Figure Donning Waterproofs

This is one of my favourite ways to initiate and complete a sketch.

I don’t want it to be photographic so I am relying on a memory of a situation I thought had great visual impact: a fisherman pulling on his waterproof pants. A photograph of the action would actually impede my drawing because I would get entangled in its details; when I only want the completed drawing to focus on abstracted essentials memory is the best tool as it will leave room for a creative remembrance.

Drawing with a dry/semi-dry pen allows me to lightly indicate the figure and work out good proportions. After which I go directly to the heart of my intent—fluid pose and positions of arms/legs plus the lines of the clothing which will describe the critical motion. Those centres of clothing stress I build into strong visual presences with a very careful eye to placement, to composition, to textural variation, to maximum effect created with minimal input. This allows ample room for imagination and suggestion to complete the work in the viewer’s eye.

Fillière © Apr 5 2019

Winter Figure

Winter Figure

Draw. Erase.

Draw. Erase.

Draw a symbol of renewal

: crocus, baseball, robin. No. Rub it out

: too romantic, too sentimental, and much too soon.

Draft instead the black-plumed preacher

in the back woods—be-sooted raven, riled fundamentalist,

that besotted Cassandra high in the black back woods, 

who frets over winter’s excesses and counts/curses/condemns

every person, dog, cat that comes and goes below it

on the road to hell in a freeze-dried world.

Sketch cats agoraphobic that slink/crouch/slide

with flattened ears from barn to bush to shed

, schizoid from nightmares of being fed

to a fanged and hackled open space.

Draw euphoric people multi-hued and mechanoid.

Scatter them helter-skelter on wheels/tracks/skis,

ecstatic hearts pacing the harangue of oriental pistons.

Trace the stubble and tattered stems of Queen Anne’s Lace

where it decays and smudges the drifts of the paper white back lot slope

: charcoal remnants / trace reminders of seasons long erased. 

Bell Figure

(Somewhere in a northern clime it is snowing and a bell tolls)

 

   The metallic heart

of a care-free child bell-tongues night snow,

resonates / hums / remembers itself

in out-flowing liquid rings, like water remembering

the knife of a dead man’s dive,

an agony, mindless, unnamed.

 

     Though the playful bell tongue tolls ecstasy

melancholy rings the inner ear.

 

     The childlike tongue / heart chimes

and rhymes joy upon the knife-edged night

; upon the knife-edged night a metal-tongued heart

hammers and hums, hammers and hums

:    hammers and hums a lyric song

     hammers and nails a requiem.