Here’s another drawing I did from a photograph I took while Jean-Chrisophe Defline was walking my wife and I around Paris. I only snapped a handful images but I ended up doing three illustrations from those few. I thought maybe I would draw one. Jean-Christophe happens to be visual good luck for moi.
Dingy
Haven’t done a painting in quite a while. I specifically took this photograph at my friend, Michael Snow’s dock in Maine for the sole purpose of painting it. Acrylic ink on heavy Arches watercolor paper. My dock companions, two loons gave their eerie bird calls in the early morning while I shot this simple picture. As I began to paint, things quickly went awry. It was not looking the way I intended. My strength as an artist is not surrendering while I’m screwing things up. So, I fought the crummy direction I took the painting in by going over what I’d painted several times. I began to tame the paint and it started to look like something I’m proud of. I gifted it to my cousin, Eileen for her new house in Florida.
Paris Corner
My wife and I have each been to Paris many times, so we don’t go to the traditional tourist spots. The best time we had this trip is when our friend, Jean-Christophe wanders us through his old neighborhoods of childhood. I occasionally snap a picture or two of street corners that catch my eye as we stroll. This drawing doesn’t really resemble the photo I took. I created my own atmosphere and sky, along with inventing a time of day. The drama of this illustration is all a fiction.
Postcards
On a recent trip to Europe, we hit London, Paris, and Ireland. I had no time to do any real street drawing because we were booked solid. I’ve come up with my own strategy whereby I sketch little objects in people’s homes, on trains, planes and AirBNBs when I have spare minutes. The faces were from framed historic photographs hanging in the Shannon Airport lounge area. In the end, I managed to squeak out an interesting double page spread in my Moleskine.
Paris
On our recent trip to Paris, I was a tourist and not a street artist. No frivolous free time. We always stay in the 8th district. There’s some great architecture there that I admire. So, I clicked a few photos to do some drawings when I returned home. I love the triangular shaped buildings that are on the street corners. They never cease to delight me.
Mab Graves
Vampire Squirrel. This is for Mab Graves Drawlloween 2023. Squirrels love cosplay.
Stuff
This is a sketchbook drawing that took me a long time to do. I picked a few items off the ground in the Berkshires and drew them when it was raining outside. A couple of weeks later I sketched a few in Maine. Two weeks later, I was back in the Berkshires, so I did several more. That’s how I roll. At some point, I put my pens down and my hands in the air and called it done.
Oz Tree
This was quite an unusual looking tree I found in the mountains of Massachusetts. I jumped at the chance to sketch her. The tree never knew what hit it. By the time the tree realized I was drawing it, I had begun to hightail it out of there. The tree chased me just like a scene straight out of “The Wizard Of Oz.” A garden gnome lawn ornament was resting next to it, so I tossed him into the illustration too.
Berkshires
I sat in my car and drew this through the window in the parking lot of a bowling alley. Sometimes the outside elements are too much for me so I sheltered in the front seat. Plus, I was close to a McDonalds, so that I could take a pee every 17 minutes.
King Salmon
Alaska king salmon are in crisis with their population at a historic low. They are smaller in size then they’ve ever been and some argue the only way to save the species is to stop catching and eating them all together. The volume of kings caught in Alaska and sold to processors has been declining for 40 straight years. In 2021, the numbers were down 80%. For many king salmon populations, humans may not be able to do enough now to reverse the consequences of decisions made decades ago.
On another note, 70 percent of the salmon that people eat is farmed atlantic salmon.
Tree
Right now I’m in The Berkshires in Massachusetts, up in the mountains. This is a tree I drew in Brooklyn a few weeks ago and haven’t posted yet. I’m eyeballing a new tree to draw, seeing as I’m surrounded by forests as far as the eye can see. I’ll pick a winner today.
My friend, Snow handed me a sun-bleached lobster claw he found on the shore in Maine. I drew it. Then my friend Pate found a crab claw. I found a muscle shell and my page of drawings began to take shape. I’d glued the Bee-bim bop and Japanese lettering to the sketchbook page a few weeks earlier, not knowing what I would be drawing on that page. Then it was just a matter of drawing whatever got in my way after that and presto.
Hockney and kane
I recently posed for the legendary painter, David Hockney. He told me that I'm very good at sitting still. The painting will now hang in the men’s room at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City.
