I felt dazed for a long time after seeing the movie ‘Crumb’ in 1996. First because the portrait of Robert Crumb’s family was so disturbing. Another documentary, ‘The Confessions of Robert Crumb’ by the BBC, presented a more normal set of family portraits. Second because I envied his obsessive approach to drawing. He drew whatever he saw around him, thought about from memory, or interpreted from photographs, and he did it continuously. His example was a turning point for me. My taste for graphic art goes back to a childhood steeped in Mad magazine, super heroes comics, and the classic MC Escher book. In the twelve years since seeing ‘Crumb’ I’ve filled many sketchbooks with pen drawings.
By 1996, I’d used Rapidograph pens for years as a commercial illustrator but used charcoal for quote-unquote real art. Charcoal is flexible, expressive, and organic. Erasing charcoal drawings was the rage in art school in the 1970s, inspired in part by Robert Rauschenberg’s 1953 Erased de Kooning Drawing, now in the collection of SFMOMA. Twenty-five years after the fact it had become a style, one that espoused mark making and discovering, as SFMOMA describes, “the outward sign of the inner man”, the path to artistic transcendence. I could erase with the best of them but finding the inner man proved problematic.
Using a pen forces the issue of not erasing at all. Every mark stays where it is placed. The tool demands careful looking — for value, edge, placement. More recent influences on my drawing are John Ruskin’s ‘Elements of Drawing’ and the gauzy continuous tone of Seurat’s drawings, exhibited at MoMA in December 2007.
A magnolia tree in the front yard blooms in April and May each year. It approaches the the end of its flowering cycle this week. Sketches from this spring are presented here.
ABOVE: Magnolia, micron pigment liner pen on Strathmore, 4″ x 6″ (10.16 x 15.24 cm), 4/19/08
Magnolia, micron pigment liner pen on Strathmore, 4″ x 6″ (10.16 x 15.24 cm), 4/20/08
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Magnolia, micron pigment liner pen on Strathmore, 4″ x 6″ (10.16 x 15.24 cm), 4/28/08
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Magnolia, micron pigment liner pen on Strathmore, 4″ x 6″ (10.16 x 15.24 cm), 4/28/08
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Magnolia, micron pigment liner pen on Strathmore, 4″ x 6″ (10.16 x 15.24 cm), 4/28/08
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Magnolia, micron pigment liner pen on Strathmore, 4″ x 6″ (10.16 x 15.24 cm), 5/1/08
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Magnolia, micron pigment liner pen on Strathmore, 4″ x 6″ (10.16 x 15.24 cm), 5/3/08
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Magnolia, micron pigment liner pen on Strathmore, 4″ x 6″ (10.16 x 15.24 cm), 5/5/08
Magnolia, micron pigment liner pen on Strathmore, 4″ x 6″ (10.16 x 15.24 cm), 4/21/08
Magnolia, micron pigment liner pen on Strathmore, 4″ x 6″ (10.16 x 15.24 cm), 4/19/08