The Artistic Biker

Sketches and Musings

  • Shaky

    shakyThis week’s challenge at Illustration Friday is “Shaky.”

    I go against the grain of the art community in most of my politics, especially when it comes to ecology, the economy, and the military.  That is one of the main reasons I wanted to separate The Small Town Big Life Show from The Artistic Biker.  I didn’t want the politics to interfere with the art and vice versa.  I am not a tree hugging, tofu eating, prius driving, latte sipping, hippy like my good friend Mark Dyson.  I do have a healthy respect for living things and refuse to kill things unecessarily.  I didn’t eat at a local restaurant for almost five years because they moved their establishment from one side of a street to another and cut down a 150 year old tree to do it.  Ok, maybe I’m a little bit of a tree hugger.  On the economy, I typically follow that if you support the infrastucture, it will support the people (REPUBLICAN).  You will do better in the long run to support the industries that create jobs than you will creating social programs to support un- or under-employed.  And for the military, I am not a pacifist by any stretch of the imagination.  I agree that the best defense is a good offense.  If you take the fight to them, then there won’t be a fight in your back yard.  Sometimes, war is the only viable option for the security of our nation and our world.  Often, though, I find myself conflicted on whether or not a particular fight is one of those viable options.  I find myself asking more and more often how the comments or actions of a foreign leader actually affect my security.  Sometimes, I even find myself more concerned about my neighbor’s and our leaders’ reactions to those foreign events.  My country has troops stationed everywhere in the world there is a conflict.  Lately, I have been asking if that is simply because we have troops everywhere, or if the conflict is only there because we are.  I’m sure it’s a little of both.  Sometimes, I feel like the little bit of peace we have carved out for ourselves here might be falling away on shaky ground.

  • What's your inspiration?

    crabpoolsketchWhew!  What a busy couple of weeks this has been.  I wish I could say that more of it was art related but my day job and other responsibilities have gotten in the way more than I like lately.  That kind of stuff just wears me out.  Then when I sit down with my arts, I am tired and uninspired.  Sometimes, that can bring your art to a complete hault.  They call it writer’s block if you’re a writer.  I’m not too sure if they call it sketcher’s block or not, but it’s the same thing.  You know you want to draw, but you look around and can’t see anything you think is worth drawing.  That was the point of the Every Day Matters challenge.  Danny Gregory began drawing as a means to relieve some of the daily stress of all the bad things happening in his life.  Consequently, he found that there were a whole lot more important things than worry and strife.  Things like love and happiness that he was able to discover just by noticing the beauty around him.

    HydrationbreakI was disappointed from my bike trip the other week because when I was in this beautiful area of Arkansas, it was too hot to do anything at all outside for very long.  So I took some pictures to use as references later.  But I really wanted to paint en plein air, or sketch live.  And so lethargy set in.  I couldn’t do what I wanted to do so I have kind of been sulking.  I have been thinking that there was nothing worth drawing around my house.  Man am I spoiled!

    victrolaThen, I saw this lovely post by Jeanette Jobson over at Illustrated Life.  She posted a litany of sorts that I’m stealing I’m going to use in my daily life:

    “There is nothing I cannot draw. There are things that don’t inspire me or interest me, but that doesn’t mean I am unable to draw them.

    I learn something when I try a subject that I don’t usually enjoy drawing. I learn that its not as difficult as I anticipated and that drawing is simply drawing, whether a mountain or a person or a flower.

    Don’t tell anyone this part, ok? Sometimes I actually enjoy the process of drawing something outside my comfort level.”

    That quickly snapped me back into the right mindset.  There are lessons to be learned and New things to be experienced by doing things outside your box.  I could have been following the example of Julie Oakley and drawn all of the family members that I was trapped in the vacation dwelling with.  That would have been fantastic figure drawing practice.  I sulked myself out of a great learning experience.  Well after having read that post, we went for coffee about town to this nice little coffeeshop/museum.  While my beautiful young bride and Girl2 were enjoying a snack and a beverage, I whipped out my handy dandy little sketchbook and proceeded to wander the museum where I might have just talked my way into volunteering once a week.

    crabinatreeThen on Saturday, the girls and I loaded up and went in to “The City” with the specific purpose of buying hermit crabs.  I have been pressing my lovely wife to let me have that we needed these for the children for several months now.  Finally, after seeing Girl2’s reaction to them in Hot Springs, AR, my bride agreed that we needed them.  So we loaded up and went to town.  Just under $200 US later, we have a hermit crab paradise.

    crabsketchThis is the kind of thing that truly inspires me.  Girl2 squeals every time we talk about them.  Every time she walks through the room, she has to run over and see what they’re doing, even though they are nocturnal and don’t move hardly at all during the day.  Watching their antics for hours on end has kept us occupied as a family to the extent that we haven’t seen a full episode of Spongebob since we got them.  I’m planning a huge luxury resort for these critters which I will of course share with you as I go along.  Just don’t tell my wife.

