Fantin-Latour's Charcoal Self Portraits

The young Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904) experimented with charcoal in a series of painterly and atmospheric self portraits.

He applied directional hatching of short, parallel strokes on top of broadly applied tones to convey a painterly impression of light.

Some of his drawings also combine pencil, chalk, and whitening to the charcoal.

He was one of the fusainistes (charcoal draftsmen), who, in addition to using oil, explored the possibilities of charcoal.

Charcoal was central to the practice of all the artists in the École des Beaux-Arts, but it became especially popular after the development of an improved fixative.
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Read more about fusainistes in Noir: The Romance of Black in 19th-Century French Drawings and Prints
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Pocket Sketching Rig

When I attend a fancy-dress event, such as an opera, a wedding, or a black tie fundraiser, my sketching gear has got to fit into a single pocket. Here's what I bring:

• 4 x 6-inch sketch journal.

• Two water brushes, one filled with clear water, and one with diluted black water-soluble ink.

• Black water-soluble colored pencil.

• Fountain pen filled with sepia ink. 

• I add the white gouache to the collar later.

Old House by the Tracks

The old house perches above the tracks, battered by the thunder of the night trains. The porch collapsed. The leaves fell off the trees and lie sleeping beneath the snow.

In its youth the house watched over sailing sloops and the busy river landing. Its heart burned with coal fire before the nervous energy of electricity. It clings on into the fury and frenzy of the modern age, shaken but resolute.

Caricature Iterations

It often takes four or five tries at a caricature to before a theme emerges. Then it's a matter of simplifying. 

Tony DeMarco, fiddler in the Irish tradition from NYC

Tony was talking and moving as he played a concert, so I had a chance to observe him in a variety of angles and expressions. 

If you want a reality check, you can watch Tony talk and fiddle on this YouTube video.

Pencil Sketch in Ottawa

When I was in Ottawa some years ago, I stopped to draw the East Block Parliament buildings. 

I started with a line drawing and then used light washes of gray tone for the shadows. When that was dry, I used the pencil to suggest the stonework details of the High Gothic architecture.

More Reviews for the Menzel Book

We've been receiving more excellent reviews of the Menzel book from influential art blogs.

"The thing that impressed me most about these drawings by Menzel is that the process didn't become mechanical for him. He was not drawing out of mere habit. After thousands and thousands of drawings, he still responded to the visual power of the world around him."

        Read more at—Illustration Art by David Apatoff 

"Menzel's subjects range from candid to formal portraiture–from the sublime to the mundane. One example of the latter being an odd perspective of a bicycle wheel. The depictions are authentic and, we assume, pictorially accurate, without partaking of narrow optical precision. Some of the sketches were drawn from memory, exhibiting an astonishing visual acumen."

       Read more at — Thick Paint by Brad Teare

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The images in this post and the text are excerpted from my new book Adolph Menzel: Drawings and Paintings. The book contains 130 images, including 32 pages of color.

The book is available signed from my website. Here's the link if you'd like to order a signed copy. It's also available on Amazon

Read more about Menzel at Christian Schlierkamp's blog Alles Zeichnen.

Three Steps in Blocking the Hand

The teachers of the Famous Artist's School correspondence course were good at drawing hands, especially Al Dorne, who I believe did these examples. 

They had a useful three-step process for approaching the challenge: 1. Gesture, 2. Construction, and 3. Refinement.

1. Gesture. The first pass shows placement and action, using curving or straight lines. This should be sketched lightly so that you can erase it later.

2. Construction. The second pass conceives the fingers as solid block-like forms. Be aware of relative size of forms.

3. Refinement. Add small forms using lighting that reinforces the structure. Don't lose the large gesture and simple forms worked out in the previous two steps. 

Here are some quotes from the course materials:

"It is helpful to think of the hand as being composed of three masses—the palm, the thumb part, and the mass of the fingers."

"The block method of construction is particularly useful in working out foreshortened views of the hand because it is easier to imagine what happens in perspective to a cube than a finger."

"The nail fits into the top plane of the finger and rises slightly toward the tip. Note how the top plane slants downward from the knuckle to the nail."

"You need never be at a loss for hands to study. Even when drawing, you have another hand to serve as a model at any time. If you place a mirror in front of yourself to reflect your free hand you will have an infinite variety of poses to choose from."
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Copies of the Famous Artist School binders appear in the used-book market from time to time. The links below take you to a couple sets on Amazon. Make sure the editions of the binders are from the 1950s, as the quality of the drawings goes down in later versions.

Famous Artists Course 3 binder set
Famous Artists Course Lessons 1 - 24

Many of the same lessons on hands (and heads and figures) were reprinted in a single volume book: The Figure: An Artist's Approach to Drawing and Construction

High Striker

I have only my pencils with me, so I can't capture the noise, the motion, or the color of the midway at the county fair.

