Foodstuffs for Morons

Welcome, pretty Hordelings. I didn't know that the book was going to include this website. There's some tasteful NSFW stuff here, so tread cautiously. These are drawings made for a communal cookbook that mostly didn't make the cut. There were some layout difficulties, I'm told. In any case, this project spurred me to draw again, and these and those in the post below "Loaves and Fishes" are my favorites.

Loaves and Fishes

I haven't done anything art-ish for a while, so now it's time for an update. I'm working on a cookbook for a bunch of Morons with a website and these are my first couple of practice drawings. Well, the fish is good. The bread may get improved on. I'll post more as I un-sloth myself.

More Work in Progress?

This was supposed to be the basis for a watercolor. The idea was to do a sort of Winslow Homer thing but to borrow the waves from Japanese woodblock prints. Maybe it's just an ink drawing and it's finished.

An Art Nude

I like the idea of art nudes and I had a couple here for a while.  They were endorsed by the model and later removed at her request.  I think this one is anonymous enough that it can stand in for the concept of black and white artistic nude photography.

Arts N Crafts

These are poplar boxes. Science will no doubt one day discover that they serve a useful purpose, but to date they are just the residue of my desire to make dove-tail boxes using only hand tools and to scratch drawings into their facades.

The striped bass is freshly stained and on the workbench. The great blue heron has settled into the patina which is the final state of both pieces. When bas reflief dove-tail boxes become all the rage, you'll know I was a pioneer.

Two Virgins

This I think is the artistic version of "you can never step in the same river twice". Each of these is copied from Andrew Wyeth's 'The Virgin', about a year apart. The one on the left is pen and ink, on the right is pencil, but I think that beyond medium there was a great difference in me at the two times in my life.

The one on the right came later and I thought at the time represented an improvement in my technique. Now I like the harder-edged one on the left much more. She's also reminiscent of a bartender I had a crush on, but that never went anywhere.

The Virgin is Siri, who modelled for Wyeth many times. Although he continued to paint Helga sporadically, Siri represented something of moving on for him. In one of his books is a great anecdote about the time of the creation of the original. Siri is posed in a darkened barn with a shaft of sunlight coming down on her. Wyeth recounts that he was friends with a sculptor at the time, and says something like "there he is hacking away at his wooden Indian all day, and noone knows that I've got this beautiful 15-year-old virgin in my barn".

Ansedonia

In tribute to the Tuscan style house I share with a handful of artists and misfits I have made a pilgrimage to Tuscany itself. Ansedonia is a seaside town perched high on volcanic cliffs. This is the view from the terrace.

Housekeeping note: many older images here have disappeared due to a change of providers and need to be reconstructed. They will be, soon enough.

Black Madonna

I wanted to post new pictures of the mermaid carving, not because she's changed any but because she looks different in so many different lights. She has landed now on a cupboard in the living room of a massive hand-built Tuscan-style house full of art I'm now living in (with an attendant collection of artists, hippies and critters). Mantel space is at a premium, or rather it's restricted to the caprice of Zito the Younger, my landlord. Zito the Elder built the place by hand and it's full of his art and artifacts, but also of other artifacts which Z2 collects. The black madonna is probably a relic of the Elder Zito. I didn't want to particularly include her, but there she was and the mermaid looked good and off I went to take the pictures for this ensemble:

And, as usual, I found that some judicious cropping could produce a provocation where none had been intended:

The tobacco barn

These tobacco barns are ubiquitous in Connecticut's Farmington Valley. I had well and truly ruined this by adding in color everywhere, until this morning when I added the yellow. Before that the effect of coloring it in had been to completely deaden the image. If I were an honest blogger I'd have captured the in-between icky stage, but my camera was in the car.

Still not sure whether this is done. The paint is so thick in spots it won't be dry for weeks anyway.

Oils

Well, it's on to the unconquered medium. Or, to quote the lovely lady at the framing shop, Ms. Ars Gratia Artis, "tourists buy oils". So I'm playing with oil.



This is my first oil. It sat a while awaiting a face for the yoga girl, which it just got this morning. She's probably done now. She looks better in person than she does photographed here. I'll reserve the right to substitute a better photo later.

The tobacco barn below is rather the opposite. It looks better here than in real life. I had just blocked out what should be the major color fields, intending to finish it with more and realistic detail. I like it as just a graphic splash as it is here. It doesn't work in real life, though, because empty canvas doesn't look the same as, say, empty watercolor paper. It just looks unpainted. I'm not sure where this one is going.

Mega-arborial In-situ Sculpture

That's what my people, basically New Hampshire Swamp Yankees, call what highfalutin' folks refer to as chainsaw carving. This is an unfinished porpoise, but it remained unfinished long enough that the wood developed a patina and I didn't want to get it two-tone by making fresh cuts and I rationalized that it was a little intentionally rough and abstract and also it's at a house that's no longer mine.

Time for more mermaids

This is a plain charcoal drawing. The lighting effects are just from photographing it in natural light. You can never have too many mermaids, and this is one of which I happen to have a photo handy.

Blue Period

I forget what stage this was in when this photo was taken. I think it's pretty close to done. The final was pleasing enough that my ex-wife, who likes precious little about me these days, framed it and hung it in her living room.

I painted this in an art class I was taking with the soccer mom from down the street. She said, "even your vases look like women!"

Espresso (in the morning with you)

There is an inside joke painted into this one, together probably with a little kharma. You can only get the joke if you're Italian or have had an Italian lover. When I painted this last winter I had not seen mine in a few years. She has resurfaced, having moved back to Italy, and has bought the painting.

Drawings

That would be these. These are drawings. I drew them.

Having been remiss...

Well, I've been a pretty slack blogger, I know. One of my excuses is that I really liked having that B&W post "Mon Metier" at the top of the window every time I looked here, so maybe I'll come up with another art nude for some later post and still end up liking the first sight.

Here are some random mostly watercolors. The pencil drawing at the top left is from Andrew Wyeth's "Overflow", one of the Helga series. I use his stuff as a prototype fairly often. When I get around to it, I'll post two different takes I did of Siri from A.W.'s "The Virgin". One's in pencil and one in pen and they were done about a year apart. To me, they show more how I or my mood had changed than anything technical. The thing about Wyeth, though, is that he's so daunting. I have reached the point where I can read Hemingway and still somehow trust myself to write. Looking at Wyeth makes me re-examine any fantasies I have of ever being an artist.

Commercial art

The first thing I ever created with crass commerce in mind. Sold at auction to support a saltwater flyfishing website.

What is not art?

About the blog title...

I have a thing for Mermaids. Always have. These days I sometimes carve mermaids out of wood.