Haupt Garden just before sunset

I was killing some time in the Enid A. Haupt Garden waiting for a Resident Associates lecture on the 'Cities of Ancient America'. The slide lecture was given by George Scheper, a professor at JHU. It further whetted my appetite to visit the Mayan areas of Guatemala and Belize. Mostly Guatemala. Someday!!

This sketch shows a few of the towers on the Smithsonian Castle. Well, sort of. I left out a lot of fancy brickwork detail.

(Here is a hand colored "stereoview" photo of the Castle back in the day. There's more here. Neat building! Jumbled, overdone, fussy, and Victorian, it's described as "faux Norman style" in its architecture. I love looking at it! It's so unlike most of the faux Classical and the genuine modern stuff around it. It's like a frilly old lady in a bustle.)

The Enid A. Haupt Garden is fairly gaudy, an apt accompaniment to the building right now. There are some big garish tropical plants enjoying these last few days outside in the sun, lined up in the terrace area around the Castle's garden entrance. They look all wrong. They'll be gone soon!

Experiments with Block Prints and Monotypes

After our one-day workshop with Melissa Hackmann at the Art League on making sketchbooks, I have been playing around with block printing and monotypes. Making messes mostly but finding pithy stuff to turn into cheesy and trite stamps. My inspiration for pithyness is the hallowed Jenny Holzer, who was in town recently incorporating Roosevelt Island and the Potomac River in her latest piece, entitled 'For the Capitol'. She is so cool.


Maybe more monotypes are coming.

This an excellent and inspirational book:
Monotype: Mediums and Methods for Painterly Printmaking, by Julia Ayers (1991)

Corner of Eye & 20th Street Pocket Park

Is it true that all the curbstones in the District of Columbia are required to be granite? Maybe this is an urban legend, but I like it. It lends dignity and majesty. Bravo, DC!

Ciggy Break on the Sidewalk: 18th and K

A few kind words and a smile go a long way, in this interminable month of August, to make downtown a tad more livable. It's just hard to remember to do it.

"Hotter than a black leather seat on a hot summer day"

Yesterday was a record breaker: 102 degrees! Broke a record set in 1930. The weather was absurd. I can't imagine donning motorcycle duds on a day like that. Nightmare. Today it was a chilly 88. Yep! Every day brings us closer to hockey season! Stay patient.

Beware the Killer Canoe!

More sketches from in and around the Indian Museum. (Above is a view of the front entrance from the one spot of shade in the entrance courtyard at 10am.) Later on I was inside the museum getting ready to sketch the prow of a woven reed canoe (more properly a Bolivian Aymara totora reed boat) that is in the form of a puma head when I was warned by a museum employee against touching the head. It is believed that if you touch the canoe cat's head you will drown in Lake Titicaca. She and I decided that sketching was too much like touching -- so I drew the detail of a Hawaiian outrigger canoe instead, at the point where the outrigger is lashed to the hull with twine.
Points to ponder include:
-- If that Lake Titicaca canoe prophesy was invariably true, then no one could make a second canoe.
-- If Hawaiian canoe makers really used kitchen twine for lashing on the outriggers, there would be a lot if orphan canoe pieces floating around the Pacific.

Mingle on the Mall

We were supposed to spend all of our time at the Botanical Garden but I enjoyed the Indian Museum more yesterday. I had fun making some detailed watercolor sketches (on this blue-tinted pastel paper) of the 19th century beaded buckskin dresses in the current exhibition Identity by Design: Tradition, Change, and Celebration in Native Women's Dresses. (Mark your calendars for the National Powwow August 10 to 12, sponsored by the Museum, but held in the Arena. I remember one held out on the Mall itself a few years back and it was quite impressive.)
I whiled away practically the whole of a nice not-too-hot day lollygagging around the Mall with the rest of America. On the way home I stopped to buy the new Harry Potter book and started reading it over an early dinner. I stalled at about the quarter post but I 'spose it's my obligation to finish it, right?

(The view above is looking at the Capitol dome from the west end of the Bartholdi Garden. In the foreground of my view was a hideous yellow and red Dale Chihuly confection sitting like a spiky dead octopus in an old green wooden dory in a little pond. It was awful! Frightful! Embarrassing!I hope MY tax money didn't go to pay him for THAT! Anyway, I am experimenting with ink wash in my waterbrushes. I don' think I have the gradations down pat yet.)

Sketching in Watercolor

Sketching directly with watercolors is difficult for me. It will take considerable practice to get anything beyond globby and confused puddles of color. (The one above was a happy accident!) It also takes quite a bit of self-control to NOT get out the pen as soon as the puddles dry and add in line and detail. Must try to let these stand on their own! (Here are some more attempts.)

Tomorrow our sketch group meets at the US Botanic Garden and Bartholdi Park. Tomorrow is Family Day so we ought to get some excellent people-drawing practice.

"Step back, to allow the doors to close . . . "

Late morning is an excellent time to catch a nap on Metro, as this gent is doing. Unless the scads of July tourists jostle and bump too much. Poor old Metro! Alas, the powers-that-be are talking very seriously about what some consider a desecration: Ambiance Of Metro Might Take Sharp Turn, by Lena H. Sun in the Post on July 2. I am going to have to start writing letters of protest. There is nothing like bright lighting to kill any elegance that Metro might possess. Yes, I do think it's elegant!
(This sketch is done with a Lamy Joy calligraphy pen and my new brown ink from Private Reserve, called 'Chocolat', which washes into that sharp reddish sepia color, which I'm not sure I like all that much. But will keep playing around with.)

The Putto in the Pebble Garden

My first visit to Dumbarton Oaks Gardens on Sunday afternoon was memorable: it was one of the hottest and most disagreeably sticky days of the year. (So far, that is. The summer is young.) The upside was that I was nearly all alone. I enjoyed the smells of boxwood and gardenia and imagining that it was my house and what kinds of parties I might throw in each of the garden "rooms". The Pebble Garden was originally a sunken tennis court. This putto was one of three adorning the pool there.

Old Town Sketching Workshop

Last weekend's sketching workshop with Avis Fleming (sponsored by the Art League) was fun. (Above is a detail of an old magnolia in the garden at Carlyle House in Old Town Alexandria.) The most interesting new technique that I learned was to sketch very freely with watercolor first, and then come back with pen to scratch in detail and pick out areas of interest. This is the antithesis of the 'coloring book' method of watercolor sketchbooking and a **very** interesting approach.

Travel Sketchbooking / Updated 14June10

 
I have turned this posting into a continually-updated Page. Go there now.

Road Trip 2007 / The Colorado Plateau

This year's Road Trip is bound for familiar ground: the Colorado Plateau. The southern parts of Utah and Colorado and the northern parts of Arizona and New Mexico.

E. Burton Holmes, on the Grand Canyon / June, 1898 /"I believe that when we behold the scene for the first time, a series of new brain-cells is generated, and until they have become sufficiently developed, the canyon withholds its message. In the average mind there is no place for an impression so unlike any before received. At first sight the mentality is dazzled. No painting, photograph, or sketch can do more than suggest to those who have not seen. Photographers by scores have risked their lives to reach that one elusive point of view where the grand lines of majesty would meet one another at the focal plane, but all have failed." From E. Burton Holmes, The Burton Holmes Lectures: The Grand Cañon of Arizona, Volume 6.