    If you have any tips or stories on what inspires you, or how you stay motivated, please feel free to share them in the comments section!

  • What if Leonardo had a camera?

    localattractionHave you ever wondered what it would have been like if the great masters had cameras?  I spent the week on vacation in a gorgeous setting, and everywhere I went I thought how beautiful a painting that would make.  But during the day it was 100+ F.  I couldn’t stand outside for more than a minute before I was totally drenched in perspiration.  So I whipped out my handy camera phone and began snapping pictures of things I would like to paint later.  I think several of the landscapes and still lifes turned out rather well considering they were done on a digital camera phone.  I have several held back to use as reference photos for later works.  But I wonder, sometimes, how people coped before such things were available.  I guess I’m just to soft to work as the masters did.

    treesWhat if Leonardo had a camera?  Would we still be as interested if we had known exactly what Mona Lisa looked like?  With the mystery of her smile gone, would we even know who Leonardo was?  He was a great artist, that’s not what I’m getting at.  My point is that if he had a camera, without the artistic interpretation of his vision, would his work have survived the centuries?  I contend that it is not the craft of art, but the vision… the personal view that makes something art.  My favorite definition of art is “applied creativity.”  I’m not sure where I heard that or if I made it up, but it goes to my point.

    HydrationbreakIf Michelangelo had a camera, would the Sistine Chapel have looked more like a billboard?  If it had been that easy, we wouldn’t have the stories of Michelangelo cursing at the priests as they chided him taking so long.  Do you suppose that all of his models were as cut and fit as the figures in his paintings and sculptures?  One thing for sure is that he would have had to find a real woman to pose as Eve.

    hardcorebikercoffeeandcookieWould Rubens’ work have been deemed pornography?  Would it be hanging in museums around the world or merely traded in dingy, back-alley shops?  Would his religious photos have had the same impact as his “Elevation of the Cross?”  Of course not.  In the orginal film version of Jesus Christ Superstar, there’s the scene where Jesus is praying at the Garden.  To drive the “Passion” home to us, the viewers, they use a series of Passion paintings.  Why?  Because a photo just doesn’t convey the same sort of emotion as a sculpture or painting.  The hours of labor, sweat, tears, blood that go into creating a work like that show in the end.

    vacationdinnerinThat’s not to say that there aren’t some great photos out there.  The drama and suffering of the children of Africa have graced many pages of fine magazines and galleries.  Historic and heroic events like the fire fighter carrying the limp body of a child out of the Murray Building during the Oklahoma City bombing disturb us on a deeply emotional level.  And they should.  They are at once beautiful and disgusting, heart warming and heart wrenching.  There are many such images as the men and women around the World Trade Center comforting each other.  There are photos of butterflies and kittens and children laughing, also, that all are quite well executed in composition, design and detail.

    homecomingdinneroutThere are some great photographers whose works are every bit as prolific as the masters of the past.  Ansel Adams, Todd Gipstein, Suze Randall… All of whom have taken some amazing and inspiring photographs.  But I wonder, will we remember those photographers 500 years from now as we do the grand masters?  Will any of the photos even survive 500 years?

  • Figuratively Speaking

    Posted by mobile phone:
    Figuratively Speaking
    The Oklahoma City Artist’s Guild hosts a figure drawing group every Tuesday night. The first two Tuesdays are mostly short poses, and the rest are long poses. Last week, a long pose session, the model assumed a pose when she first got there and was able to get back into that same pose after every break without marking her spots.

    She would climb up on the stage and sit down. Then her eyes would glass over as though she were in some kind of a trance. Never twitching, itching or adjusting, I thought she must be some kind of yoga master… or maybe a guard at buckingham palace.

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    Figuratively Speaking

  • Adrift

    Posted by mobile phone:
    Adrift
    On Tuesdays, I like to post whatever weekly challenges I’m participating in. Lately, the only weekly challenge I’ve been doing at all is http://IllustrationFriday.com . Many of the weekly and even monthly challenges I was interested in have gone on summer haitus… hiatus… vacation. (There’s no spell checking on my mobile phone.) That’s where I am this week also.

    This week’s Illustration Friday challenge is “Drifting.” Since this is exactly what I did to recover from the over 500 mile bike ride to get here, it seemed the perfect illustration on the topic.

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    Adrift