some small, sketchy things

2009-05-31T06:15:10Z

Warning: this post contains several links to other pages. These are supposed to open in a new window. But my knowledge of the HTML code necessary to achieve that is about a decade out of date, so I don't know whether it is going to work in all browsers, or indeed in any. My apologies in advance to any frustrated surfers out there, desperate to follow links to nowhere, if any.

A few of my latest adventures in dubious creativity; two small pen drawings with watercolour, and a pencil sketch. None of them are larger than about 15cm in height, which is partly why they lack in much detail. The other reason is that I am too lazy to try to put in all the detail, and that when I do try to do so, I tend to end up with extremely messy pictures anyway.

Here's some or other species of butterfly. I made the wings a bit too large but only noticed it when I had already reached the point of no return with the picture:

And then, a type of insect known as a stainer bug. I'm told these can be nasty pests, but seeing as I'm not a farmer, I think they're quite beautiful:

And lastly, another in my series of credit card-sized portraits. I didn't like it very much, but then, I seldom like anything I draw very much. At least Missus Moneypenny liked it. No, not THAT Moneypenny, this one.
She now proudly displays it in her living room for all the world to see (and she knows LOTS of people), which is one reason why I'm glad I didn't sign it with my full name.

Anyway, here it is:

Something rather weird and wonderful has happened, or so I thought. I host my images at Photobucket and one of their features that I recently discovered is that you can look at some statistics of how often your images have been accessed. This includes information on which sites they have been accessed from. And so I discovered that my portrait of Mr. Bean from a previous post had been accessed on a site called Portal of Evil. I had never heard of them before.

My first thought was that someone had enjoyed my portrait so much that he/she had stolen it for his own site, and while many other people might immediately think of calling their lawyers, I simply felt rather proud of myself. I have grave doubts over much of current copyright law, and being happy to put my proverbial money where my mouth is, as far as I am concerned, anyone is welcome to use anything he finds on my blog for any purpose whatsoever. Especially seeing as I used someone else's photo as reference for the drawing in the first place.

But alas, as it turns out I was not about to achieve sudden fame in cyberspace. It was on a page where people post images randomly pulled from Livejournal, so my little portrait languishes there amongst a whole host of other images. You can see it on this page.

Bean on a credit card

2009-05-02T05:59:05Z

Every now and then I get in the mood to work in miniature, or at least rather small, and I think credit card-size is just about perfect for miniatures, so in a quiet half hour at work some days ago, I traced the outline of a card on a piece of paper, and made a sketch of that famous maniac Mr. Bean. Well, actually I don't have a credit card, but as far as I know an ATM card is the same size. The original is about 8.5cm X 5.5cm in size, and on my screen it shows up actual size, but I guess your results may vary.

And here's Harry Potter (about 10cm in height), or is it a teenaged John Lennon?

And lastly, getting a bit too large to quite call it a miniature, a sketch of a lily (12cm high):

Apocalyptic sky

2009-04-02T04:36:39Z

I keep on forgetting to post these images, but here they are, finally. I took these photos of a summer storm early in January. The sun was setting, and was visible through curtains of rain, while above, the clouds boiled. It created a quite unearthly spectacle, and these photos do not even begin to capture the full impact, or the amazing range of colours. It has been a while since I have seen everything from deep blues to greens to acidic yellows and oranges in the same sky.

Unfortunately the rather cheap and unsophisticated point-and-shoot camera couldn't quite capture the very wide range of lights and darks, so some areas ended up overexposed and others too dark.

And here's Jeffrey!

2009-03-28T04:37:34Z

After my previous post, I suppose this was sort of inevitable...

Not really a very good likeness. I didn't have much time, and then I committed my old sin of stretching out the face too long. So I had to erase and redraw most of the lower half of the face, after which the neck was too long, and there wasn't time to fix it. Now will this be the last murderer for the moment, or have I started a series?

I have to go now Clarice...

2009-03-27T04:39:31Z

...I'm having an old friend for dinner.

This sketch is in keeping with my new philosophy of not drawing. I can't draw. Never could. Probably never will be able to either. All I can do is make rough sketches.

But what is this thing with drawing, er, sketching, psychopathic murderers? Who'll be next? Jeffrey Dahmer!?

Mrs. Murder

2009-03-03T17:19:54Z

A very quick portrait sketch of one Najwa Petersen, who recently achieved notoriety after being convicted of murdering her husband Taliep, a musician. I have no particular preference for drawing murderers; I just happened to have a press photograph of the lady at hand to serve as reference. I was at work at the time, and only had a few minutes, so I rapidly scribbled my sketch within no more than twenty minutes or so, hence the rather unpolished look (I also did not have an eraser on hand, so I made no corrections). There are many inaccuracies, but I think I sort of managed to capture a likeness.

And this confirmed something I have suspected for some time: I seem to be constitutionally incapable of really refined drawings. I either capture a likeness within twenty minutes, or not at all. If I had spent hours and hours on this drawing, it might have looked more refined, but almost certainly would have been less recognizable as the widow Petersen.

