Syrian Full Balkan

Watching the relentless rains (15.4 inches from Sept 4 - 8) then the monstrously flooding Susquehanna here in Marietta these past couple of days, swelling out of its banks, fed by streams washing out roads on their way to bigger things. Something about all these billions of cubic feet of muddy water roaring down to Chesapeake Bay, all the tree branches and debris from collapsed buildings, and bridge piers eroded to fine silt, this awesome power of nature. Something about it has gotten into my bloodstream and thrown me a little out of control. If I had paints out I'd be making a serious mess.

Pipes, a beer bottle, and a tin of Syrian Full Balkan, 11 9/16 x 8 1/4, watercolor pencil and water soluble graphite

No patience

I don't know if it's that I waited until the end of the work day, having written two articles for a kitchen design blog, sitting in front of the computer for hours. Or if the strain of containing myself when I really wanted to yell at people wore me out. Or if the heavy downpour that shows no sign of letting up has gotten on my nerves, finding previously watertight ways to get into our house, softening plaster and drenching old woodwork around the stained glass windows in the studio, dripping onto the staircase where water has never leaked. Or if it's a deeper anxiety generated by feeling the sky close and relentlessly dark and the streets running like broad sluices and the creeks flowing muddy across the roads and the Susquehanna swollen and spilling over its banks. But whatever the cause, I had no patience to do the delicately detailed drawing that I thought about doing all day as I worked, set out old towels and catchbasins, and went about what seemed like a normal if fractured business day in the studio. So when I found myself so tense that my back began to ache after ten minutes of drawing, I just let myself grab colors randomly out of my pencil box and took out my frustrations, obliterating the carefully drawn profiles the way that the flood waters are breeching the river's edge. At least nobody got hurt.

 three old bent billiards, the New Yorker, a book of poems by Donald Hall, and a glass of cheap zinfandel, 8 1/4 x 11 9/16, watercolor pencil

Token sketch for Labor Day

Sometimes I think of what I do as drawings, sometimes as studies, and sometimes as sketches. This one is a sketch. Quickly done as an exercise, the way that a pianist practices scales to loosen her arms, hands, and fingers. A way of staying limber and staying in shape for more serious work. It doesn't take long for the edge to dull if the blade isn't honed frequently. Sometimes, a sketch becomes something more, but not because it's planned that way. It just happens unpredictably, through the process of doing without intending to make art. Today is Labor Day, though, and while I have other work that must be attended to, the results of any drawing are going to remain in the sketch category. Have a restful Labor Day. Oh - and for those of you who know my daughters Nora and Noble, today is their eighteenth birthday. Happy Birthday, you two!

three pipes by Rad Davis, 8 1/4 x 5, 9B graphite and watercolor pencils

Portrait drawing

I love to draw. I have seldom loved to draw portraits, and the instances of my doing it have been rare. As a friend aptly put it, I have a very harsh frame of reference by which I judge myself, and I've stayed away from drawing people to avoid my most damning self pronouncements of artistic ineptitude. I even convinced myself, for complex reasons that we'll just stay away from here, that I didn't draw people because I wasn't interested in people. Yet I have, from time to time over the years, drawn people nonetheless. And because an artist's most readily available model is himself, I've done more portraits of myself than of any other single person among the small number that I've drawn.

Portraiture is really intimidating. I can get away with lots of little inaccuracies with other subjects, but drawing people and their faces requires far more skill and focus in observation and draughtsmanship. Tiny nuances inaccurately perceived are instantly recognized as flaws in a portrait. And of course, for me, there is the additional challenge that I refuse to draw from photographs. But, the same friend suggested to me just yesterday that I consider taking commissions for portraits of pipe collectors, individually and in groups, enjoying their pipes and one another's company. Wow, now that's intimidating. And in spite of my horror that I might be grouped with sidewalk artists doing $10 portrait sketches on the fringes of Central Park, it's intriguing. As my restless thoughts return more and more often to speculation about becoming a full time professional fine artist, the notion of entering the merciless crucible of portrait art whispers "I dare you."

Do I dare?

self portrait, 8 1/4 x 11 9/16, 9B graphite pencil

Conversations in German

My grandfather, Richard Eugene Stultz, who passed away in 1980, was a cigarette smoker as long as I remembered, but he occasionally smoked a pipe. He once told me that we could trace our lineage to William Tell, and showed me a pipe he had acquired on a trip with the American team to the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, carved in the likeness of the fabled champion of political freedom and of course, archery. When he died, my grandmother gave me the pipe. I had it professionally cleaned, resisted the pipe shop owner's offer to trade me any pipe in the store for it, and have over the years occasionally filled it with tobacco and smoked it. Otherwise, it has rested in a box or gathered dust on display.

Today, however, as I realized that I couldn't let myself avoid my daily drawing exercise, it came out on the balcony with me where I perched it on the stone parapet facing a contemporary Cornelius Manz bent apple. Although I didn't realize it until just now, it was an apple that William Tell shot from his son's trembling head with a single arrow - a great moment in the folklore of civil disobedience. So, we'll call this one "conversation in German".

8 1/4 x 11 9/16, watercolor pencils and 9B Caran d'Ache Swiss Made Grafwood graphite pencil