Drawing at the Met

Sketch after Michaelangelo

Sketch after Leonardo

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art you can make an appointment at the Drawing Study Room, which is like a library, and they will pull any drawing you want to see from their collection and put it on a stand on the table in front of you. Wow... so I went and did this today, and of course had to choose their two most famous drawings, Michaelangelo's Study for the Libyan Sibyl and Leonardo's Head of the Virgin. I only had a short time with each, and I was pretty overwhelmed with being in the presence of a 499 year old drawing, but I enjoyed the chance to get a good look at them. I'm also inspired to do more master copies from reproductions at home.

Today I also visited Grand Central Academy of Art today. Dan Thompson teaches there and he was kind enough to give me a tour. The school is set up in four huge old classrooms on the 6th floor of a midtown building. Each room is dedicated to a single pursuit: figure study, cast drawings, sculpture for painters, etc, and they have arranged the lighting and painted the walls to be perfect for each pursuit. The school is gathering an amazing collection of casts, and everywhere you see statues set up with lights, stacked in corners, tacked to walls, with students busily working away on detailed pencil drawings.

I've now visited Studio Incamminati, Gage Academy, and Barnstone Studios - between all these, I have certainly had a great little tour of the "American atelier movement" these last few weeks.

Frick Frack etc...

Sketches from the Frick

I spent a couple hours at the Frick Collection today. It wasn't very busy so I could stand and draw without being jostled by throngs. I sketched a Rembrandt self-portrait from 1658, and the lady from Vermeer's "Mistress & Maid" - the mistress is receiving an apparently unexpected letter from her maid, thus the gesture of surprise.

Front steps of the Frick Collection

I also visited 4 galleries today, but I was only really excited by two of them:

Forum Gallery
A works on paper exhibit with some good Modern and contemporary specimens. Got to see my first Stephen Assael up close and in person. He seems to scrape away a lot with a knife of some sort, so he layers lots of dark marks with graphite and charcoal, and then white marks with the scraping. The show as a whole seemed a bit jumbled though, with only the fact that the work was on paper holding it all together.

Hirschle & Adler
A great show of still lifes by Paul Rahilly. His color technique is very impressive - he uses tons of color but manages to keep a compelling value range as well. The gallery was also showing selections from the permanent collection, including these "Allegorical Figures in Blue/Pink" which were just luscious to see up close.

New York is of course all about walking.... and walking.... and taking the subway. I quickly gave up on trying to wear even semi-attractive shoes and have been comfortably clomping around in my San Francisco standard-issue chartreuse green Keens. (I just try to stay out of the way of the many model-types who seem to glide effortlessly down the street in their white headbands, huge sunglasses, and smart little pumps.)

The heat hasn't been record-breaking, just high 80's, but being from San Francisco even 80's is shockingly warm, and the subway platforms are just about unbearable. It's supposed to rain Friday so maybe the heat will break soon. Ah, September in NY!

New York Monday 9/24

Ten days in New York! I am so excited to have time to explore!

My first pilgrimage was to visit Arcadia Gallery, which I first discovered online over a year ago. The current show is "small works" which I was thrilled about, because about 20 artists are represented with several small paintings each. You can see the whole Small Works Show here, but the tiny images on the website do not do the work justice. Camie Davis, Paul Raymond Seaton and Daniel Adel's paintings were particularly stunning in person.

The gallery prints up a large multi-page color brochure/catalog for each of their shows and sells copies of them for just $3. So I now own a handful of beautiful little catalogs for Adel, Seaton, Grimaldi, Hicks, Mackesy and Lipking.

Had a nice conversation with the gallery owner, who guessed I must be a painter, because apparently only painters buy up handfuls of their brochures. He says he does not show "classical realists" per se... rather painters who paint very well. He says he looks for something contemporary and relevant, not simply work that attempts to mimic the past. I told him Myron Barnstone said nearly the same thing to me.

FYI, Arcadia is going to have major works showing at the San Francisco Fine Art Fair at Fort Mason this Sept 28/29. If you are in SF this weekend don't miss it!

