August 2007 Archives

Another weekend, another great session at the Vallejos'. This past Saturday the model was Kika. Kika is a very small Brazilian woman, just over five feet tall and 200 pounds lighter than I am. She is so small, in fact, she was able to lie down on a folding table for a couple of her poses.

Kika is tiny and full of ripples as her skin moves over her muscles.

I tried to capture her in Conté, ink, and then pencil.

Then, feeling confident, I went ahead and tried something I don't usually do: I drew a portrait. I showed it to Liana and I said, as I usually do, "You know I'm not a portrait artist..."

"I think you have to stop saying that now," she said. Coming from her, that's pretty good, because she's an excellent portraitist.

Following the session with Kika Dorian made us dinner, which he likes to do. Then most of use returned to the studio and one of us became the model. Kristina Carroll was at the last session I attended, also, and both Liana and I were interested in her pale skin and dark braided hair. Both times I've seen her Kristina had this kind of quasi-Goth thing going -- sort of a colorful Goth, if that makes sense, what Kristina suggested might be a Fairy Goth -- with dark hair, milky skin, low-cut top, braids falling down onto her bosom, and crazy striped socks up to her knees. She has bright blue eyes to round out the image and an air of science fiction geekery -- you know, the prettiest girl at Comic-Con who isn't a paid-to-be-there booth babe.

Kristina is also an excellent artist. She's been doing watercolors that I've seen, and a few really wonderful traditional academic figure studies on buff paper. Her site has more.

Liana talked her into modeling after that session, too, but I had to go. This time I stayed. Dorian, Richard, and Liana were all going to paint; Reilly stayed even though he stuck to his pencil. Since the plan was to do one very long pose, I knew I'd get bored doing only pencil or Conté, so I borrowed some hard pastels from Dorian and jumped in.

Now, if you were to go to my online gallery and choose to view oil pastels, you'd see about 70 drawings. But you wouldn't see very much color. So this was my first real attempt as using pastels properly.

I discovered a lot of things doing this. First, I had no idea I could layer pastels as much as I did. I've only used soft pastels -- like the venerable Cray-Pas stocked in every New York City public school -- and they don't layer as well, especially if you don't use, you know, pastel paper. Second, I found I could rub the pastels into the paper with my fingertips and get some very subtle blends. Both Reilly and Liana told me I shouldn't use my fingers but I'm not sure why -- Reilly said something about skin oils and Liana murmured "It's bad for you" but I don't know if she meant "pastels are poisonous" (which they probably are -- if you eat them) or "your drawing will get messed up."

And finally I learned that I've been practicing enough to be an actual portraitist. "You got it," Dorian assured me, "You caught the likeness."

Meanwhile Richard did a lovely oil sketch. Reilly drafted a really impressive pencil drawing, a perfect full-figure portrait with a ton of hatching and all the details of Kristina's clothes and jewelry (some of which was wildly ostentatious, the better to be painted). Dorian did an amazing profile which was not quite a portrait -- he does portraits all the time, after all -- and Liana did this fantastic, fantastically tiny head for the full-figure Fairy Goth Art Nouveau Mucha kind of thing she's been working on.

I ended up staying until nearly midnight working away the whole time. As I said, another great time.

When last we left our hero, he was drawing Cathleen at SVA. Let's skip around a bit and talk about some of the other people at SVA when I was there. I'm continuing in no particular order, although I guess it's sort of geographical based on where their studios were.

Next door to Cathleen and Ling was Kirsten Magnani. Kirsten is a little Italian-Scottish sprite, always chipper, energetic, and chirpy. She was never not glad to see me lumber up and always had a smile. I'll remember Kirsten for her two sets of dimples: One set high upon her cheeks and one set of dimples of Venus that were to die for. Alas, she refused to let me immortalize them in pencil or Conté.

Kirsten started out fooling around with little drawings based on sea creatures. At some point she got a really huge piece of paper and painted a giant version of one of the drawings. Then she fell into pouring arcylic paint out onto wax paper, waiting for it to dry, and then peeling it off. No one, least of all Kirsten, had any idea what she was going to do with this stuff once she made a whole slew of them; in the end she ended up hanging them to make layers of curtains. The result was this sort of undersea pinkness.

Marcos Chin had the studio across from Kirsten's. Marcos is so talented and so attractive I made it my goal to get him to pose for me. I figured it'd balance out all the naked women I'm always painting. But he wouldn't pose for me -- he wouldn't even take off his shirt. I don't understand this; if I looked as good as he does, I'd walk around naked all the time.

