I live here ...

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Ball point pen sketch in an 11x8.5" sketchbook. This pictures what was on the location where my apartment now sits - well actually I'm off to the right, in the corner - but out on the corner of West Main and 16th, back in 1980, was this stump.

I guess I looked rather suspicious, wearing scruffy clothes and long hair and carrying a backpack(they weren't that common in 1980), roaming around like I was "casing" the neighborhood - although I was just looking for something to draw - because about the time I was nearing the finish a cop pulled up, said one of the locals called in and would I please move on as soon as I was done.

He was nice about it, and I did. And now I live there. Hee-haw. 

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"Sea" shell ...?

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Ballpoint pen in 6x4" sketchbook. I don't remember if it came in a pack or I found it in the yard. Either way. I like how the back-lighting produced a glow you can see right through it, especially in the open end there. Wonder who made it home.

 

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"Once we start to draw, all of a sudden we begin to see again. Were we so blind? How could we have ignored the beauty, the intricacies of these 'simplest things' ... The moment the eye opens up, all becomes equally fascinating, equally inspiring, equally pregnant with meaning."
— Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing: Meditation in Action, Frederick Franck

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Made in the Shade: Main St.

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"The eye does not judge, moralize, criticize. It accepts ... the long bamboos being long, the goldenrod being yellow.”
― Frederick Franck, The Zen of Seeing

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PM At The Oasis

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"We are all ordinary. We are all boring. We are all spectacular. We are all shy. We are all bold. We are all heroes. We are all helpless. It just depends on the day." - Brad Meltzer

 

 

 

 Ballpoint pen in 5.5" x 8.5" sketchbook.

Sitting in the van, in the parking lot of Oasis liquor store in Buckingham, Richardson, TX. There's a bank now, where those trucks are. In the foreground you can see stakes with black stuff draped between them; that's that construction plastic/tarp stuff they put down under a concrete pour, so BOA was on its way, even then.

I did a number of sketches at various times in this area, but this is the best one.

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Old sketchbook page

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"I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time." -- Orson Welles

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 "Bare Tree," ballpoint pen in 8.5" x 5.5" sketchbook

I like to commit as much as possible, old or new, to digital.

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Mournful Congregation_The Waterless Streams

Megan's Ghost
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Edgar Valle

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Gimme Chocolate; my ekg's on the fritz.

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"...  Moreover, our efforts to awaken others to our notion of what reality is all about can often prove to be merely an additional impediment to both their as well as our true awakening. As the sage Siddharameshwar Maharaj noted: “What you are thinking of as ‘awake’ — some intense new passion for a worthy cause or a deep feeling of love for all existence — is actually the deepest of deep sleep, much deeper than a feeling of boredom or indifference. Yours is an intense association with the Illusion. The bored and the indifferent are on the verge of leaving the lure of the temptress Maya behind, no longer swayed by her shiny attractions. They are on the verge of waking.” "  --Conscious Process, Bob O'hearn

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A bomb

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Ballpoint pen in 3.5"x5" sketchpad, from a photo found online:

      "These photos were taken in 1952 during nuclear tests in Nevada by Harold Edgerton. They were taken less than 1/10 000 000 of a second after the explosion by a special camera connected to the detonator and an exposure time of 1/1000 000s."

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Flavors...

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Egami Rorrim

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Ballpoint in 3.5"x5" sketchbook.
Rear view without inclusion of the car mirror.
That's why it kinda slopes off to the left, I reckon.
Just a quicky while I was doing some waiting. It sometimes helps me on such occasions to remember Siddhartha, from the Herman Hesse book, who remarked at one point that one of the things he had learned was "how to wait." Other times I pull out a sketchpad...

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Once upon a time...

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 ...1980 something, I started this sketch, on location in a field where I sometimes...did that sort of thing, using just a Bic ballpoint, which is what I used to work it over a bit more in '07, and then some more just a week or so ago.


 
  "Worked it over" should be "overworked" it maybe, but what the hell, it gave me good practice with a new type of Bic ballpoint, since I can't seem to find the kind I used to use.

2018, ballpoint in 11"x8.5" sketchbook

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Pareidoodle

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Old dreams...

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Reviewing some old dream journals I came upon this old ballpoint doodle. From early 80s I think.

Yeah it was 1980 because I remember showing it to a therapist I saw briefly that year. Of course she couldn't tell me what it meant, just wanted to know whose name I thought was on the grave stone. Like it might be mine and that would mean something. Well I've got news for her now. My name is on a tombstone--for real--and here's a sketch I made of that. From life. Heh, heh.
My full name and birth date are on the front, next to my deceased wife, the only part missing is my 'end date.'
Pretty sobering but that's about it in terms of "meaning."

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Yeah, Don Quixote...

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My mind was too much in "adventure" mode yesterday to settle on a subject, so this turned out to be more of an exploratory exercise with the Pilot Precise V5 extra fine rolling ball pen. I guess technically that makes it a ballpoint sketch. 'Cept not really. It ain't no Bic Stick, although I was trying to use it like one.

