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3. New Drawing

Hi all,
I just completed a new pen and ink drawing. Title: "Rainbow In Hiding" Thought I'd share.

Mark


Right Click on the image and select "view image" to see it full size.

oh, my! one flick of that tail...great drawing, Mark. the pointilist (sp?) technique really lends itself to the subject, doesn't it.

Very nice! I could never do anything like that without an eraser...

Mark
I think I like this one the best ,that is out standing.

John

Beautiful, Mark. And Jason, I would like to see you draw that with an eraser - you must be very talented, indeed.

-Shawn

mark
when will prints be available for purchase?
i know you are a good fisherman since you hooked me on your first cast(print).
however - don't get too high on your horse - i am a SUCKER for sporting art!
tony

Thanks all for the positive feedback. I don't know if it will be a print, yet or not. I'll see.

As an aside to Jason's comment- artist Robert Raushenburg actually erased a drawing done by his fellow artist Willem de Kooning. The piece is now in the collection of the San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art. It's called "Erased de Kooning". Look it up, online if you're interested in further information. So it's possible to "create" art using an eraser!

Mark

Very nicely done!

Nice catch...Oh professor of "high art" and trout...:) and softhackles!

Casey...There is a Seurat here in Detroit at the Detroit Institute of Arts that when you get close enough to the actual painting you can see the canvas showing through between the "dots" of colorful paint. When you stand back far enough it looks very real...The points of paint are carried over from the painting right out on to the frame...I don't think they are sure whether Seurat did this or someone after him.

Very nice Mark, by-the-way.

Spence

Another pointless aside...de Kooning war hollandisch(umlaut over the "a") wie Spence...von Rotterdam. Meine Familie war von Beesd Geldermalsen Holland...upstream of Rotterdam. When it comes to "art" I'm rather fond of the "dutch boys". Hey! And Hans van Klinken.

Thanks, Spence,
Isn't it funny how we come to appreciate the artist more after they are gone. Seurat was a very interesting artist. He was a color-ist and mathematician. He understood the concept of letting the viewers' eye mix the colors, thus developing his technique. The result was a very different looking painting more "light through" than "light on"-- almost like looking at a standard color TV screen. In fact, He was considered the "predictor" of TV.

Mark

Pixels! Yeah, I can see that.

Spence

Very nice, Mark.

Mark,

How do you painters deal with water? I know it's very hard to make it appear as realistic as you have here. It has to be a little difficult, it's being clear and all. I have sat and watched the water moving over the gravel bottom on the Au Sable and have thought that if someone could somehow catch that it would be beautiful...The light bouncing off the broken water and at the same time the multi-colored stones, sand, and maybe some small water plants behind this...

Spence

It depends--In this drawing, I was focused in on the subject, so the distortion of moving water is not so much, but if you look at my other paintings where the bottom shows through, it may be more distorted by water movement. The playing of light and how light shines through the water is somewhat created by the artist. It is a personal interpretation of how things look.

This drawing shows some of what I'm taking about:



Notice how the water is done in this one:



Don't know if this answers the question, but I hope it does.

Mark

The water in that last print is wonderful...The one with the angler in it...That seems like something very difficult to do...It's like the reflections on the glass in the door in your watercolor, "Moving Day"...

Are you sure that when you visited old Norman R when you were a kid that he didn't slip you some "tricks" of the trade? :) He may have let you in on some secrets and you just aren't telling anyone what they might be.

My wife bought a nice painting from a local artist that hangs in our dining room and she's trying the same thing...It's of a wonderful tree and some old buildings reflecting in a pond or small lake...The tree is in full fall color. It's large and dominates the room.

Spence

Mr. Rockwell was very encouraging and he told me to get good schooling. That was his best tip. I had a very good High School art teacher who was an artist, herself, in watercolor. She taught me a lot about light and reflections.

I started out in a two-year college in Auburn, NY. Then while trying to transfer to Syracuse, I was drafted. By the time I returned home, I was married with two children and did not think I could return to school to complete my education. After nearly 5 years in a dead-end job, I decided I'd had enough. So with 4 children, now, I returned to school at Syracuse University.

They started me out in freshman core program, where I could have taught the classes, myself. By that time, there was a lot of water under the bridge, and I'd been painting in WC since I was 14. After one semester in freshman core, I moved onto more advanced classes.

I got some very good tutelage while there and experienced a lot. I took three semesters in studying artistic mediums of all sorts. I have made my own oil paint, watercolor, pastels, egg tempera, encaustic, gauche, casein, and cold wax. Not to mention studio courses in figure drawing, head drawing, watercolor and oil painting. All my instructors were very successful artists in their own right.

In addition I took a lot of Art History, and of course, my educational classes. Syracuse University has one of the best art schools around.

Mark

Mark,

I know we are wandering ever further here from trout, but I have had an interest in art most of my life...Just as an observer, though I had some relatives that had attended art school. Lisa and I have been very lucky to have had the chance, more than some, to travel and have made it a habit to visit art museums whereever we have gone.