Marcos comes from the illustration world, so he's used to other people telling him what to make. Coming in to SVA, where he had to invent things, he decided to follow someone's advice and do what interested him. So he began by drawing men and sausages. He moved on to doing these great drawings of kind of ambiguous renderings of orgy-like penetrations. I loved them; they were so sexy. These mutated into smoky swirlings which were even more ambiguous and alive but less grounded.

He also kept a couple of books of Tom of Finland's work lying around. They're enough to make any man feel inadequate, and I avoided reading these more than a little.

On the other side of Ling from Kirsten was Jonathan Friedlander, who you can see here in the photo with Marcos. I hardly ever saw Jonathan or spoke with him and so can't say much about him.

Across from Jonathan was Pooneh Maghazehe. She spent the entire four weeks cutting tampons out of their applicators, dipping them in paint, and arranging them. I have no idea what prompted this, but the result was very beautiful, since the tampons soaked up the paint quite well. The largest thing she did was place the tampons out into an Islamic-style geometric pattern. I'm sure you could read some kind of obvious theme into this: Islam, Iran, women, tampons, and so on. But I'm not sure Pooneh meant it that way. I'm pretty sure she just had this idea and ran with it. I liked it because of its Crayola intensity.

Pooneh is, by the way, stupefyingly beautiful. Cathleen suggested I ask her to pose for me, but I knew if she actually did, I'd just die. She is also very sharp and very dryly humorous at times. At one point I overheard her and Joshua Harris talking at the sink. She mentioned that she liked one of his works; at the time he was making penises and vulvas out of fabric.

"So you like my penis," Josh said.

"Yes," Pooneh said, without any inflection at all. "I like your penis."

But then, I imagine Josh gets that a lot.

Let me talk about Josh for a bit. He used to be a store dresser for Abercrombie & Fitch and now he's making the switch to fine art. He attends SVA during the school year. He is arrestingly handsome. His face looks like it could have been carved by some boy-loving sculptor of ancient Greece with its full lips, small flaring nostrils, and large eyes. Broad-shouldered and tall, he's a brilliant male specimen. He wouldn't pose for me, either.

Josh is also wildy talented, but like any good student, all he wanted to do was experiment and play. At some point he brought in this fabulous portrait, with this fantastic John Singer Sargent kind of thing happening, and I asked him why he wasn't doing that any more when so many painters would kill to be able to do that. "It's too easy," he said. So instead he spent his time hauling in weird stuff he found in the trash -- orange plastic fencing, pie tins, a hunk of 1930s door frame -- and playing with it. Here's a torso made out of plastic fencing. Here's a few penises and vulvas made out of scraps of cloth, fur, and zippers. Here's a doglike animal made out of crushed pie tins -- along with crushed pie-tin poop. All he did was make wacky stuff the whole time. Those jars you can see in both photos each have something -- mostly cute little stuffed animals -- squeezed inside and then filled with EnviroTex Lite.

Despite his apparent artistic insanity, Josh is one of the nicest people I've ever met. Just a great guy: funny, friendly, open, smart, all those wonderful things really good-looking people can be because no one's ever mean to them. Only Josh was such a good person, I couldn't even be mad at him for that.

Back to going in roughly studio order. Next to Pooneh was Kathryn Nova Williams. When my wife came to visit, it was Kathryn's paintings she fell in love with immediately. They were striking and fun. Kathryn wasn't shy with color and she was looking to capture, at least partly, the sense of vibrancy and movement you get from, say, seeing a city at night, or a casino in full swing. Her paintings were masses of swirling neon and flashing lights; Kathryn told me once this was how the world looked to her just before she got migraines. I can understand that -- I don't get migraines, but there are moments I feel so overwhelmed by the vast seething whirl of the city I can't even stand it.

Kathryn also showed me the paintings she'd been working on before SVA. She showed me two incredibly subtle and detailed drapery studies -- bed with pillows in shadow -- in a flawless Old Masters style with a lot of glazing.

Then, as a companion piece, she built a "chandelier" out of brightly-colored extension cords and wires. It weighed a couple of hundred pounds and when she mentioned she'd spent over four hundred dollars on cords for it (apparently the pretty-colored ones are more expensive) I was amazed. I think she took my amazement for "I can't believe you spent four hundred bucks on that piece of crap!" but it was meant more like "I can't believe you spent four hundred bucks on extension cords! I didn't think that was even possible!" Also "I can't believe you spent four hundred bucks on a single work of art, since I thought paying a hundred and thirty for a panel to paint on was insane!"

