A grand-niece of mine drawn in pencil two years ago as one of twelve faces I produced for a Brad/Maxine Rowsell Family group portrait.
Tag: Portraiture
Luncheon on the Grass
Figurehead
The female head shown below is an experiment drawn with a mechanical drafting pen. It is on an oriental printing paper with a considerable nap to its surface, which in turn pushed the pen into an unexpected, unpredicted character of line. Essentially the tool was suspended vertically between my fingers and thumb and moved lightly enough above the paper to create marks without ripping the fibres, which likely accounts for the poetic restraint and the rhythmic, arcing of lines.
No model was used, either in the flesh or by way of photo reference. And no preconception followed, other than to aim for a face, and allow the accumulative marks to determine which personality would arrive, and begin to grow on the page. After the fact I realized that my sculptor side had responded by laying down course upon course of contour lines; that both Giacometti, in his studies of Annette, and Henry Moore, in his studies of sheep, and in some of his war-time subway figures, had arrived at similar approaches before me; hence, though I loved the powerful result, I made only one other companion study.
The most startling aspect of this drawing though, even a dramatic personal surprise for me several years after this drawing, came when my relocation from one Canadian province to live in another, brought about numerous encounters with a local artist-writer of whom you could easily have said this was her singular, penetrating pose.
Portrait as Poem
The watercolour is recent, June 2017.
Deep, Deep
Deep, deep how deep can we go and whom do we know whom we know we think …
(We start out with such endearing presences, and can’t figure out how we lose that charm).
A Thorny Patch of Love-Prick Rose
In its Shakespearean Gardens, Stratford, Ontario there’s a striking sculpture of The Bard. I had tried to make a watercolour of it which failed miserably, until I attempted a correction with pastel, whereupon it suddenly came alive. This is a tale of that process.
Great-grandmother Figure
Was she not all coals on slow internal burn / anxiety manifest in her taut and treeless yard, an outright exile in her own potato patch …
An Incidental Portraiture
Exactly fifty years separate my two photos here of friend George Caesar.
In the first we were heading out of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Canada, on a small ocean liner to spend the summer of 1966, along with his brother Bill, yachting in the Baltic and North Seas, and writing and drawing about the adventure for the now defunct Toronto Telegram.
In the second photo, with fifty years having elapsed, we have remained great friends and he is a long-retired Art Teacher, husband, and father of two sons, who themselves are already middle-aged, and I, always a full-time artist, always on the search for arresting images, have at last photographed his impressive face in preparation for some drawings and a sculptural portrait.
Two entire personal histories are summarily here contained along with an incidental, coincidental meditation on Life / Art as Process.
fillière 