Irish Music Party

Here's yesterday's sketchbook page, with quick portraits from Irish accordion player John Whelan's 50th birthday party last night. Along the top are drawings of the Half Moon, the Clearwater, and the Onrust, flagships of the Henry Hudson Quadricentennial celebrations. We watched them from the shores of the Hudson River as they sailed by.

More about the Quadricentennial, link.

Csont and New Urbanism

David Csont is one of the most admired members of the American Society of Architectural Illustrators (ASAI). He’s a principal of the firm Urban Design Associates in Pittsburgh, which is a leader in New Urbanism. New Urbanism is a movement to design communities to be more walkable, diverse, and sustainable.


Mr. Csont spends a lot of time meeting with his clients all over the world. He brings his watercolor setup to those meetings and paints right there at the conference table. Seeing his colorful renderings take shape before their eyes energizes planning groups and gets them thinking about specifics.

Although his firm uses computers extensively, this role of visualizing with traditional media can’t be replaced by the machine because of the artist’s ability to select and accentuate detail and to convey mood. Below: overviews produced by his team.

For Mr. Csont, the appeal of new urbanism grows out of childhood experiences of intact traditional communities. “I grew up in a suburban neighborhood,” Mr. Csont told me. “My grandmother lived in an old house in a traditional neighborhood. We’d sit on the front porch and watch the cars go by. There was a store on the corner and she would send me out for a loaf of bread. Those were my fondest memories.”
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New Urbanism on Wikipedia and Official Site
Urban Design Associates website
Dave Csont Bio
American Society of Architectural Illustrators (ASAI) website

Brush Washer

Here's an easy and cheap way of making a brush washer for oil painting using a glass jar and a plastic container, with kerosene as the solvent. The holes in the plastic container are made with a power drill and a 1/4 inch high speed drill.

After the jar fills up with sediment it can be discarded at the recycling center on toxic waste day.

Also check out the GJ post on Ed Ahlstrom's design for a coffee can brush washer, link.

Clotheslines

Clotheslines are beautiful things.


Charles Curran painted these sheets drying on the line, using the cloth as a back projection screen for the cast shadows of the nearby foliage.

Clothes dried on the line smell fresher. Hanging laundry floods the soul with joyful light. And it uses free energy.


So why don’t we see more clotheslines in America? The energy and appliance companies ran a relentless series of ads in the 1950s and 1960s brainwashing people into thinking clotheslines are ugly or old fashioned. Many communities have laws against clotheslines. You could get fined for hanging out your laundry.

Abe in Two

Genesis by R. Crumb

R. Crumb, the comic artist who brought us Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural, has chosen an unexpected subject for his latest project: the book of Genesis.


The current issue of New Yorker includes a long excerpt. The 200-page book will come with a warning label “Adult supervision recommended for minors.” Crumb, who was raised Catholic, was fascinated by the raw power of the imagery. He started with the idea of doing a satire, and instead decided to present it straight, verse by verse.

In a recent interview with TIME’s Robert Hughes, he said,

“My problem was, how am I going to draw God? Should I just draw him as a light in the sky that has dialogue balloons coming out from it? Then I had this dream. God came to me in this dream, only for a split second, but I saw very clearly what he looked like. And I thought, ok, there it is, I've got God."

HUGHES: "And what did she look like?"

CRUMB: "I went through that whole thing too; maybe I'll draw God as a black woman. But if you actually read the Old Testament he's just an old, cranky Jewish patriarch. It's a lot of fun doing Genesis, actually. It's very visual. It's lurid. Full of all kinds of crazy, weird things that will really surprise people."

Interview in Time, link.

Transparency of Foliage

Foliage in trees has different degrees of transparency.


When the leaves emerge in the spring, you can easily see the sky through the tree. The leaves make a whisper-thin veil that has to be painted very delicately.

Some trees, like the one on the left, cover the sky more completely, with fewer skyholes. (Asher B. Durand)

The tree on the right is an oak, and it happens to be very opaque. As the foliage becomes more opaque, you can begin to see the form of the tree in terms of a light side and a shadow side. The maple on the left is more transparent. The foliage was drybrushed over the sky to suggest the delicacy of the leaves.

Look for a variety of degrees of transparency within a single picture, for beauty almost always accompanies variety. Claude Lorrain almost always had one tree that was very transparent adjacent to another that was more opaque.