A Favorite Artist-Norman Baxter, A Line on Texas

Hey--a few more visitors found their way to Orbisplanis yesterday, so I will press on! Remember, you're retired now and you have time to do your art.

Encouragement

Before getting into today's blog, I want to say how important encouragement is to every single one of us. I hope you are as fortunate as I am to have a support system around you that provides that. It applies to all aspects of life, but seems particularly relevant to artists and would-be artists. I suppose that's because when you allow others to view your art, you're really giving them a window into your creativity. I thank my family for being supportive of my efforts. I appreciate the constructive criticism, too (really). Just wanted to throw that in--so enough of that.

Re-Igniting

In the last couple of blogs, I talked about how I initially got back into drawing again by doing pencil sketches using good quality hard- and soft-lead pencils, and even showed you a couple of my pieces. Some of you may be asking why I'm discussing pencil drawing when the masthead of this blog CLEARLY states "about acrylic painting." So what gives? Well, when I started on this trek, I didn't know where I was going with this, and truth be told, still not 100 percent sure either.

Remember, I was new to retirement. We newbies know it takes a while. Suddenly you go from structured world to little or no (or at least less) structure. While it isn't complete freedom, it's darn close to it. It takes time to adjust. I think I was in the vanguard, because for me, it only took about two weeks, whereas I 've heard up to three years (wow) for others. Guess I was one of the lucky ones.

Simple, I did the pencil drawings because I had pencils, and time. I've discovered, and maybe you are experiencing this--I go in phases, from one to the next, one thing leads to another. I'm talking art here. Pencil drawing led to my remembering how much I used to enjoy doing continuous line drawings using pen and ink. That was in the old days (remember Rapidiograph?), but now they're drawn with good quality roller-ball ink pens or some such. The roller-ball phase lasted two or three weeks. Then it was on to colored pencils, oil pastels, pastel-pastels (you know, the ones like chalk, but they're not chalk), acrylic painting, some oil painting thrown in, then back to acrylic.

The masthead says acrylic, etc., because that's what I'm doing now. If/when that changes, I'll just change the masthead, right?

One of my favorite artists is Norman Baxter. He was a professional artist and famous for his line drawings and watercolors, but I liked his line drawings the best. I don't know if he's still living. I Googled his name but couldn't find out. He was known for illustrating the covers of the Yellow Pages phone directories (in certain parts of the US) beginning in the early 1980s (after Karl Hoefle). The covers were intricately detailed line drawings, usually of city skylines, that included a few almost hidden whimsical items that were fun to search for. It was kind of like the recent Where's Waldo illustrations. So I was inspired by Norman Baxter during my roller-ball phase. I have two original signed drawings of his as well as a framed print, and an autographed copy of A Line on Texas, a book with a collection of his drawings.

Line drawing is similar but different from pencil drawing. It's similar in that you use your skills of composition and perspective, but way different because any shading or surface tone is achieved by lines (only), be they parallel, cross-hatch, or whatever. It's an intriguing art form, to me anyway, so I included one of my line drawings above for your viewing pleasure.

Tomorrow

It's already mid-afternoon, so I need to get back to my "studio," such as it is.

I finished re-working one of my acrylic paintings to which I had applied gesso. This was one of the acrylic paintings I said was below par, my par anyway. On this one, I only applied gesso to the top one-third of the canvas panel and left the bottom two-thirds as is. The painting was a freighter cruising along in the fog. The ship was in the top one-third with water taking up the lower two-thirds. I said I had recently been interested in the Impressionists, so I re-did the water in that style and painted a wooded shoreline where the freighter used to be. More on the Impressionists in a future blog. Still not sure if I like it, so I'm going to add some more highlights to the reflections in the water.

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Cheers!