This is the wonderful used book store where I find my perfect-sized $1.00 books for recycling. It is a lovely bookstore - well organized and cozy. There is a cafe and tables for browsing and reading - and 3 carts always loaded with their oldest and most unloved books for $1.00. All proceeds go for AIDS research and support. My favorite that I purchased this week was Parnassus on Wheels - a short novel by Christopher Morley - complete with lovely ink illustrations. Of course I had to read the entire book as soon as I got home.
There are many, many museums in the city and I love to visit the art museums to see the exhibits and sketch from the Masters. We saw a Leon Kossoff drawing exhibit at the National Gallery in London and I was impressed with his return visits to sketch the same few works by Masters many times during his career. I thought it might be fun to try this, in part to see how my art skills evolve and how my familiarity with the painting may change my drawing over time. The Galleries for 19th- and Early 20th-Century European Paintings reopened on December 4th after renovation - so on my first visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2008, I sat in front of Cezanne's Card Players and sketched it. I am concentrating on sketching figures again in 2008 - with faces - so this seemed like a good painting to revisit again and again. Please don't let them move the bench from in front of the painting! Pen and paints aren't permitted in the Met, so I took a photo and plan to paint it soon.
We visited the Museum of Modern Art with out of town house guests several weeks ago and while my husband toured the 5th floor Painting and Sculpture I exhibit with them, I spent 25 minutes sketching. I love the view from a window in the Picasso room on the 5th floor of MoMA of the top floors of a townhouse across W54th Street - and have many photos of it that I took during previous visits. This time I spent 15 minutes sketching it - again in pencil because of museum rules. Yesterday I found a full charcoal drawing of the same house in Drawing magazine (Winter 2008). Artist Anthony Mitri wrote that his drawing of the house and surrounding buildings took 6 months! I will redraw this house soon and try to do it justice.
After sketching from the window, I did a quick sketch of Cezanne's painting "Turning Road at Montgeroult." I love views of rooftops and always was attracted to this painting in the permanent exhibit. I painted it at home in several sessions trying a yellow underpainting and mixed complementaries for the color of the houses and roofs. Watercolor and oil paints give very different results, but I had fun with this and I think learned a lot from copying his composition.
This week I made a quick visit to the Morgan Library and Museum to see their current exhibit entitled Michaelangelo, Vasari, and their Contemporaries: Drawings from the Uffizi. I chose a simple drawing by Baccio Bandinelli to copy and except for the tilt of the head managed to capture the rest of the lines and the type of shading used. This drawing was a study for his Hercules sculpture that is opposite Michaelangelo's David in front of Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. There were many other wonderful drawings, but it was crowded and I had to select one that I might copy quickly enough while standing and trying to manage sketchbook, pencil, bag etc.
Today I had an hour to go back to the Eternal Ancestry exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to sketch the wonderful faces on these Reliquaries. They are 1-2 feet in height - some are full figures, but most are just heads on a standard base. They are mostly earthcolors with some gold, bronze, silver, and even feathers.
I walked through with my Moleskine watercolor notebook and walnut brown Albrecht Durer watercolor pencil and just sketched pieces that I really liked. The digital photo image below shows all of the faces across a double page spread in the Moleskine. I originally intended to add water, but then started using the pencil for small details meaning these strokes would be lost if I painted over the pencil.
I wasn't at all sure what would happen if I sprayed these pages with Fixative, so I sketched another page with another mask and tried it. There was no running or smearing of the color - and in fact I couldn't get the pencil to rewet so I could add color.
The exhibit doesn't close until March 2nd, so I hope to have time to sketch more of these beautiful 19th and 20th C. sculptures from Central Africa.
I had a completely free day on Wednesday - no work or family activities - or required errands. For a full week I've been planning a slow leisurely trip to Pearl Paints on Canal Street in Manhattan. Since I have not carried my recycled NY sketch book with me recently, I brought it and no other paper,
As soon as I got off the subway I decided to sketch a roofline and water tank - one of my favorite NYC icons. Then I browsed all 6 floors of Pearl Paints - picking up art supplies for my grandchildren and small new items for me (they have open stock Albrecht Durer WC pencils I can't resist). I think I was in there more than 3 hours! At lunch at Pain Quotidienne in Soho, I sketched a few of my new supplies and then a wall unit facing me in the restaurant. What a wonderful day - full of inspiration and needed mind clearing relaxation.
The map that is on the edge of each page is a piece of the end paper that I used for this recycled book that I used to cover the gap between the signatures. The two pages were actually sketched on two different types of wc paper - I'm growing to love HP, tolerate CP, and hate rough!