It was a week before the solstice when Little Helmut finally realized he was being hunted by a polar bear.
I loathe marketing, but this commercial. Damn it.
Category: Art
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A reader beginning a poem is like someone stepping into a rowboat with a stranger at the oars; the first few draws on the long oars through the deep water tell a lot — is one safe, or is one apt to be soon drowned?
– Mary OliverA simile to help one recognize a “good” poem.
A Poetry Handbook might be the modern Rhymester
Oliver, Mary. A Poetry Handbook. Taiwan, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994. pp56-57
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No man who ever lived liked so many things and disliked so few as Walt Whitman. All natural objects seemed to have a charm for him. All sights and sounds seemed to please him.
– Dr. William James, from the Varieties of Religious ExperiencePlease.
Smith, Keri. How to Be an Explorer of the World: Portable Life Museum. United Kingdom, Penguin Publishing Group, 2008.
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My favourite illustration in the whole book is the very first. It shows the White Rabbit looking at his pocket-watch, worrying that it’s late. I copied that White Rabbit hundreds of times in my sketchbooks, trying to capture the worried expression in his eye, the folds of his coat and the wonderful shading at his feet.
– Chris RiddellYou can still see the influence of John Tenniel‘s Alice in Wonderland’s drawings in Chris Riddell’s work today.
What’s the illustration or picture you’ve copied hundreds of times in your sketchbooks?
Carroll, Lewis., Riddell, Chris. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Puffin Classics) London: Puffin Books, 2015. (from the introduction,pp vi)
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Characteristically, where many might see the picturesque aspects of la vie de bohème, Hockney notices the inner discipline of that way of life: an element that must have been essential since these Bohemians were driven and hugely productive people.
DH: Picasso would go to the Deux Magots and the Flore most evenings in the 1930s. His studio was a few minutes away. But he always left at ten to eleven, and he’d be in bed by eleven. He would never drink much alcohol – a bit strange for a Spaniard that. I think he must have had a routine, because he worked every day of his life, just as I do.
It’s easy to think the bohemian life style of decades past was completely unhinged, artists living free from any type of restraint. But as David Hockney and Martin Gayford describe, discipline to the craft had it’s place.
Gayford, Martin, and Hockney, David. Spring Cannot Be Cancelled: David Hockney in Normandy. United Kingdom, Thames & Hudson, 2021. pp57,58
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I know I’m eight-two, but I feel thirty in the studio when I get going. I stand up to paint. I stand up to work, mostly. Sitting down is supposed to be bad for you, but everything is supposed to be bad for you. I just ignore it. My mother lived to be ninety-eight. You have to be very tough to live that long. I remember telling her over the tea table that Diana, the Princess of Wales, had been killed in a car accident. She said, ‘That’s very sad!’ Then she said, ‘Do you think there’s another cup in that pot?’ Fate has not been cancelled, has it?
– David HockneyA surprising response from Hockney’s mother. Spring Cannot be Cancelled continues to surprise and delight. It’s an excellent dip from passage-to-passage book.
Gayford, Martin, and Hockney, David. Spring Cannot Be Cancelled: David Hockney in Normandy. United Kingdom, Thames & Hudson, 2021. pp80
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Work, to him, is a pleasure, and also a habit. When he moved into his flat on Powis Terrace in 1962, the largest room served as both his bedroom and his studio. On the chest of drawers, he place a notice in large capital letters reading ‘GET UP AND WORK IMMEDIATELY’ (which he did with all the more alacrity since he regretted wasting two hours painting the sign).
– Martin GayfordOne doesn’t need a separate room for a studio. You can make it work. Keep going.
Gayford, Martin, and Hockney, David. Spring Cannot Be Cancelled: David Hockney in Normandy. United Kingdom, Thames & Hudson, 2021. pp76
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Drawing isn’t work. It’s a form of prayer.
– Random sailorTrue.
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Each of these graphic media, he likes to say, sets its own technical tests for the artist. The Rapidograph required extreme concentration, because there was no possibility of erasure and correction. With charcoal, changes are much easier, but, he points out, you can’t put your hand on the drawing because it will smudge. Watercolour is equally unforgiving in another way: put too many layers on top of each other and it will go muddy. Conversely, each of these methods presents unique possibilities. The almost miraculous evocation of light, shadow, and reflection in those charcoal views of puddles and burgeoning vegetation along the East Yorkshire road called Woldgate could not have been achieved with a Rapidograph; nor could the Grecian elegance of his Rapidograph works have been accomplished with charcoal or crayon. He is a connoisseur of effects that can be obtained with various kinds of line, sometimes in unexpected places.
Martin GayfordAdd this to the what I wish I knew when I was younger list. Each type of graphic media has it’s strengths, and coupled with that, it’s drawbacks.
The key is knowing when which method is best to use.
Gayford, Martin, and Hockney, David. Spring Cannot Be Cancelled: David Hockney in Normandy. United Kingdom, Thames & Hudson, 2021. pp84
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He has indeed made many different kinds of lines. An art historian could put together a chronology of his career just in terms of the multiplicity of diverse lines that he has produced. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, for example, there were the ultra-thin marks made by a kind of pen called a Rapidograph, with which he created drawings modelled with line alone — no shadows. Then, quite different, the works in coloured crayon and pencil of the early 1970s; the chunkier reed-pen strokes of portraits from the end of the decade, such as the poignant one of his mother done just after his father died in February 1979 ( not 1978, the date inscribed on the drawing); the later ones drawn with a brush, including watercolours from 2003; the extraordinary charcoal landscapes of the Arrival of Spring 2013; and on and on.
– Martin GayfordA
careerlife in lines sounds like a good one to aspire to.Gayford, Martin, and Hockney, David. Spring Cannot Be Cancelled: David Hockney in Normandy. United Kingdom, Thames & Hudson, 2021. pp83
Floodlights and Goalposts 