The Tentative Ghost.

But..... under a green moon. Yes, it is (green).

Have a spooky day!




Tentative Ghost Under a Green Moon, 2012, Charcoal, India and acrylic inks, Moleskine Folio Sketchbook A4, 8" x 12", 21cm x 29.7cm. (His ink lines are black and I'm not sure why the scanner read them as brown - unable to colour correct without changing the colours in the whole drawing.)

He smiles, doesn't he? A debonair skeleton, perhaps on a date, 'Where would you like to go for dinner, dear? Or how about a wine bar with a plate of appetizers?' He only needs a black top hat, a tuxedo starch white bow tie.... ::giggling here::

He is drawn from an actual mini skeleton model. Drawing our bones while listening to newscasts of the flooding and destruction of the massive storm that blew in on the East Coast of the US, and in south Ontario and Quebec in Canada.

Yesterday's iPhone pic of the sketch with a Camera+ 'Grunge' filter.



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Today she was restful. Probably 2" x 3" in a little old Moleskine I keep in my purse. I've been afraid to sketch my mother, who had a stroke last March. She's very thin, about 70lbs, and so I'm not sure how much my sketch resembles her. It perhaps has the quality of this difficult time, for her, for us, though.

Certainly emotionally difficult to draw, and yet, as frail as she is, there is a beauty, her skin so thin it is waxen, translucent, the capillaries, the bones evident, an inner light emanating.
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"Praise the world to the Angel, not the unsayable," sketch in-process, 2012, 21cm x 29cm, 8" x 11.5", graphite, Moleskine folio Sketchbook A4. Title is a quote from Rilke's 9th Duino Elegy.

It gave me peculiar pleasure tonight to work on some anatomical shadowing, not entirely successful, but getting there.

The chest to my eye isn't quite right, and I need to imagine myself into that rib cage (or another, I won't tinker with this drawing now) for a better anatomical shadowing rendition. I went to this site, gratis of a beautiful artist where, when doesn't have live models, one can practice.
 
It'd be easier if I printed an image out, but I don't. I sit 3 or 4 feet back, with my mid-distance and close-up bifocals on, and draw straight from the screen, imagining my way into the body I am drawing. :smiles:

I feel this man, his strength, the strength of his anguish, the poetry in him, his agility to throw the masses of fabric high like wings. He becomes a Rilkean man under my pencil.


(My mother fading; bad news from the MRI on my wrist; and other difficulties in my personal life. I find I can't write or make videopoems but that drawing and painting help to still my mind and thus allow some relief from the stress.)

The Living Carry the Souls of the Dead, 2012, 21cm x 29cm, 8" x 11.5", charcoal and oils, Moleskine folio Sketchbook A4.


The spirits of the dead are held aloft by the living.

My grandmother's spirit was my father's memory of her in me and projected by me into a nurturing maternal spirit of safety.

Has she been with me all my life? Yes. But she resides in the energy of my understanding of her through my deceased father's memory.


The figure I have drawn, that I made from bones, who is an experiment in charcoal, seems not the narrator of the writing, and yet she is carrying the souls of the dead, look at her.

Notes on process: First I drew her skeleton, all her vertebrae are there, and her rib cage and sternum, clavicles and humeri, radiuses, and ulnas, femora, and bony pelvis. Then I drew her major muscles, her craniofacial muscles, pectorals, abdominals, femora, the wrap of arm muscles, tendons over the phalange of the fingers. I traced her body's outline with charcoal, and poured some sizing medium (Gak100, for the paper) over her, smudging and sweeping the charcoal with a brush. Red seemed to be her colour, so on my table of oil tubes, used paper towels, half a dozen water jars, a real mess, I searched through a box for the Alizarin Crimson, and began to dry brush it into the wet solution. I tried other colours, delicately, but she was insistent, and so I rubbed them out. After some indefinable time - the clock stops when you are working with a fast drying medium - a few sweeps of orange seemed permissible in her sheer dress, and the white highlights, composed of charcoal white, white oil pastel and Titanium White water-soluble oil paint. My son says she looks like she could be a cover for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

She is a bit scary, but she has fine bones, a good musculature. :)

She is somewhere between life and death, where the soul resides.

Painted this more than a week back, and wasn't sure about the way it scanned, but then I took a photo in sunlight and the colours came up properly, so sharing now.

She was the smartest dog I ever met. The sketch underlying the painting was about her paws, which were almost like elongated hands with thick black fingernails.

The Saluki is an Egyptian desert dog, and often travelled with nomadic tribes across the Sahara.The Saluki is the oldest domesticated breed, representations of Saluki-like dogs can be found on Sumerian seals dating around 7,000BC, and they are depicted in the paintings on the walls of tombs of Pharohs from 2,250BC-1,650BC. Thousands of generations to now, an extraordinarily ancient and intelligent breed.



