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The Friday Illo theme this week is "Focused". I first went to Flicker and did a search through 'people' photos using 'focused' as the search term. Several of them featured people peering into cameras. I remembered I'd done such when I got my new camera. So I sketched from that photo:
I'm going to edit my Illos gallery, too. It will be a project for tomorrow...
Note of January 30, 2010:
The Illustration gallery is now edited and IMPROVED!
Sunday, January 31, 2010
"Weekend Focus"
4:49pm
My website statistics tell me I've racked up an amazing monthly bandwidth transfer of 664.11 MB! As 'only' 105.16 MB
is stored at joanannlansberry.com, much of this transfer is the same file, being edited over and over and over...
The transferring should settle down to a low roar, now that most of the major changes have been made.
After yesterday's web work, we got out and ran the usual Saturday morning errands. Julia got more books to read, and I picked more videos. I can't praise _Gods and Monsters_ enough. Ian McKellen put so much of himself into the role of Jimmy Whale, a movie director famous for _Frankenstein_ and _Bride of Frankenstein_. Of course, portraying the openly gay director is something he could relate to, being an openly gay actor. But he also captured Whale's illness, the aftermath of a stroke, very well.
Today, we will watch the Grammys. I look at the long list of nominees, and there's many I don't recognize. I'm glad to learn Jai Ho (From Slumdog Millionaire) has already won
"Best Song Written For Motion Picture, Television Or Other Visual Media". Kudos to songwriters A.R. Rahman, Sukhvinder Singh, Tanvi Shah, Mahalaxmi Iyer & Vijay Prakash!
As there's sad talk of closing the Territorial Prison Museum due to state budget cuts, I wanted to visit it again, with camera at the ready. I'm not too pleased with many of the photos I got today, but I did get a couple of good ones, which I added to the photo gallery.
View of the 'Sallyport' entrance, as seen from observatory tower steps.
The term 'Sallyport' comes from the Spanish "salir por la puerta"- meaning "to go out the door."
I'd sure hate to be on the other side of those bars...
Info card quote:
"Several prisoners in the Territorial Prison are expert lace makers and their work is very neat and desirable." Arizona Sentinel - 1899
The two samples I saw are very intricate, indeed.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010 A
"Seated Musician"
6:53am
Not feeling very inspired this morning, I took a look around online museum archives, and saw this
appealing Seated Musician from the Tang Dynasty. I love the simplicity of the curves and the sense of peacefulness. To better appreciate this piece, (and to practice drawing), I sketched from him:
I added a couple of details of my own, gave him shorts and a shirt!
Tuesday, February 2, 2010 B
"Chimaera"
7:54pm
I'm happy to find a new source of drawing inspiration. I give credit to Renoir. Or more exactly, Renoir via Sylvie Patry:
“Renoir believed strongly in going to museums to learn from other artists,” says Sylvie Patry, curator of the Paris exhibit. She paraphrases Renoir: “One develops the desire to become an artist in front of paintings, not outdoors in front of beautiful landscapes.”"Renoir's Controversial Second Act", by Richard Covington, Smithsonian magazine, February 2010
So I'll paraphrase this even further. Rather than getting a simulated 'outdoors' via photos of people and critters, I'll
visit online museums, and sketch. My theory is if I just look at 'nature', I am looking at it with the 'natural' eye. But the artist's eye is a trained eye, thus her perceptions are different. If I want to strengthen my artist's eye, I need to study the works of artists. (As wise words have advised to, "Change the nature of perception" to solve dilemmas
{- BoHS}, I adapt this to a possibly mundane aspect. Yet the more I struggle towards even this "perfectibility", I transcend the mundane.)
At the very least, I get to fully enjoy whatever piece I'm drawing, to whatever extent the web photo allows me. I did see tonight's piece in person, for it was at the Getty Villa when we visited last August. It won't be there much longer, though, for it returns to Italy's Museo Archaeologico Nazionale after February 8, 2010.
I adore the powerful muscularity in this sculpure. I sketched from two different photos, one with lovely shadows and no distracting background and
one at Wiki 2,220 × 1,984 pixels big.
Chimaera di Arezzo 400-375 BCE, Etruscan
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
"Short Attention Span"
5:20am
I wake restless, full of thoughts. Just before going to bed, we watched Frontline on PBS, about
"the Internet's impact on modern life", the good and bad of it. Yes, we are more connected. But have we lost our attention span? Brain experts tell us we cannot really 'multi-task' as efficiently as we think we can.
I am not as involved as some, ever connected to their cell phones, I-pods, lap tops and what not. But I'm definitely of the short attention span. I'm no different than the college guy they featured, who cannot read a novel for his class. He substitutes 'Cliff notes'. I cannot read a novel. I made an attempt, but left the character in his bad spot, and never returned to see if the situation redeemed itself.
I'm not as bad as the radio D.J. Cooper Lawrence who cannot even read an e-mail. She recounted that a friend was upset with her because she did not read an important e-mail. So she was upset with the friend. If it couldn't be abbreviated to the length of a Twitter update or Facebook status report, she had no time to read it.
I'm not that bad. I read e-mails. I can even read short stories. But I can do better. This world in chopped bits and pieces is not a full experience of life.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
"Line Drawing of Set Slaying the Apep"
7:54pm
I'm not sure how I will color this...
I decided my earlier attempt at this scene was way too amateurish, so it didn't make it into the Egyptian Inspired Art gallery. So now I'm trying again.
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