Kathryn is a very tall, thin woman, with the perfect figure for wearing those elegant, glamorous dress styles I usually only see in the movies. I was so taken by the way she stands -- hip stuck out, back curved in the model slouch -- that after watching her smoke in front of the building during a fire alarm, I went back and painted her. (I'm not sure why I made her blonde.) I gave it to her on our last day.

Across from Kathryn was Stephanie Mora. Stephanie is from Venezuela and we had a couple of chats about the weather -- apparently it's not as hot in Venezuela as it is in New York City in the summer despite the fact that the Equator just about runs through the darn place -- but not much beyond that. She made some things with bicycle wheels and maps and shortly before the open studios she went around stenciling "DON'T LOCK YOUR BICYCLE HERE" and "NO CYCLING" on the floors and walls in Spanish.

I didn't mean to ignore her but somehow we didn't talk much. I'm sorry.

Next to Stephanie was Erika Ranee, another artist who I didn't see much and barely spoke to. She pissed me off during the group critique (more on that later, maybe) by suggesting I objectify women. Actually, that wasn't all of it; it was also, not only do I objectify women, she suggested I don't even realize I'm doing it. I don't mind being called a sexist pig -- I probably am -- but I do mind being called ignorant. Anyway, that's not why we weren't friendly -- by then the residency was almost over -- but it didn't make me feel really good. For all I know she walked past my studio on the way to hers whenever she came in and thought "Sexist asshole." That's okay; I didn't think her work was so hot, either. Well, these things happen.

Across from Erika was Christin Hutchinson. I really like Christin's work. She does these photo-like (but not photorealist) acrylic paintings where the forms are all built up through stippling. She uses stencil brushes to get her effects. Her work even inspired me to try some stippling in my work, at which I failed miserably. I have no idea how she does it. But the effect is a surface which looks like an enlarged photo: It suggests a lot of detail which swims away as soon as you try to focus on it. During her time at SVA she was working on very, very narrow panels such that you could barely tell what was in any one of them; they gave off an air of erotica, or of close-ups of body parts like eyes, but steadfastly refused to get any wider or let you see any more. They were like very narrow keyholes.

Those works were intriguing but even better was what I saw when I went back for the second Open Studios: Christin had taken her sliced photo idea another step forward and built an entire panel to look like a shredded photo. It blew me away with its combination of inspired surface -- she even curved the panels out from the wall -- and virtuoso stippling. Absolutely stunning!

Looks like I'm going to have to write a Part 4. Coming soon.

I tend to be interested in new things more than old things, so the continuation of the SVA diary will have to wait while I show off some new drawings I did yesterday at Dorian and Liana's.

The model for the day was Mia, and my, was she beautiful. If you've read my blog and looked at my work you know I love fat chicks but I've been learning to enjoy the looks of skinny chicks, too. With Mia it was her belly that really got me. So thin, but with subtle curves and ripples I tried to capture. Mia wasn't exactly muscular but there were hints which were wonderful but hard to get down in Conté.

Luckily I was prepared. I brought ink, brushes, a crow quill, and some pencils, including a brand-new woodless 9B from Cretacolor which was a joy to draw with.

And of course it's important to move around to show that, as an artist, I'm not all about boobs. Sometimes I'm about asses, too! Joking about that with Mia and the other artists made her laugh, which was wonderful, even if Liana complained she was shaking so much she might as well draw with her left hand. But getting the model to crack up was wonderful because I could then get a sketch of her smiling, which turned out to be one of my favorite drawings from the session. So many drawings are of models looking so serious. A smile now and then is good to see.

"It's hard to hold a smile for a model," Liana observed.

"I had a state senator sit for a portrait one time," Richard told us, "and she held a smile for six hours."

Richard seemed shocked when about half of us came out with the obvious punchline: "She's a politician!"

Eventually Mia put her Serious Model Face back on and I got Mia #11, which is my other favorite from the session.

After we were all done, I made Mia the offer I usually make, which is to look through my drawings and choose a couple for herself. She seemed really surprised by this. She even said it was a first -- some artists and photographers won't even let her see what they've done, that's how possessive they are of their work. I can't even imagine it -- I consider the model a collaborator. The drawings are of her. Without her they wouldn't exist. And I would hope that some of her has rubbed off onto the drawings.

I do have to remember to bring something for the model to carry the drawings home in, though. Once again Dorian ended up constructing a portfolio out of scraps lying around his studio. And while I'm sure it was good for him to clear up even that small amount of clutter, there's no reason to make him work like that, especially since he likes to make everyone dinner, too.

I had to leave before getting my fiber fix -- Dorian likes meals with a lot of fibrous vegetables -- but there's always next time.