Month: November 2022

Posted on

Monday Morning Art School: what do you use for drawing?

For figure drawing, I prefer softer materials, primarily willow charcoal.

“I wonder if you can give me some tips on getting back into drawing,” a reader asked recently. She’s a retired professional artist, so she didn’t need help with the mechanics, just the materials.  “I only have those hard leads that I put in mechanical pencils.  I like drawing with a mechanical pencil and lead but I need leads that are much softer for the kinds of thing I might be drawing, along with the thinner lines I use now. I don’t like clumsy crayon-type of drawing or anything like that.  I am not at all interested in drawing with ink.”

“I also need a good quality sketching paper.  Later I might move into a higher-grade paper if I keep up with this kind of work.”

I always carry a sketchbook with me when painting, and I always start with a drawing.

Although this reader doesn’t need help with the mechanics of drawing, many of my students and readers do. I recommend Sketching from Square One to Trafalgar Square by Richard E. Scott. Drawing is a technical exercise, not a magic trick. Anyone can learn it.

These days, I do 99% of my drawing in a Strathmore Bristol Visual Journal with a #2 mechanical pencil, using my finger for a stump. I like the hard-press finish and can go off on watercolor or gouache tangents when I feel like it.

My winter mittens. I’ve been saved a world of boredom by always carring a sketchbook and #2 mechanical pencil with me.

But that’s not the kind of finish my reader is seeking. I’m never doing more than a quick sketch for a painting, or drawing in church. Neither need the depth of shading that better materials would supply.

I prefer mechanical pencils because they don’t need a sharpener and eraser. If that appeals, you can buy replacement leads in a variety of densities. These, however, are wider than the pencils one buys at Staples, so they require a matching lead holder, only some of which come with internal erasers.

That exceeds my tolerance for fuss. When I’m doing more finished pencil work, I use woodless pencils. They can be sharpened with a sandpaper pointer. If you like a bigger, bolder look, liquid charcoal and graphite blocks cover a lot of area quickly.

The animals in our annual church Christmas service suddenly came alive.

Another reader suggested I try Uni Mitsubishi Hi-Uni pencils for a traditional lead pencil that has satisfyingly smooth graphite. And there’s Blackwing, which a writer friend swears is the best pencil in the world. But since I don’t use traditional pencils, your suggestions would be helpful.

Good graphite deserves good paper. You could take a deep dive into a wove paper, but for everyday drawing, I rely on that old standby, Canson Mi-Tientes. It has a different surface on either side and comes in a plethora of colors.

Moving away from mechanical pencils means a good eraser. I use a Pentel stick eraser, but the softer the lead, the less precision you’ll need. I used kneaded erasers for years, but I’m finding them too gummy these days. The Koh-I-Noor Hardtmuth Soft Eraser is made of old-fashioned rubber.

Drawing in church leads to some priceless observations, including this teenage boy falling asleep.

And last but certainly not least, there’s the question of pencil sharpeners. I have several, including a wall-mounted one in my studio. None are as durable and reliable as the old metal ones from our school days. In the end, I find the simple, cheap, handheld metal ones where you can replace the blades to be the most reliable.

What products do you love for drawing, and why? Just remember to put your recommendations in the comments below, not on Facebook. That makes them universally accessible to readers from any platform.

This page contains affiliate links for some but not all products. If you choose to make a purchase after clicking a link, I may receive a commission at no additional cost to you. Thank you for your support!

Posted on

The last fun time

Iris Blossoms, by Peter Yesis, courtesy of the artist.

On March 6, 2020, Peter Yesis had an opening at the Picker Room of the Camden Public Library. That night, Ken DeWaard introduced us to the elbow bump, which was supposed to replace handshakes and hugs and keep us safe from this new disease from China. It was a dark winter’s night and we were a party of close friends. We laughed and joked and practiced bumping elbows. I wasn’t overly worried; we’d seen this with SARS and Ebola-a whole lot of fuss over nothing.

I flew off to Argentina with my pal Jane Chapin and all hell broke loose (proving that I can’t leave you kids alone for fifteen minutes). Among the first casualties was Peter’s solo show-closed down a day after it opened. After that, we weren’t bumping elbows; we weren’t even allowed in the same room. The library shut down all art shows for the foreseeable future.

