Category: Art
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Three Birds, No Perspective
Phoebe Age Six has drawn three birds flying. She depicts each bird with a severe simplicity: Four ovals, two lines, and dot. The first bird gets a bit of special treatment: the two lines of his beak are expanded to be flattened ovals themselves. Each bird has its own minor distinctions, and the rapid loops…
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The Communion of the Apostles
Joos van Wassenhove (a.k.a. Justus of Ghent) was a Renaissance Netherlandish painter who spent the greater part of his career in Italy. He became a member of the Antwerp Guild in 1460, but by 1464 had moved to Ghent. Sometime after 1468 he went to Rome and by 1472 had settled in Urbino. Joos’s only…
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Beautiful Isle of Somewhere
Do you know the hymn, “Beautiful Isle of Somewhere?” Written by Jessie B. Pounds in 1897, it was apparently a very popular hymn for funeral services in the early twentieth century. It was sung at President William McKinley’s funeral, for instance. Google it along with words like “funeral” or “burial,” and you’ll find plenty of…
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Two Lost Dogs in Berkeley
Thursday afternoon in Berkeley there was a small concert by Terry Taylor and Mike Roe, who are the two members of the Lost Dogs who live in northern California. Terry Taylor has been recording music since the 70s, Mike Roe since the 80s, and the Lost Dogs since the early 90s. These guys are, in…
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Titanic Day
Freddy Age Seven draws a remarkably accurate Titanic from memory: the color scheme, the tilted smoke stacks, and all. And memory is what it’s all about on this anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. Highlighted against the stark white of a dramatically over-sized iceberg, the great ship goes down. In the background, the Carpathia…
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Curtain of Flowers and Gaps: Jim Hodges at SFMOMA
Modern art often seems as if it’s just going out of its way to bug you. It was with some trepidation that I visited the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art last weekend. I knew I’d get to see some of my favorite pieces: Things like a whole room full of Paul Klee’s playful drawings,…
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See Creatures by Contour
The contour line, says Kimon Nicolaides in his classic book The Natural Way to Draw, is where the seeing eye meets the touching hand. A drawing made with a contour line is a drawing that touches the edge of the object represented, but touches it by proxy, with a marking instrument on paper. “Place the…
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Life, a Preparation for Death
In January, I had the privilege of taking twenty Torrey Honors Institute students to Rome, Italy for two weeks. Not only was I impressed by these students’ attention, interest and appreciation for great art and architecture, but I was also impressed by their appreciation for an opportunity to travel and learn. Though there were many…
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Golgotha (paper and ink)
This is a little drawing (about six inches square) given to me by Verna Smith, an artist who works in hand-made paper. She must have made it around 1975, but gave it to me thirty years later. Photos don’t quite capture the delicacy and suggestiveness of the paper: we’re so used to thinking of paper…
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Pirate Epic in 25 Panels
Prolific artist Freddy Age Seven has recently turned from single images to the demanding art form of juxtaposed sequential graphic narrative: cartoons. Here is an untitled composition in 25 panels that tells a pirate story. But it is no mere entertainment: it is both a searching study of human greed, and an exploration of the…
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Cactus Forest
The stagecoach, horse, and cacti are all drawn in red, with sharp angles and spiky corners everywhere. I can testify that Freddy Age Seven learned some of this technique from books by Ed Emberley, who can teach anybody to draw simple symbolic forms. The spokes are sharp, the cactus needles (OF COURSE!) are sharp, the…