Especially when it's your kid

It's always wonderful discovering a new instance of bold drawing. It's especially wonderful when the example comes from my kid. The drawing illustrated here arose from a process that I've observed before in my daughter: she sees a subject that is "too hard," "too complicated." In her simplication of the "hard" subject, she discovers a beautiful and elegant economy of means.
It's a wonderful lesson. Learn to think like a child. See the world anew.

Asparagus and Carrots

Here's a novel way to measure your ingredients!

Drawing

For a long time I remembered a passage I'd read somewhere about Degas, that his was the art of the "ensemble." A group of dancers, a group of horses, the audience of a concert, or the loitering people at the ballet rehearsal, all these collections of things have the sense of being united in very natural and unself-conscious ways. Ever since reading that -- and of course noting it in Degas's pictures -- I have had some curiosity about how to capture a similar sense of things in my paintings.

This drawing of horses is made from my daughter's toys. I arranged them to overlap, to seem as though they were moving in a line together, perhaps out of a corral. Drawing them, one thinks about real horses and wants them to seem life-like. Yet, I also think about them as toys. They have many happy associations as my daughter's toys, all the loveliness of watching her learn and grow.

The green that surrounds the horses is added without reference to anything. It's amazing how just the addition of the color creates the beginnings of landscape and weather and temperature.

The spiral coil of the notebook, the fact that the drawing spilled over into the facing page, prevents this drawing from being framed for sale. But artists of course have drawings that are made strictly for personal reasons, and they should always make many such drawings. Some of the best drawings in history were privately made for the appreciative audience of one.

Amazing, the difference

These are two photos of the same set of pencils. The difference between the black and white shot and the color is rather dramatic. The effect of tonality in art is super important. You can tell whether an artist is thinking about tone by seeing the image photographed in black and white. A great many impressionist effects rely completely upon color, the idea of black and white not playing much of a role in the idea. Certain Renoir paintings, in particular, bear this out. Cezanne, in contrast, was seriously concerned about both color and tone, and again black and white photography reveals it. Rewald's catalog of the artist's work is mostly black and white, but the solidity of the images still comes through. Even in reproduction, even in small plates.

The pencils above were arranged in their orderly pattern by the resident child, the Art Writer's "art child."