"The Important Woman"

Good news from the studio: As we exit the month of August and the remains of summer 2013 fade away, I am finally finishing some new, large, mixed media drawings! This piece is one of several that I can finally move to the "completely done, never touching this again!" drawer in the studio flat file.

As with much of the new work happening in my studio these days, "The Important Woman" focuses on the relationship between a specific human head (based on one of the many marble and bronze portrait busts I have photographed over the years) and a specific found object (in this case, the wood chalice sitting on the small shelf at the bottom of the composition.)

My goal is to have five or six new large, mixed media pieces completed by the end of October. Ah well, that's what fall is about after all, setting rather unrealistic goals...

Final thoughts from Arrowmont

Just one final note from Arrowmont... Here is a picture of the class holding those great ceramic heads I was drawing. (Except, of course for Debbie, that's her real head...)

Also, I had intended to venture out into beautiful downtown Gatlinburg and make some sketches for the blog of this very unique mountain town, but it was quite a busy workshop and I never got the chance. So here is a photo of some awesome rhinestone cowboy boots on display in one of the shops along the main street. I think this image says all you really need to know about wonderful wacky Gatlinburg.

"Large Drawings: Image and Text", some final student work

Here are some photos taken on the last day of our Arrowmont workshop. Most of this work isn't completely finished, but is certainly well along the way, and was all done, start to finish, in just five days of studio time. I think all of the students on the class did an amazing job, testing the boundaries of what big, mixed media drawings can be, and how important it is as an artist to break out of your comfort zone and take creative risks. Each artists name is listed above their photo.

Natalie Strum

Debra Kern

Rowena MacLeod

Karin Huettemann

Debbie Rule

Ian Ballantyne

Some more images from a week in Tennessee

 Here are few more images of my class at work at Arrowmont last week:

And here are a few more images of the larger drawing of the ceramic heads that I was working on. All the work at this point is still in graphite, with graphite powder and a lot of erasing using my electric eraser. I will continue to work on this for quite a few months once I return to the McColl Center in Charlotte...

Working on Big Drawings at Arrowmont...

So here are a few views of a large drawing I have been working on with my students at Arrowmont this week.
This first layer is just graphite drawing, no gesso washes or mixed media added at this point.

The heads that I am drawing here are all from the Arrowmont ceramic sculpture collection. Every clay instructor donates a bisque-fired piece to the collection at the end of their class, so there were quite a few great figurative pieces to chose from. I'm not sure which artists made these wonderful pieces, but as soon as I find out their names, I will post them here on the blog...

That's Robbie, a student form the printmaking workshop at Arrowmont, standing next to the drawing to give a sense of scale.

And here is a photo of the actual heads I was working with...

Welcome to Arrowmont!!

As promised, I am spending this week at the wonderful Arrowmont School for Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Here are a few introductry photos from my class. "Large Drawings: Image and Text":

More images are on the way as the class progresses through the week...

Here are a few additional images from our warm-up, Round-a-bout exercises from the first day of class:

Decadence and Distortion

This coming week I will be at the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg Tennessee, teaching a one week workshop, "Large Drawings: Image and Text". 

It should be a fun and exciting time for all, and one of those teaching situations where I learn as much or more than the students. Because 1. I have never taught a class on this theme before in such a short time format, and 2. Gatlinburg apparently has a "moonshine bar"which I hope will provide libations to loosen everyone up and get some BIG gesture drawing going with non-traditional materials.

Stay tuned for images and impressions from the coming week's adventure...

In the meantime, here are some images of what was happening at the McColl Center studio this past week. Having finished a few new mixed media pieces, I rewarded myself with one of my favorite things in the world: starting a big, new ambitious drawing series. This is a dangerous reward system, in that I have a tendency to start projects well and finish them less faithfully. Hopefully posting projects to the blog, and holding myself responsible to the Internet audience thereby implied, will keep a fire under this series. It would be great to have everything I am working on in the studio now completed by, say, October... Ah well, it's good to have intentions.

So this new drawing series pairs various distorted and disfigured heads from my archive with collage material from a book on the history of dolls. It is something to ponder; as many heads and bodies as I've drawn and studied over the years, I don't think I have ever really looked closely at dolls or puppets as potential drawing reference material. Of course, the collage imagery I have chosen has something of a creepy factor about it, but this seems to be the norm when chopping up dolls into parts and putting them into a particular context.

There are five drawings started so far in the series, and each sheet measures about 2.5' X 3.5'.
I decided to keep this work within the realm of traditional "dry" drawing materials, meaning that there are no acrylic or gesso washes in the first layers, and the materials are limited to graphite, ink, collage and colored pencil. Here are three in progress (shown with detail shots) that have been sketched out to the point of having a stable composition and fixed subject matter:

And on an entirely different note, it occurred to me upon reviewing a few of the past month's blog entries that I may be giving a false impression of my McColl Center studio: that it is a squeaky clean, polished, gallery-like space. Such is not the case, at least not on a day-to-day basis. Here is a random shot of what my work table looks like in the middle of the average workday before a lunch break:

There's usually a lot of crap on the floor as well. It is important to remember that creative space is messy space, both physically and intellectually.