We have been to Paris, Rome, Florence, Venice, Berlin, Munich, Dublin, Lisbon...New York, Chicago, Cleveland...to name a few and have visited museums at each of these places...I have found wonderful art museums in Toledo Ohio, and Little Rock AR...

I think that maybe what ultimately seperates us from our simian cousins is this need to be creative. Most of us on this site craft our own flies and spend countless hours hunched over the vise and love it. My tying/fishing buddy and I would set up in his basement on Saturday nights and watch Hockey Night in Canada or our Wings and have at it.

You and Shawn also create flies but cut your creativity loose in other mediums...Somehow we need to be doing something...It seems...Hell! Driving a nail, wrapping a new rod, tying up secret leader formulae, the list goes on...If someone doesn't have some sort of creative outlet in their lives they are living an uninteresting existance, if you ask me...

Maybe if we all just got busy we would be better off...(?)

Spence

Spence,
We are not far off track when it comes to discussing art along with fly fishing, tying. My great education taught me that we use all our senses to create art, and in doing so, immerse ourselves in the experience. Fly fishing itself involves our senses, sight, hearing, touch, smell, and sometimes taste. It also involves senses we are less aware of like our sense of balance; our sense of timing, and our sense of body movement. Fly fishing, in itself, is an art which can be developed to a very high degree.

This is exactly what Norman Maclean wrote about in his book "A River Runs Through It". Unfortunately this is often lost in the fascination the reader may develop in fly fishing. It is somewhat romanticized in the story, but the underlying base is fly fishing is an art. Also, you don't get that much of sense of this in the movie. You do, however, in the book.

So, are we far from the mark, here? I don't think so. I think we're right on.

Mark

What an interesting discussion, guys. I've really enjoyed reading it. Funny, I almost went to Syracuse (School of Environmental Science and Forestry). No formal art training for me. I was pretty into playing guitar in college, and I took and enjoyed a theory class on 20th century music, but then I took an improv class and found myself in way over my head. I also felt that the classes were making my music too academic for me, and it stopped being enjoyable. When that happened, I decided to drop the coursework and just play for fun. I'm really glad I made that decision and never tried to make a career out of music. I've always respected those, like Mark, who have the discipline to study an art form and hone their skills to the point that they are creating something new and beautiful in a medium that countless others have used before them. I approach a lot of things artistically, and I certainly identify with Spence's assertion that we are built to be creative, but I have trouble really pouring myself into any one artistic pursuit to the point of truly mastering it. For that reason, I think my ideas will always outpace my skills to execute them. I try to compensate by taking a great deal of time to get things just right, whether I'm tying a fly or making a bookshelf. When it comes to flytying, I can say with confidence that there are a huge number of people, including many on this board, who tie far better than I do. Most of them just choose not to spend as long on a fly as I do. I wouldn't say I'm more patient than average, perhaps just more determined.

As far as erasers go, as soon as I wrote my little jest to Jason I wondered if anyone ever made sketches by first shading in the entire canvas and creating an image by erasing parts of it. I suppose other media could be approached this way as well.

And as far as water goes, Mark obviously approaches the subject with a little more intimate knowledge of the substance than your average person does. He sees it through a fisherman's eyes. The stream in that last painting is unbelievable. I'd love to see it in person.

-Shawn

Hi Shawn,
You are correct regarding the eraser usage. You can definitely cover a piece of paper with graphite and erase the white areas out to make a drawing. This is called an "additive" approach. A piece of white paper reflects all wavelengths of light, when you cover it over with something you are subtracting the amount of light reflected. However if you remove some of the covering, you are increasing the amount of light reflected, thus adding to the amount of light reflected.

Watercolor artists, like myself, use this approach to lift dark paint off the paper to leave lighter areas. There is a number of ways of doing this. One is using clean water and a brush to wash off the paint. Another is to use an eraser and another a sharp object like a knife or needle to scratch the paint off.

I once was watercolor painting a scene out my window during winter and it began to snow heavily. In order to capture this in the painting, after it was completely dry, I went over the entire painting with rough sandpaper in a diagonal direction. It worked!

Regarding what Spence said about creativity. That is true to certain extent, yet we are often stifled at a young age by something. It can be from an outside source or within ourselves. It usually halts our artistic development, somehow, and we never really continue as artists. Some make it through, like myself. Others don't, and yet it comes through in other forms.

Most of us are cultured into utilizing our left brain rather than using right and left hemispheres together, as we were born to, This results in our left brain holding us back from stepping into the realm of using our right brain, more.

I read your thread on fly tying and wanted to comment, but did not. We each approach our artistic endeavors differently. To me, inspiration comes from within and outside of us. It's my belief that one can not create with blinders on. One must be aware of techniques and the material usages of others. I'm inspired by watching other artists work OR other tiers tie. Does it mean I have to copy them? Of course not, but it does give inspiration to me to finding my own way.


Mark