A Clear Day, by Peter Yesis, courtesy of the artist.

An abrupt closure is painful for an artist, since we work for a year or more for the materials for a one-month show. The library staff understands this; they offered Peter a reprise date in November, 2021, when life had begun its slow, sluggish return to normalcy.

Cellar Dweller, by Peter Yesis, courtesy of the artist.

Unfortunately, life intervened in another cruel way. Peter was slammed by cancer. He was in the depths of treatment and in no condition to be hawking paintings.

But today he is in remission, and we’re all celebrating with another opening. Let Peter’s annus horribilis end, and let this be the start of his annus mirabilis.

Light on the Water, by Peter Yesis, courtesy of the artist.

Every Canvas Has a Story opens this Saturday, Nov. 5th, from 3:30 PM to 5:30 PM. Enter on the Atlantic Avenue side of the Camden Library; there’s ample parking on the street and in the library lot. The show will be up for the month of November, but I always encourage people to show up for the party.

Still Waters, by Peter Yesis, courtesy of the artist.

Peter’s wife, Kim Yesis, will also be giving a book talk on Tuesday, Nov. 29th at 6:30 PM. She’s the author of Side by Side: Tales from Behind the Canvas. It talks about Peter’s decision to give up engineering for painting. They were in early middle age, which for people with children is a terribly expensive phase of life. Come ask Kim why she didn’t just kill him for the insurance money.

Tried and true, by Peter Yesis, courtesy of the artist.

Peter’s a crackerjack painter; for example, there is nobody around who paints flowers so well. I’m so glad to see him back up and punching his full weight. The paintings in this show are beautiful, and I encourage you to come out and see them in person.

Posted on

Does surrealism work in painting?

Winter Lambing, 48X36, oil on linen, $6231 framed.

I slept through most of Halloween, meaning I missed one of America’s key spending holidays. My fellow citizens were expected to lay out more than $10 billion on—what, exactly? Candy? Fake spider webs?

“When you think of it, all the world's great stories have an element of the supernatural,” my student Mark Gale told me recently.

Ravening Wolves, oil on canvas, 24X30, $3478

It’s a thesis I’ve tested against my own taste in literature. It’s there in the Homeric epics, where the gods intervene in human affairs in very human ways. All the books of the Bible are about relationship between God and man. Dante’s Divine Comedy is a fantasy about cosmic justice. Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope wrote within the Victorian understanding that God is ever-present. Kurt Vonnegut (if you didn’t read him at 20, you had no heart) was an atheist, but wrote in the supernatural. Haruki Murakami is a modern-day shaman. Even dystopian novels like Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World are about malign power beyond the merely human.

Apparently, contemporary readers feel the same about magical realism. Fantasy literature is one of the great successes of modern bookselling.

The Harvest is Plenty, 30X40, oil on linen, $6231 framed.

The supernatural, in the form of religious painting, is the foundation of western art. We invented painting largely to explain the Bible. Now that almost everyone reads, religious art no longer serves that purpose. But we can see its power in works like the Ghent Altarpiece.

However, magical realism never made the leap to modern painting. Surrealism was a minor mid-century phenomenon that was rendered superfluous by moving pictures. Giorgio de Chirico and Salvador Dali were probably its greatest practitioners, but neither had any profound impact on art history. Surrealism lives on in the work of Frida Kahlo, but Fridamania is probably more a cult than an art movement.

This is a disconnect I feel strongly. I’ve been a Christian convert for about thirty years. You’d think I could express that through art. However, I’ve had little success. The exception was a series of paintings I did for a solo show called God+Man at Roberts Wesleyan’s Davison Gallery in 2014. It was hardly a cutting-edge idea or treatment, even if the paintings themselves are good.

All flesh is as grass, 30X40, oil on linen, $6231 framed.

Part of that is the crushing weight of sixteen centuries of great religious art. There is nothing that I can say about the stories of the Bible that hasn’t already been said by hands and minds trained to the task.

I’ve argued that this is enough; that in Creation we see God. But that’s starting to feel like an insufficient argument. Is landscape enough? If not, how does an artist start insinuating his or her higher thoughts into the work?