Jean-Leon Gerome exhibit

On Saturday I went to see the most amaaaaaaazing exhibit of works by Jean-Leon Gerome at the Getty. It's running until September 12th, 2010. If you live even remotely close to Los Angeles (and, actually, even if you don't), you HAVE to go see this. Of the small handful of people that I would give my left pinky finger to be in same room with too see how the heck they did what they did, Gerome is definitely on that list. How I wish sometimes for time travel. The astonishingly accurate skin tones and the ludicrous level of perfect detail that he did on these heads the size of your thumb.... (I mean, did he use a hair off a fly to do that, or what?) It's enough to make you cry from jealousy. Or from happiness. I don't know.

Unfortuntely, it's pretty hard to find a picture online that does some justice to any of the originals I saw. For some reason, most of them look like a cheap Kinko's copy of the real thing. (No offense to Kinko's, I use you all the time.) But this one is pretty good:

Carpet Merchant in Cairo by Jean-Leon Gerome

Aaaaagggh!!

I've had "blogger's block" recently, so I thought I should title this blog with something that really expresses how I feel at this time. My inability to write a blog post lately has been due, Number One, to the fact that hardly anyone is actually reading this blog yet. For all this is accomplishing right now, I might as well walk into the kitchen pantry every few days and announce my thoughts on art to the canned vegetables and shredded wheat.

But alas, I will plug on. Why? I am not quite sure.

Today I wanted to do the thing I most enjoy, which is to spend money on art supplies. So without the inconvenience of removing my butt from the couch, I moseyed over to dickblick.com and ordered a set of pan pastels.


Besides just wanting more stuff, I bought them because I've decided to make some drawings. Up until now, most of the drawing I've done has been for the purpose of being a better painter, just practice and studies. Today I was struck with an interest to do some drawings that have no further purpose than to be completed works of art in themselves. I have no idea what they are going to look like... hopefully somewhat respectable. Stay tuned!

Here's a drawing done with pan pastels that I really liked, by Sydney McGinley.

Edouard Dantan: Ridiculously Good Painting of the Day

Chicago pastel drawing

Pretty soon I'm going to make one of those cool speed painting videos where you speed up the painting process of a painting into a few minutes. But for now, here's a short thing I put together. Please ignore the fact that nothing is centered...I have no idea how to fix that!



And here's the finished piece:


Chicagoscape I - 18"x24" - pastel on paper

Today's Thoughts, and Socks

Am I too old to be making a Christmas list in the middle of June? (I'm twenty-three and a half.)

Also, is it a bad idea to choose who I want to date based on their musical preferences?

On that subject, here is a drawing I really like of Mr. Thom Yorke (from Radiohead):


It's by a dude named Matt Cipov. Some of his stuff is a little creepy for my tastes, but I love his style. And he has things that aren't creepy, like owls.

I will either wait until Christmas, or purchase it as soon as an occasion arises where I have an excuse for buying another awesome thing that I don't necessarily need. Maybe as a celebratory present for finally finding a sock that matches one of my other socks.

YOU, with all your riches, can buy it immediately right here. :)

Plein Air painting: Dirt, oranges, and a banana.

So, today I had what I call my first real plein air painting session. For all you painters who live in a hole, and for regular people who don't paint: plein air basically just means painting outdoors. It comes from the French en plein air, 'in the open air.'

Anyway, I call it my first real plein air painting because I thought that I had never done it before, but then I realized I that I actually have. But the other times I was making watercolor sketches and not necessarily trying to make anything look like real life, and this time I was using oils and wearing a painting hat.

I decided not to get too adventurous for my first time, so I headed to Prospect Park in Redlands. I parked, prepared for a long expedition to find The Perfect Spot, and found it in an orange grove after looking around for about 10 seconds. Feeling like I should take this thing more seriously, I wandered around checking out the other options, and eventually ended up back where I started, about 15 feet from the parking lot.

Plein air painting definitely brought a whole new set of Challenges. Namely:

The Challenge of how to not drop your brushes in the dirt a second time.

The Challenge of how to not use unladylike language when the wind is blowing everything goddamn everywhere.

And most of all, the Challenge of what to paint when the lighting is changing every five minutes--from completely overcast, to so-blindingly-bright you can't tell if you are painting with ultramarine blue, or a banana.

But all in all, I ended up having what I would categorize as a really fun time. Which for some reason kind of surprised me. And as an added bonus, I learned some things that are going to help me in the studio. I won't share those things with you. It would be too boring, and useful.

I was out for about 2 1/2 hours, and here is what I came up with:


Love, Nat

Another study

Here's my latest study from Joseph's workshop. Only one more class to go! :(


Nude study #9