Dragon in Colored Pencils

I drew and painted a tremendous amount when I was in high school. While I nominally took correspondance courses for most of my schooling, I went to the high school and stayed for three periods of art, two days a week. The last two years, I took independent studies for which I had to come up with five major projects per semester. I drew a lot of dragons and this was one of my favorites. Chrome is amazingly fun to draw.

Why am I showing you this now? I'm having it framed! I'm very excited that Bull City Art & Frame Company, at Brightleaf Square, in Durham, is taking care of this for me. I'm looking forward to having it hanging in my home and hopefully seeing it on a regular basis will inspire me to start painting and drawing again. Of course, I've been hopeful that a lot of things would do that, but we'll just have to see.

Close Encounters

I went to a two year old's birthday party on Saturday, which provided the opportunity to create serious sculptures with play-doh. I was pleased that I was able to convince a cute and inquisitive four year old that this was an alien and that aliens had antlers. He didn't seem so sure about the beanie. Those things that look like wings are really hands, but the arms kept getting shorter and shorter, since I was having trouble getting them to stick to the body.

I used to use clay to create these antlered aliens all the time when I was in high school. This is the original.

Paintings from Back in the Day

A week or two ago, my parents brought over some more of my artwork, which I painted or drew many years ago. This past weekend, I photographed a couple of large pieces. Back when I originally digitized these, the only practical option I had was to photograph them with a 35mm film camera, get them developed somewhere and then scan them. I also had to keep the resolution of the scan comparatively low, because I only had a 5MB quota on my unix account. Now using a digital camera is the easiest way to get the highest resolution images and it's not unusual to have a single image larger than that entire quota. Unfortunately, I sold most of my original botanicals and can't photograph them again.

I remember being very excited about working on this Berol Prismacolor colored pencil drawing and stayed up late several nights working on it just because I had so much fun with it. When people looked at this, they said that I would be good at designing wrapping paper. I should still probably photograph this once more so I can get it a little more focused without using the flash.

I painted this in gouache, probably during the same semester of high school, in 1992. I remember painting these fish like it was yesterday, if not considerably better than that.

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

While we were in Boston, I decided to take YB's recommendation and go to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, which is just a hop skip and a jump from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Originally, I had planned to go both museums on the same day, but going to the MFA alway seems to take the majority of the day and we didn't want to rush it. That turned out to be a good decision, because the Isabella Steward Gardner museum deserved quite a bit of attention.

The museum, which is the house in which the wealthy art collector lived, is jam-packed full of artwork by artists such as Sargent, Zorn, Rubens, Titian and Botticelli. The house is still decorated as it was when Gardner died, in 1924, so the rooms are lit very dimly to preserve both the watercolors and the fabrics. One of the rooms has a cabinet like structure that allows people to view panels full of framed artwork as if they were pages in a book. There are far too many works to display on the walls alone. They had even more paintings, including a Monet, before a major heist in 1990.

I thought one of the most beautiful aspects of the museum was the central enclosed atrium, which is full of sculptures, palms, orchids, caryotas and hydrangeas. It just seemed extremely peaceful. The majority of the rooms of the house look out onto the atrium through glass or open windows. I actually think just the atrium alone would be worth visiting, even without the artwork in the rest of the museum.

While their elevator is old and small, it seems more modern than many of the ones on Duke's campus and it works fine. Some of the doorways on the upper floors are extremely narrow. I actually worried that my comparatively small chair was going to get stuck going through one of them on the third floor and I just barely made it through. Visitors with larger wheelchairs should definitely keep that in mind.

Another interesting characteristic is that almost none of the artwork is labeled. In a couple of the rooms with the more famous paintings, they have laminated cards indicating the artist of each of the paintings on each of the four walls. Those were extremely helpful. Later on, one of the docents recommended that we borrow a guidebook from the front desk. That was useful, but it was still difficult to identify some pieces based on their written descriptions of the everything in the room. I'm afraid that I practically detest audio tours, with rare exceptions, so I wasn't willing to use that option.

All in all, I thought it was a wonderful experience, which I would recommend highly.

YoYo World

Even after living in my house for over three years (unbelievable), I still have lots of stuff that needs to be moved from my parents' house to mine. Late last week, my parents brought over a bunch of the paintings and drawings that I did while I was in highschool. Many of them haven't even been photographed, so they haven't been up on my website. Above is an example of one of which I was and am very pleased. That is my hand in the painting, but whatever you think about what this might say about my personality, remember that, as a lefty, my right hand was the most convenient model. I painted this using gouache on bristol board in 1993.