After the gallery visit we had a wonderful afternoon walking through SoHo and the Village (see pictures). New York is only 75 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny about 8 days a year, and we caught one such day!

Jacob Collins Interview 2006

Some great quotes from an interview with Jacob Collins (the interview took place a year ago, but I just discovered it):

"One of the things I noticed when I was an art student was that a lot of artists or young art students were made to feel very culturally insecure—even in a socially or socio-economically way. In light of this, they tried to pursue a kind of art, like modernism, that seemed to push forward. Traditional art was, essentially, the art of provincials or hicks, not intellectual or significant."

"When I was a kid, I felt like I was isolated in my pursuit of traditional art forms... There’s a certain amount of regret that I experienced when I was launching into a career where I was pretty isolated: I was doing Traditional art in the 1980s... and gradually, one by one, I found other people who were interested in the same thing—in the beginning I was quite amazed and excited to find another person who also wanted to draw a figure with a coherent structure, or to learn how to put together a painting with paint and glaze.... I started finding people in very mysterious ways: people popped up and showed up at the door. I was very inspired. I found that I was meeting a whole lot of people who had the same strong desire for Traditionalism as me."

"For quite a while when I was starting out, most of the market in New York was for Modern art.... But now it’s changing, it’s changing fast. The galleries are really recognizing the passions of the artists and the interests of the collectors."

Read the whole interview here.

Drawing Marathon

Pencil on paper, 18 x 24 inches

Charcoal on paper, 18 x 24 inches

On Sunday I attended Bay Area Model's Guild Drawing Marathon, which is an all-day drawing event held quarterly. They have a room full of models working all day, with different lengths of poses. I worked at the long-pose model stand, so each of these two drawings was 3-hour session.

Rembrandt in Portland, OR

I visited Portland Museum of Art to see the Rembrandt and the Golden Age of Dutch Art exhibit. The work is on tour from Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum while that museum is being renovated. It was wonderful to see the Rembrandts in person, I love to stare at his brush strokes and try to fathom how he builds up from transparent darkness to his signature clotted, swirly lights.

As for the other Dutch Masters, I was especially entranced by this Still Life by Jan van de Velde, which surprised me. The reproduction does not do it justice at all, but the painting was just captivating in person. Even standing within inches from the canvas, the illusion of the glass objects emerging from the dark background is never broken. More than just stunning hyper-realism, this painting has a magical, captivating feeling.

(An interesting footnote - smoking was considered a sin, but the wealthy, pious Dutch liked to hang images of the vices they rejected, as a way to display their own righteousness. Which is why so many Dutch still lifes feature pipes and smoking paraphernalia. I wonder, would that be the equivalent of our own most wealthy and pious members of society displaying images of illegal drug paraphernalia?)

At the museum store I bought a fascinating book: Art in the Making: Rembrandt which has gorgeous close-ups of Rembrandt's brush strokes, as well as magnified cross-sections of the paint layers, and analysis of what pigments he used and how he used them. Very fun to find such a technical book.

While in Portland I visited my college friend, painter Scott Conary, whom I had not seen in person in 14 years. He and his wife were kind enough to put me up for the night, and we drank wine and talked art for hours. We had some good discussions, because he does not understand my fascination with classical realism, but at least he liked what I showed him of Michael Grimaldi so we found some common ground :)

Drapery and Pitcher

8.5 x 11 inches, graphite pencil on paper

I decided to work on a drapery study while I have been waiting for my paints to be shipped back from Seattle.

Time Lapse

Juliette Aristides' Still Life Painting Workshop
Gage Academy, Seattle WA, August 2007

This is so cool - Nowell set up his high-definition digital video camera on his tripod and recorded a couple time-lapse films of our art class this week.

You can see the films on YouTube:
Gage Academy on YouTube Day 1
Gage Academy on YouTube Day 2

You can also see higher-quality versions of the the clips on
Nowell's website.

Note - you'll need Quicktime, and the file sizes are large, it may take a while to load