And back to the oil

2009-01-22T21:40:53Z

I decided to play around with oil paints again, after having given it a rest for several months. And this time, I used a 'real' support too, namely Masonite, primed with a layer of acrylic. It was a bit different, in some ways more difficult, to work on than the cardboard I used before. But it does seem to give a more slick sort of look.

Well, thus far I have passionately hated every painting I have done, and this one is no exception. But if I paint a hundred more, who knows what they might begin to look like? I suppose we'll see...

Agapanthus

2008-12-11T10:01:22Z

An inflorescence of an Agapanthus. When the flowers open, they look a bit like miniature lilies.

Ballpoint pen with coloured pencil.

Thorny business

2008-11-26T12:11:08Z

I tried something I haven't dared do in a while: make a drawing in ballpoint pen without first sketching the subject in with a pencil. A quick sketch of the seed pod of a thorn apple (Datura stramonium), coloured with a light wash of coloured pencil. Believe it or not, but this rather vicious-looking dragon is a close relation of such wholesome beasts as tomatoes and potatoes.

EDM Challenge #179: Draw an onion

2008-11-13T13:48:56Z

First a perfectly innocent onion, and then the onion after Hannibal Lecter got hold of it:

Botanical Art November Challenge

2008-11-12T12:43:34Z

November Challenge: A plant or part in macro or magnification

I bought this little pocket microscope many years ago. When used as shown here (with a common ballpoint pen for size comparison) it serves as telescope; pull out the inner tube, and it can be used as 30x microscope.

I used it to observe some moss plants found on the lower part of the trunk of a potted bonsai tree. Drawing these presented much difficulty. Because the microscope's aperture is so small and it has no light source apart from my desk lamp, the image is extremely dim and ill-defined, and one has to hold the scope upright with one hand while trying to draw with the other. And every time you breathe too hard, the specimen shifts around!

So I spent a breathless half hour trying to make sense of what I see, and the results will probably not exactly get a naturalist all excited. Under a proper dissection microscope, one can see much more detail, and the plants are actually quite beautiful:

As you can see from the scale on the left, the plants are very small. The lower, darker parts are bits of tree bark and soil, into which the plants are anchored with root-like structures known as rhizoids. You can see part of one protruding in the left-side drawing. The plant has little leaf-like structures arranged in such a way as to make the little plants look for all the world like miniature irises, or perhaps aloes.

But they are actually quite profoundly different. Technically these mosses belong to the plant division Bryophyta (there are also other types of mosses, and different authorities classify them in different ways, for added confusion!). They are primitive plants, and unlike flowering plants, they reproduce by means of spores. It is in fact even a bit more complicated than that: the plants as drawn here are known as 'gametophytes' and produce gametes, i.e. sperm and egg cells. These fuse to form a different sort of plant called a sporophyte, which usually grows as a parasite on the gametophyte. In these specimens, there were no sporophytes when I made the sketch, but one can often see them if you look closely at moss plants: they are usually shaped like smooth little stalks growing from the top of the gametophyte, with a thickened tip, which is the sporangium that produces the spores.

The moss plant therefore has a quite clear 'alteration of generations,' in which a gametophyte generation alternates with a sporophyte generation. This alteration of generations is not only found in mosses: it is present is all plants, including the more familiar plants such as flowering plants and conifers. However, in these 'higher' plants, the life cycle is completely dominated by the sporophyte. The gametophytes are microscopic - basically the pollen and ovules ARE the gametophytes. In the 'lower' plants like mosses, the two generations are both about equally dominant and visible, or the gametophyte is larger and more visible.

Above I mentioned that mosses have rhizoids and 'leaves.' In other words, they do not have true roots and leaves. This follows because in the moss plants in the sketches, the plants represent the gametophyte generation, whereas in flowering plants, the dominant form is the sporophyte generation. The moss plants above are therefore homologous not to a flowering plant as such, but to the ovules or pollen grains inside a flower! For this reason, however much these little plants might resemble little aloes or irises, botanists do not consider them to have real leaves and roots. Hence their root-like structures are known as rhizoids, and the 'leaves' are often written like that - in quote marks, to show that they are not really the same thing as leaves on a tree, although they serve the same function.

Because moss plants are so small, and produce sperm cells that have to swim towards egg cells in order for fertilization to take place, they cannot reproduce unless there is plenty of water around. One will therefore see carpets of moss mostly in rather wet habitats, such as under a dripping tap, or on moist forest floors.

EDM Challenge 108 - Draw a light bulb

2008-11-02T14:47:43Z

Save power - draw a light bulb instead of switching it on.

No, Philips is not paying me for this post.

A few more recent daubings

2008-10-16T05:40:41Z

After experimenting for a while in monochrome oils, I decided to try out colour. Indeed quite a bit more challenging, and I think I have tons to learn about mixing and balancing colours.

As in the examples in my previous post, these were done in student oils on cardboard that had been primed with a layer of acrylic. I used a limited palette of black and white, plus three primary colours (red, yellow and blue, and more particularly, cadmium red and yellow, and phthalo blue.)

The still lifes were done from direct observation, while the landscape was done from a photograph, seeing as I am not too keen on working out in the elements, with whole crowds of gawking spectators looking over my shoulder and making remarks!