An interval of calmness

When events and emotions conspire to induce sadness, discouragement, heartbreak, exhaustion, I am grateful for the solace of my love of drawing and my ability, at times, to find some calm and comfort in doing it. Here is the evening clutter on my chairside table up in the studio loft, where I've retreated to find my way back to center. Tomorrow is a fresh day.

silent companions for a quiet evening, 11 9/16 x 8 1/4, 8B Mars Lumograph and watercolor pencils

Sunday morning shadows

I love the morning light in our house. For the past ten years, we've lived in a 160 year old former church in a small village alongside the Susquehanna River, a brooding two story block of brick and stone with ten and a half foot high ceilings on the first floor, and double that upstairs in the former sanctuary. Large but widely spaced double hung windows break through the masonry at regular intervals along the east and west walls, parallel to East Market Street as well as the building's spine. It is a wide building, and the windows in the living and dining area and adjoining kitchen, while opening onto views of the brick patio and side yard, face west, away from the rising sun. The light that filters in during the early hours is indirect, so the inner reaches of these rooms are layered in shadow, even as hints of a brilliant morning beckon through panes of glass. It is this zone, where colors are soft and subtle, thick with the dark, with the profiles of objects emerging from shadow, that I am captivated by. It is only with reluctance that I turn on lights to chase away the delicious ambiguity of these quiet interiors. The Japanese writer Jun'ichirō Takizaki wrote a gem of an essay in the early 1930s entitled In Praise of Shadows which was translated into English, making the case for the aesthetic richness and mystery that lurk in the darkness, and saying it with far more eloquence than I could hope to do, at least in words. 

living room with Talbert Rhodesian, 11 9/16 x 8 1/4, Derwent Inktense pencils

Update on Sunday, January 29, 2012 at 4:40PM by Scott A. Stultz

a break from design work on a Sunday afternoon, 7B graphite and Prismacolor pencils

Update on Sunday, January 29, 2012 at 8:36PM by Scott A. Stultz

Three Rhodesians

Maybe I'll take time later to write about these, and might even give it another whirl with a more detailed drawing before I move them off the table, but for now, here is a quick Saturday morning pencil drawing of three very different variations on the Rhodesian pipe shape, from three of my very favorite pipe carvers.

Before work

It's time for another day of painstaking (for me anyway) Glasgow cabinet series illustration work, which won't look anything like this unruly sketchbook page done by my evil, undisciplined alter ego. But if I don't let him out for a little exercise every day, BAD THINGS happen.

Suzanne Crane coffee mug and Rad Davis long shank hickory nut, Prismacolors and Mars Lumograph 8B pencil

Rhodesian morning

This rather agitated sketchbook drawing was done this morning (it's now mid afternoon) to help me warm up for a full day of illustrating examples of a cabinetry series that I've been working on for several months. I started out calmly and carefully with the contours of an Adam Davidson and a Trever Talbert Rhodesian and various smoking articles scattered across the front edge the table that my computer monitor sits on, but no sooner was the outline done than my mood shifted abruptly, producing the stormy result that you see here. I really thought I was going to do something much more delicate and refined. Today, though, that's not what really wanted to be let out.

Rhodesians, 11 9/16 x 8 1/4, Prismacolor pencils