Another angry drawing

I was in such a different mood when I began this drawing than where I ended up. I sat down on our living room sofa downstairs, where I seldom draw. Brought my pair of Howell/Roan 283 pipes in my little zippered leather case, set them on the credenza next to me, and started a careful contour drawing. But I couldn't get comfortable, and as I'd already been sitting most of the day in front of my computer modeling a project in AutoCAD, I ran out of patience very quickly. Everything started to irritate me - the shiny indigo paint on the pencil shanks makes it difficult to see what color the leads are, they're round and tend to roll around too easily, they started sliding out of my left hand because I had too many clenched in my fist. Fortunately, I can get away with having my quiet little tantrums on paper. Delicate hatching and subtle tonal gradients get savaged by a rough hand. Fine details are swallowed up by harsh, slashing marks. But nothing gets broken and nobody gets hurt. I didn't even swear. Not very much anyhow, and I kept it to muttering under my breath. The truth is, I'm getting less and less interested in fine detail and much more interested in the tension between raw emotional energy and keeping just enough control to manipulate it into something that has validity as art. And hey, if nothing else, you get to be entertained by another angry drawing!

pair of A Passion for Pipes 2011 Pipe of the Year specimens by Jack Howell, 11 9/16 x 8 1/4, Derwent Inktense pencils

Driving to work

Two days a week, sometimes more, I climb into my car and drive most of the way across Lancaster county to work on site at my client's cabinet shop, Premier Custom-Built in New Holland. That's the same New Holland that produces the well known brand of farm machinery seen all over the country, and despite the best efforts of real estate developers, the area is still a stronghold for family owned farms, most of them relatively small operations. Having grown up in an agricultural community in central New York, the landscape, while much flatter down here, is agreeable and soothing to me.

Harvest is pretty much over for the year, and as I traveled east between fields put to rest for the coming winter, I got a sense that the land and farm buildings resting on it are hunkered down, waiting quietly yet still vibrating with the potential that this richly fertile soil is famous for. Passing by a tract of roughly turned ground with a string of white painted house, barns, outbuildings, and a cluster of tall silos, spread across the low ridge beyond, under a gray sky not quite benign but a little short of menacing, I had to make myself late getting to the plant and pull off to the side of the road to do a quick drawing. Not as invigorating as drawing in the middle of a bike ride like on Sunday afternoon, but nonetheless a better start to my work day than cursing myself for yet again missing an opportunity to record my impressions of this place that over the last nineteen years has gotten into my blood.

farm along North Shirk Road, New Holland, PA; 11 9/16 x 8, watersoluble and wax colored pencils and graphite

Update on Tuesday, November 15, 2011 at 10:42PM by Scott A. Stultz

scrawling in a sketchbook is better than watching stupid movies on netflix when I'm too brain dead to do real work

water glass in front of the computer monitor, prismacolor pencils

Bad Places

When I was in my mid thirties and in graduate school for architecture, I found myself increasingly attracted to places that would never be chosen as photographic subjects for scenic picture postcards. In Seattle, my friend and colleague Ken Thacker and I called them Bad Places. Railroad yards scattered with locomotive parts and cars rusting from neglect. Power stations, especially old, grimy ones with lots of broken windows. Agricultural buildings that were never beautiful, even before decades of hard use. Visiting him later in Chicago where he continued his master's degree work while I was living back here in Pennsylvania becoming a dad, we spent most of one night skulking around a seedy area where iron foundries worked the graveyard shift, spewing smoke and sparks into the sky. For reasons that I won't offer to analyze just now, these places held a delicious dark delight for us. Still do. Different, my ego wants me to believe, from the fashionable preoccupation with urban decay that has become hackneyed and passe in the art world, but maybe not. Who cares.

This particular Bad Place is more rural. It's just a five mile bicycle ride from my house, over in Mt. Joy, next to a railroad siding where grain is loaded onto hopper cars. One need not go all the way to Seattle or Chicago to find Badness. It's everywhere you look. All you need is a bad enough attitude to be able to see it.

Why Man Creates

When I was a freshman in the art & design core program at the Rochester Institute of Technology, we were all required to take a course called Creative Sources from an eccentric white haired professor named Stanley Witmeyer. Stan was full of a childlike enthusiasm and wonder that sometimes made him seem a little like a kindergarten teacher, or a more animated version of Mr. Rodgers. Besides assigning us little projects that were designed to get us thinking beyond the predictable and common, he sometimes showed us films. One that has stuck with me all these years was a film made by Saul Bass, entitled "Why Man Creates". It was a series of humorous animated skits, following mankind through history, looking at famous moments of creative genius. At the end, there was a more serious narrated passage, considering humanity and our inexplicable need to create. The narrator refers to expressions of creativity, and alludes to soaring achievements, commenting that "some have spoken eloquently", then shifting to a shot of angry inner city graffiti, says "some have been almost mute." Thinking of that flushes my sinuses with tears and makes my chest swell with emotion. "Some have been almost mute." So much pain in that phrase. I think of having so much inside without the means to articulate.

tuesday night

low low low. i shouldn't even post tonight

 AutoCAD rendering of a showroom design in progress