Turkeyeti

Counting down to Thanksgiving dinner... only have a little more than twenty-four hours left to go. And I was going to find one of my recent wild turkey photos to post here, but decided to go a little weirder and put up this drawing that I did last year.

It was inspired by a walk I took with Jeannine in 2011. We were strolling down the road, passing a neighbor's small pasture, when from the far woods we heard a very odd noise. It was loud, and sounded eerily like the "gobbling" of a gigantic turkey. I mentioned to Jeannine that it might be the rarely-seen, highly reclusive "turkey yeti"... two words which I decided later to combine into one.

Yeah, that's how I think. -- PL

Glimmers

It's a bad weather day here in Maine, good for the trees and grass and ponds but bad for vacationers. I shouldn't complain too much -- we've had more than a week of great weather -- but I am kind of down because the heavy rain and winds are keeping me from heading down to the pebble beach below our rental house, where I have been going pretty much every day since we got here to sketch rocks.

As anyone who has visited the Maine coast can attest, one thing it is not short on by any means is rocks -- rocks of all shapes, sizes, and colors. Beautiful rocks, rocks in fantastic profusion and variety. Harshly-angled, jagged rocks next to sensually rounded rocks, shaped and smoothed by the endless tides.

And I have been having a good time drawing them. My wife has asked "Are you planning on drawing anything other than rocks?" And I do… in fact, I drew a gnarled piece of driftwood a few days ago. But right now, I like drawing these rocks. I enjoy watching an image emerge on the page of white paper as I scratch and scribble, hatch and cross-hatch away with one of the several markers I carry in my shirt pocket.

And the simple fact that I LIKE drawing these rocks is what has given me a new glimmer of hope that the joy I used to feel in drawing anything is slowly beginning to return. It's been a long while since I have spent much time drawing from life, but I am starting to remember how much fun it can be. It can also be incredibly frustrating in equal measure, of course, when you are trying to capture the essence of something real on paper and it just isn't working.

But one of the things I realized, and it came out last week during a conversation with Jeannine after we'd taken a break from eating fried clams, swimming, and gazing at the ocean from the back deck of the house we're renting to travel up to Portland, ME and see the Winslow Homer exhibit, is that I don't need to be so picky about getting everything, all the shapes and textures and other pertinent details, JUST SO. It's something I'd learned a long time ago when I started drawing from life in college, and had kind of forgotten. But as Jeannine in her quiet wisdom so cogently put it, "The world is inspiration, and art is not a mirror."

I'm thinking I will continue this when I get home. There are lots of things to draw in the world, and I am going to try my hand at putting some of them in my sketchbook. -- PL

Drawing

I've started drawing again, a little bit... I took one of the many empty sketchbooks I have accumulated over the years and have been carrying it around with me, even taking it to California on my recent trip there with Jeannine. I decided that I really needed to take her advice and just start doing something in it every day, even if it wasn't much good.

Most of it hasn't been, so far. And I don't know if I have really met the mark of drawing something every day. But it does feel good to see some stuff emerging from the void onto the page, which -- truth be told -- was always one of the best parts of drawing for me.

I kind of like this one -- I drew it the day after Jeannine and I watched "Robin and Marian", the "old Robin Hood" movie starring Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn. It's one of my favorite movies, and I'll admit it -- I always get teary at the ending. I've always had a love for the Robin Hood stories, especially the setting -- the mighty greenwood of Sherwood Forest. It's such a romantic notion -- living free in the deep, lush forest.




Of course, as I remember from the dim days of youth helping my brothers build little "camps" in the woods near our house, there was probably a lot of crude reality to intrude on the romance -- dirt, bugs and other vermin... and what did they do when it rained? And what about, you know, sanitary issues? Best not to think too hard on such things. -- PL

Blast from the Past #214: adaptive re-use

This drawing -- which I think dates from back in the early 1980's -- is an example of what I like to call "adaptive re-use". In this case, I had spent quite a bit of time drawing this corridor full of machinery, and I believe originally there was a robot peeking out of that doorway. I thought it might be handy to be able to re-use parts of this drawing, and so created an acetate overlay onto which I pasted the drawing of the barbarian with the sword (you can see that it doesn't line up precisely with the rest of the drawing -- when I took this photo, the acetate had shifted).



I think I did this a few times with various things I didn't want to re-draw, but it never became a real habit with me. -- PL