Painting of a Sleeping Saluki, 2012, 21cm x 29cm, 8" x 11.5", 2012, graphite, acrylic, India and acrylic inks, Moleskine folio Sketchbook A4.





Sketch of a Saluki, 21cm x 29cm, 8" x 11.5", 2012, graphite, Moleskine folio Sketchbook A4.

You remember this one from a bit back. I had intended to paint it also, but a few people, including the owner of the dog, who is considering a commission of it in a large size, asked me to leave it as a simple pencil sketch.

A very simple sketch of a Saluki (smooth variety). Saluki are the oldest domesticated dogs. Saluki-like dogs have been found on Sumerian seals dating back to 7,000-6,000BC; they are in pictures in ancient Egyptian tombs from 2134-1650BC. They are also called Persian Greyhounds, and are an Egyptian desert dog, and often travelled across the Sahara to the Caspian Sea with nomadic tribes. They are extremely thin, sleek, fast, and intelligent. No idea how I'll finish this sketch - design, or paint - but sharing a little scan. No, not my dog, but an extraordinary animal.

Sketch of a Sketcher, from my Poetry Salon in March, of Jennifer Hosein, 21cm x 29cm, 8" x 11.5", 2012, graphite, India and acrylic inks, Moleskine folio Sketchbook A4.

While I had thought to do wild, expressionist colours, to lose the form somewhat, my muse urged me in the direction of delicate restraint instead. Over many hours I created the colours stroke by stroke with a dip pen. Once I started working on this drawing, I knew I wished to keep the original sketch intact, that there is a softness that could not be rendered in ink. Jen's artwork is full of bright passionate colours, and she is a bold and talented writer, and yet, her gentleness, she is a kind, warm, compassionate person.

Happy with this painting of a dancer in my Moleskine. Why? She is lithe and muscular, and has an elegance. She also looks like she's dancing in an ink painting. Splotches of black India ink move over her; she is situated in torrents of acrylic flame red ink. In her dance, she holds still for a moment and her pose imparts a tension of the energy of emotion. There is life, passion and death here.

What I most enjoyed was overdoing this piece. Many inks were dip penned and brush spread until it was a mess, and then, miraculously, I washed the inks off, using all my rags and a half roll of paper towels, wetting and blotting until the sketch began to re-emerge.

With that weight of paint removed from her, of which only I hold the memory, she is again lithe, ready to spring.

And I had to laugh when someone said she looked intersex, and admit ever since Fellini's Satyricon, and then Jung's exploration of the hermaphrodite, I've felt intersex in dreams or art can be a powerful image of inner union. If my Dancer appears to be both woman and man, I am delighted.

Not sure why, since I don't usually anymore, I scanned the sketch, and then the first wash of black India ink and permanent red acrylic ink, and I took an iPhone photo early in the process of adding the inks that I later removed. I have included these three in-process photos, along with the final one (it's first, on the left), for you so you can see the progression of this little painting that took the greater part of last Sunday to complete.

Dancer, 21cm x 29cm, 8" x 11.5", 2012, graphite, India and acrylic inks, Moleskine folio Sketchbook A4.

Self-Portrait Study 3, 21cm x 29cm, 8" x 11.5", 2012, Moleskine folio Sketchbook, graphite, oils, India and acrylic inks.

In the Moleskine, the earlier sketch in this blog this month. (No, I never ever wear eyeliner like that, not in my whole life. Anyway, it's a self portrait that is its own painting and only has some resemblance to me.)

I wanted it to have something beyond itself, be piercing somehow, and even be hard to look at. Somewhat disheveled and distorted, a sadness there, the more difficult realities of our experience, I guess.

In the initial sketch, I wasn't trying to draw a 'self-portrait' for anyone else, only trying to draw what I saw in this little, round magnifying mirror that was somewhat distorting but at least I could see detail without readers. The woman in the sketch had a 'sad and stricken' look, as one commenter wrote.

In the finished painting you see here, in her eyes I hope there is  concern, compassion, fear, sadness, hope, love, remembrance, and the wild ride that life is, with its inexplicable ups and downs, its times of plenty and times of drought.

Leonard Cohen, in a CBC interview I heard last Sunday afternoon, spoke about how we are all, in one way or another, trying to align our will with Divine Will. I'd call the latter, fate, fortune, life, the way it goes, the Tao.

The woman in the painting is caught right in the crux of moment between individual will and that of the life force, aligning an acceptance of fate, of karma, of whatever the forces are, and perhaps learning that allowing the horror of the pain is an empowerment in itself.