Another Artist Whose Skills I Want

I'd like to skip the effort of learning to draw with a persuasive perspective and just have the ability of Rackstraw Downes who has put at least fifty years into mastering this skill.

Artists whose Skills I would like to Steal

Charles Ritchie.  I want his skill with watercolor washes, with reflections of light, and with tonal gradations.

James McNeill Whistler.  I admire his choice of what to leave out.  It doesn't seem formulaic or predictable.

Andrew Wyeth.  I want his ability to draw realistically.  I admire that skill in Whistler and Ritchie also.  Wyeth's father required him to spend time drawing basic geometric shapes: cones and spheres and cubes, a task he did not enjoy but that he was later grateful for.

Naoko Matsubara.  I love the boldness of her lines and compositions.

William Fain whose drawings I admire in his sketchbook ITALIAN CITIES AND LANDSCAPES. I  envy his ability to depict cityscapes and landscapes.  It's not high art or finished art, but it's considered observation. 

Theodore Rousseau.  I want his varied skills in depicting foliage.

Windows: Lois Dodd, Andrew Wyeth, Charles Ritchie

Lois Dodd, View Through Elliott's Shack Looking South

My look at Lois Dodd's window paintings has been cursory so I suspect that I may not be doing her justice, but it seems to me that her images do not carry the metaphorical, symbolic weight that the window images of Ritchie and Wyeth do.  Nor are they as compositionally complex.

The work above with its reflections and then its view through is the most complex exploitation of  a window's possibilities that I saw while looking at her work on the internet.  But it doesn't seem freighted with meaning of the kind that I see in the mysterious and slightly ominous darkness and compositional complexity  of Charles Ritchie's drawings  nor with the possibilities of hope that I see in the windows of Andrew Wyeth.

Not that I could do what any of the three of them has done.

Art That Has Impressed Me

Whistler,  The Doorway



These images of Whistler's etchings of Venice were taken from www.SpaightwoodGalleries.com.

   I have been thinking often of Whistler's etchings of Venice which I first saw in an exhibition several years ago at the time of  the centennial of his death.  Lots of special exhibitions of his work at that time, whatever date they honored.

I remember in particular an exhibition that included works of some of his contemporaries who had also worked in Venice at the same time.  What struck me about Whistler's work was how relatively economical he was compared to them.  He didn't include everything, not every brick not right up to the edge of the paper, not every wave or detail.  His work seemed more powerful as a result.

I think also of the images of Charles Ritchie's work that I posted.  In "Pegasus," he left off the bottom floor of the house and kept very simplified  foliage.  In the other image he cut off  the bottom of the door and  the top of the door and the top of the window frame.


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All of the work I've done in the past two weeks seems preliminary, as if it belongs in a sketchbook.  I don't think any of it looks finished.  I began by deciding to spend the next months drawing a window in a spare bedroom.  I took a look at the window and saw it offered a lot:  the shapes of the window itself, the grid formed by mullions that divided the view and offered a way of managing scale, the view itself of mixed foliage and houses and chimney and balcony and the panes which offered the possibilities of reflection.

I began by trying to record what I saw: all the stuff out there.  I used a fat 8B pencil.  I draw a slightly quavery line. I wanted something sharper. I tried drawing just a corner of the window using a straight edge.  I liked that better, but thought that if I wanted to learn how to draw freehand,  I should draw freehand. I tried charcoal. I used some graphite.  I got interested in the patterns of light made by the venetian blinds.  I liked the blackness of the panes at night when only the interior was illuminated.   Looking at Charles Ritchie's work made me think about size.  I went a little smaller.

A persistent cough has had me sleeping in that room  and gave me the opportunity to admire the smudgy patterns of light that appeared in the early morning.  I tried to capture that.  Then I lay in bed and put my glasses on and the smudgy venetian blinds got sharply defined. I tried that.  Then I tried to include some of the interior and some of the exterior.

It hasn't been an unsatisfactory experience.  I see it as a beginning, but nothing I've done so far seem to have a finished quality.



Two catalogs of Charles Richie exhibitions came in the mail this week:  Suburban Journals: the Sketchbooks, Drawings, and Prints of Charles Ritchie, and Charles Ritchie, The Interior Landscape.
 Above is "Pegasus", a mezzotint, one of Ritchie's least complex images. Below is one of his most complex, a drawing, "Kitchen Window with Reflections." Both were taken from www.charlesritchie.com. 

I love the melting darks and the sharp surprise of the whites,  the darks which sometimes seem to have a blue or purple cast.  When I look at his work, I think about what constitutes a picture, of where the image ends.  Both of these seem to end abruptly, but not unsatisfactorily.

Theodore Rousseau's Foliage

All the images above were taken from   THE  UNTAMED LANDSCAPE: THEODORE ROUSSEAU AND THE PATH TO BARBIZON, New York: Morgan Library and Museum, 2014

How do I depict the foliage outside my window?  (This is much more legible, but how did I get to this typeface?)  It's a problem so I looked at how Theodore Rousseau did it. He offers me a lot of options from washes to a series or bunches of single lines (not cross hatchings), dots, contour lines that enclose the outline of the bush or tree, to color.

Cover of  catalog for Jennifer Bartlettt's 2008 exhibition at Richard Gray Gallery  taken from the gallery website.

 

To my surprise and pleasure, I was able to pull this off the internet.  I love the cross hatch style marks she made to develop this simple image of intense blues.  I'm a sucker for blue..

Cover of  a catalog of a 1993 exhibition by Jennifer Bartlett at the Richard Gray Gallery

Pretty soon I should be able to figure out how to differentiate between creating  a caption and composing a blog entry.  

What interests me here is that the prompt for creating the image remained the same--maybe a photograph--but the marks for creating each image are quite different. 

I also like Jennifer Bartlett

Jennifer Bartlett

The top image is from art.1stdibs.com;  The lower image titled "Recitative" is an image of a show at The Pace Gallery from www.Facebook.com/public/Jennifer-Bartlett.


The top image is from a series titled "Amagansett, Best Garden Pastels.  So what do I like, what interests me about these works?   I like the graph work,  I like the  cross hatching, the presence of the marks she used to create the image. It looks as if she applied color with the tines of a bent fork.  The upper image refers to plant life without actually looking like a plant. 

I loved some works at www.Richardgraygallery.com, but I was unable to transfer them to this blog, either because I am not competent or because the gallery blocked the possibility of doing so.  I love her use of color and the pared-down, simplicity of design that I saw in most of those images which were primarily very large diptychs.

Another Paul Hawden Etching

                                              Isola San Giovanni by  Paul Hawden taken from his website
                                                       www.PaulHawden.co.uk

Here's another etching by Paul Hawden that I admire.  I like the scribbles indicating water and the rich blackness of the trees among which I can still distinguish trunks and branches.

Artists I Admire

Impression of Siena

Chartres

Both images are by Naoko Matsubara and were taken from her website www.naokomatsubara.com.


I've admired Matsubara's woodcuts for  some time.  I like the boldness of the black and white and the freedom  of her imagination in assembling these images which are impressions, not renderings of buildings.

The images below are all of etchings by Paul Hawden and were taken from his website www.paulhawden.co.uk.  The architectural images are all of the same building: Il duomo,  Orvieto.  The other image is "Storm approaching Lake Maggiore"

I love his scribbles.  I love the sense of something maybe out of control, but not quite.  He had to have a sound sense of the structures of this building before he could take off in flight.  Could I do this?  Not now.  Would I like to?  Yes.

Paul Hawden from wwwpaulhawden.co.uk.