 This is page one in a new sketch book, 8.5x5.5" made by Daler Rowney with 80 sheets of 65 lb. paper.
 And you get the full width for drawing as it's attached to the book by a 3/4" strip with perforations.
 Cool huh.

And here's some eggs I drew in pencil in another book a long time ago.

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Speaking of fantasy...

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 Some old drawings and one painting:

This is ballpoint in a small sketchpad. I was driving back from Dallas to Garland one day, stopped at an intersection when a shadow crossed the windshield, I looked up and...!!!  If you google "pterodactyls in Texas" you'll find people who would believe that. THAT'S a true story.

Deep in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Pelucidar series.

Dreaming of flight...

...a study for the above figure.

Alas it never became a painting. Yet.

Snort

Mainline

Jungle Queen. My pencil after The Master Frank Frazetta's painting.

Mushroom Fairy, 24x18" oil on canvas. I used a photo by a friend--which had a frog on the toadstool--and a figure from a book of action photos for artists.

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Light and shade

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3.5x5" ballpoint, sketchpad. Below is just about actual size in the book. Sat in the van for about an hour yesterday, looking west from the Walmart parking lot toward the slope that leads up to the Dixie Cafe.  Touched up a little after.

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Yesterday and today...

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Um, actually the "Yesterday" is about 30 yrs. ago, and the "today" is...well, yesterday.

First is a ballpoint sketch in my little 3.5x5" sketchpad, made yesterday at approximately the same spot as the following oil painting, which was made back in the 90's from photos I took back in the 80's.
The tree out in the field in the painting has been replaced by an 80 foot power pole in the sketch, and in the painting where there's a break in the mid-distance tree line, showing more distant trees down by the creek where as a kid I hunted rabbits and stegosaurus, in the sketch has been replaced by, on the left there, a bypass going right over the creek.
"Progress." It is a nice lonely stretch of road, skirting the south side of town, which if I have time I'll try to capture some of, before it gets all commercialized.

I don't know if you can tell but the larger painting (18x24") was done during my "Bob Ross period," ;) using mainly his tools and methods. I struggled with this scene for months and then knocked it out his way in about 2 or 3 sessions. I still want to do it over in my own style though...


Afterthought: 8x10" oil study of the tree break, done just before the above painting.

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Nothing personal...

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I had me a right ponder on the throne this morning. The value of conceptual knowledge. Would we sense what's good to eat and what would kill us without conceptual knowledge? Could pure senses tell the difference? Moot point since everything coming in through the senses is filtered and translated by already existing knowledge. That's what tells us there's a thing separate from us at all. Manifest reality - or nature, if you will - is not nice, or mean, or indifferent. It doesn't produce pscilocybin shrooms to thrill us, nor Deadly Nightshades to kill us. It doesn't extend one life a century and end another in minutes because of who they were. When I die, it won't be about me. It happens whether you're ready or not. If death is impersonal, doesn't it follow that life is?

 1/21/16

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Missing White Rock Lake, Dallas TX

Live 11x8.5" pencil sketchbook drawing; just inside the southeast entrance at Lawther and Garland Rd.

Pen sketch, 8.5x11" of the spillway.

White Rock Pump Station, 16x20" oil on canvas

Pen sketch, 8.5x5.5" sketchbook; East Lawther.

Second sketch from same day as previous. Over by the baseball field, on Emerald Isle Drive.

5.5x8.5" ballpoint sketch, looking over at Winfrey Point.
I'm almost sure it has nothing to do with Oprah.

Another 5.5x8.5" ballpoint. From over by the Bathhouse, I think. I got a $200+ ticket that day for having a case of UNOPENED beer in the car. From a cop on a bicycle. How you doin', Officer Dethloff?

5.5x8.5" ballpoint, sketchbook, under Mockingbird, surrounded by kayakers.

4x6" pencil of Winfrey Point.

One of the few sketches here made from a photo. 6x4" pencil painting of the old bike path just north of the spillway.

Ballpoint in a 3.5x5.0" sketchbook. I don't remember where exactly this was, but the wind was cold that day.

4x6" pencil, from a photo. Pump Station from East Lawther.

5x7" oil on canvas panel, from the same photo and sketch as above.

3.5x5.0" ballpoint from the ball field.

3.5x5.0" ballpoint overlooking the old boathouse. Middle of September and it was raining a warm drizzle, so warm and light nobody even seemed to notice. Mmm...north Texas weather...

4x6" ballpoint, from Lawther up near Winfrey Point.

Ah, I sat at a picnic table on T.P.Hill, in direct July sun, gettin' burned. A family was bar-b-queing at the pavilion about 100 feet to my right and a slight breeze brought the aroma right under my nose. Tantalizing. I wanted to stay longer, put some background, sniff some more q-fumes, but I could feel my skin burning and had to walk away, slightly light headed. Maybe next time...

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