Some sketches ...

~ ... from late this year, all at once, before it's next year already. All on location at parks in the area, all on 3.5x5" sketchbook, with drawing pencils or Pigma Micron pen.

   Mistake: the "on location" part isn't 100%; the second one, the rearview mirror shot was made from a photo. But I did make the photo myself, on location, in the park.

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Lake Log

 

6B pencil in 5.5 x 8.5" sketchbook. Log at lake's edge. I was drawn to how the texture of the bark defined the raking of the light across the shape of it.

A friend on FB said she thought it was a gator at first. I can see that, but what a hoot 'n' a holler that would be in northeast Arkansas!
 

 

 

 Okay, I just had to turn off Enhanced Tracking Protection in Firefox to get this to work, to load an image. Feels like manipulation. This may not fly either ...

Uprooted Stump

3.5" x 5" sketchbook

My first outing with the Staedtler Mars Lumograph black drawing pencils. They're really darker than regular graphite; this is just the HB and a straight scan, no digital enhancement.

Found this uprooted stump down by the creek, where they're putting in a new jogging/biking/walking path. It was 95F and I'm 70 yr, old and out of shape, or I might have gotten more of this done. Was fun though.

Doppio

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“On the exoteric level the traditions are irreconcilable. On the esoteric, experiential level of the heart reigns an eloquent, reverential silence.”
― Frederick Franck, A Little Compendium on That Which Matters 

6b pencil in 3.5x5" sketchbook

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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Sleepy ...

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Does Coffee Make You Sleepy?

Wasp

 

 

 “We have a belief that we need not believe in, no dogmas, no ritual, no mythology, no church, no priest, no holy book--what a relief!”
― Frederick Franck 

Creek Tree Shade

 

HB pencil in 8.5x5.5" sketchbook. Out at Harmon's Field yesterday, about 30 minutes toughing it out, "in the field,"(sitting in my car with the AC going), then some touch-ups back at home, trying to save it from being a scruffy mess.

I'm clearly out of practice.

I recently did some reading and video watching on 'notan' and 'chiaroscuro' and concluded, who needs fancy terms when all you gotta do is look. Well I think I just found out who. Might have served me well in simplifying my lights and darks, prevented that rather chaotic scratchiness in the tree foliage, if I'd pulled those tools out of the box.

At least this part looks pretty good. To me.

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"Practicing's good in theory. In reality it just tires us out." --Hank Yarbo 😂

"Wall Street" Paragould style

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Pencil in 5.5x8.5" sketchbook. Small town humor; "Wall Street" is what we used to call 2nd Ave., because in Paragould's heyday as a railroad town, the depot was right in back of buildings like the one pictured above, and that whole block was warehouses and such, chocked full of freight and it was what put us on the map. So, take 'at New York City! 😉

I don't remember if the depot had been torn down yet, the day I made this sketch, but it was long in disuse either way. At one time, in my youth, I think this building housed a retail outlet for some brand of bread and snack cakes. Something is still there, but it doesn't look like this.

And for some reason, I guess I was thinking hard on it that day, I associate this drawing with a trip I made 6 days later, to the picture frame factory outlet store in Pocahontas, during which I spotted the subject of the sketch below. It was around 11 am, she and two young men came into the motel coffee shop I was in, looking like they just made it out of the room in time for check-out, after a night of ... revelry. A disheveled lot they were, but she caught my eye and I sat in the car afterwards and tried to sketch her from memory. I think I got the haggard look, at least.

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Starfish

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Back when I was married, there were magnets on the fridge. One was a starfish. One of its arms fell off, broke off. I drew a picture of it, evidently with an HB pencil, in an 8.5" x 5.5" sketchbook, on the 25th day of January, 2008. 

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"I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may, - light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful." --John Constable.

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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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Darkness At Times Edge

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The year Christopher Reeves' first Superman movie came out, 1978 apparently, I'm at home trying to draw this Frazetta illustration from TV Guide -- the grayscale version to the left was in the magazine, below is the full color image -- promoting that week's episode of Battlestar Gallactica.

I mention the Superman movie because that's what interrupted the drawing: friends showed up and coaxed me away to go see the newest incarnation of The Man of Steel. 

I was glad I did but don't know why I never finished the sketch.

Anyway, it's pencil in a 11.5" x 8.5" sketchbook.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Rita Drive, Garland, TX, '08

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Pencil in 5.5" x 8.5" sketchbook. A view from my 'studio' window, in those days.

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"We talk far too much. We should talk less and draw more. I personally should like to renounce speech altogether and, like organic Nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches.
 That fig tree, this little snake, the cocoon on my window sill quietly awaiting its future –
all these are momentous signatures. A person able to decipher their meaning properly would
 soon be able to dispense with the written or the spoken word altogether. The more I think of it, there is something futile, mediocre, even (I am tempted to say) foppish about speech. By
 contrast, how the gravity of Nature and her silence startle you, when you stand face to face
 with her, undistracted, before a barren ridge or in the desolation of ancient hills."--Goethe

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Tree Neighborhood

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 pencil sketch 8.5x11"

 

 oil painting 20x24"

1985

 

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Field

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 1996, 10"x10" oil on canvas

Still getting used to Nikon D5600 and now, as if that wasn't enough to worry about, I'm trying to figure out Luminar 4, a new editing program, very strange to this old brain...

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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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Alien light

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"There are no correct experiences to have. The well-being we have sought by trying to rearrange thoughts, feelings and sensations is always and already present as the seamless flow of everything that arises."
~ John Astin

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HELLO...Hello...hello...

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Stego '78

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Old pencil sketch in 11"x8.5" sketchbook, cropped. From way back, and way off, out there, somewhere...

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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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