18 January, 2023.

It’s been about nine or ten days since I last sketched anything. Or painted… or read… or even watched television, for the most part. Just as the polar vortex descended upon us, covering our world in snow and ice and temperatures well below zero, Covid reached out and grabbed me. I cannot believe I made it all the way through the pandemic and beyond – what’s that? Four years? All that time without catching this thing, and now, stuck at home, not going anywhere or seeing anyone, somehow I managed to test positive.

And man, what a ride this is! It’s unreal how fatigued this has left me. I’ve barely left my bed for the past three or four days – honestly, I’m having difficulty remembering with any certainty because I’ve been sleeping or napping that entire time.

So, no. No sketching. I haven’t been able to muster the energy to pick up a pen or pencil since last week, and that, even, was pretty briefly (see yesterday’s post.) So here’s a sketch from just before.

OK. Time for another nap.

17 January, 2023

There was no school last Friday due to the ice, but I wound up crawling out of a warm bed anyway, very early, to drive downtown to help my son. His fuel line had frozen up and he was stuck at 5th and Delaware. After getting his car towed to his house, I came upon this diner scene on my own way home.

8 January, 2023.

I began with a rough sketch. I liked the tree mass and thought it would translate well into a muted color sketch (below). The general composition felt like it was heading in the right direction, but something seemed to be missing. The divisions seemed too regular and an overall focal point was lacking.

By restating the shadowy form of a dead tree in much lighter values, the contrast (below) heightened a sense of organization that I was looking for in the study.

But now the composition needed to be adjusted. The focal point needed to be a little more asymmetrical, and it called greater attention to the huge putty-colored foreground. Cropping the image slightly improved things a bit (below.)

Taking things one step further, the image got cropped tighter still, and now it feels “right” (see below.)

7 January, 2023.

Time to get back in the saddle again: I’m slowly starting to develop some new sketches. There’s a part of me that’s grown more interested in Tonalism, the better examples of which have caught my eye this past year whenever they pop up in social media groups I’ve been mindlessly thumbing through. They feel relevant to my ongoing quest to work as simply as possible, and I’m certain that’s helped to drive some of the focus I’ve placed on emphasizing masses of value rather than cumbersome detail.

As I’ve said before, I enjoy making these small three- and four-value studies. It doesn’t matter much to me at all how faithful they are to the original place. These days, I’m happier seeing how the contrast of shapes and masses and values can create dramatic tension. The impressions of a time and place seem somehow much more interesting to me than documentary style image capture.

Whether hiking the neighborhood or trekking across hills and fields, I find myself stopping frequently upon noticing a combination of lights and darks that, to me anyway, seems to have the potential to flavor a square motif. Why a square? Even to myself I have no reasonably good explanation. I just like the format.