I look instead for the bones of the scene—the canopy with its fiberglass decorations, and the fanciful lettering that says ROLLER MAGIC and TICKETS and PLAY LAND.

On the far left is a High Striker game waiting for a strongman with a mallet. The carnival worker taunts, "Which of you boys are real men?" A Popular Mechanics article in 1935 showed how these games were sometimes fixed by controlling the tension of the wire leading up to the bell.

Menzel's Technique

Traveling in beautiful nature. 1892. Gouache.
[11 x 15 in.] Neumeister Auction House (NAH)

Menzel's friend Paul Friedrich Meyerheim observed that Menzel’s technique was always different from other artists of his time. Painting in oils did not come easily for him, and he didn’t care very much for technical finesse.

He used children’s watercolor pigments, exhausted bristle brushes, and a palette made from a toothpaste dish.

After 1887 he declared that he would retire his oils in favor of gouache. He felt gouache was more suited to capturing certain natural effects. According to Meyerheim, “It didn’t appear right to him to present dry stone, a sandy path, or a woolen sheep as if all of those things had been drenched in oil and varnish. . . . He expressed his greatest truths in pastels, watercolors, and gouache.”

The Festival of the White Rose 1829. The tournament begins.
Gouache. 1854. 44.0 x 58.0 cm. [17.3 x 22.8 in.] NAH 

Some of his most ambitious gouache paintings were commissioned as a gift set to commemorate the visit to Berlin of Alexandra Feodorovna, the spouse of Russian Emperor Nicholas II. 

The Festival of the White Rose was an elaborate and highly romanticized public spectacle that enchanted aristocratic society. Menzel presents the complex panoramas as seen through extravagant framing devices. 

The whole 3D illusion is painted in gouache. The book has 10 color plates from this Festival of the White Rose series, all reproduced for the first time. 

Standing elderly man, half-nude, seen from behind, 1894.
Pencil on paper. 28.5 x 41.0 cm. [11.2 x 16.1 in.] KK 

For the last ten years of his life, Menzel used only the pencil and the stump, which is a leather-coated or wrapped paper wiping stick used to soften or blend the strokes that were first laid down with the pencil. 

Menzel advised the son of a friend to “use the stump to correctly establish the shadows, after which one has to draw as necessary into the softened shadows.”

Woman with a dead bird in her raised hand, half-figure to the left.
1881–1882. Pencil on paper. 7.7 x 5 in. KK. © bpk/ Kupferstichkabinett

Many unfinished drawings show this base layer of blurry tones over which a gravelly texture was directly applied with the pencil tip. His final drawings are often dominated by stump work, which lends them a hazy, atmospheric quality, like figures emerging from smoke. 

In his pencil drawings, Menzel seemed to give little attention to the composition on the page. Images run off the edges of the page. Figures appear in fragmentary form, with parts of the pose redrawn whenever they could be improved. If a part of his own drawing displeased him, he ruthlessly crossed it out.

All the images in this post are included in the new book Adolph Menzel: Drawings and Paintings. The book contains 130 images, including 32 pages of color.

The book is available now signed from my website. Here's the link if you'd like to order a signed copy (I can ship to addresses in the USA only, because of the high shipping rates overseas, sorry).

I've been packing and mailing lots of your orders. Amazon doesn't release the book until August 17.

Adolph Menzel: Drawings and Paintings signed copies from JamesGurney.com

Menzel the Sketcher

Adolph Menzel’s drawing supplies accompanied him everywhere, whether on a short walk or a long journey. He was always prepared to draw. One of his overcoats had eight pockets, each filled with sketchbooks of different sizes.

On the lower left side of his coat was an especially large pocket which held a leather case with a big sketchbook, some pencils, a couple of shading stumps, and a gum eraser. 

Bärtiger Mann herabblickend [Bearded man, looking down]. 1887.
Carpenter’s pencil on paper. 20.8 x 12.8 cm. [8.2 x 5 in.] GSS 

His personal motto was “Nulla dies sine linea” (”Not a day without aline”). He drew ambidextrously, alternating between the left and the right, sometimes on the same drawing. 

If he was ever caught without drawing paper, he sketched on whatever was available, even a formal invitation to a court ball. Whenever he was spotted at a social event, the whispered word went abroad that “Menzel is lurking about.”

Zeichender Junge, am Tisch [Boy drawing at a table]. 1837.
Pencil. 16.6 x 10.3 cm. [6.5 x 4.1 in.] KK.
Copyright © bpk/ Kupferstichkabinett/SMB 

He was known to interrupt an important gathering by pulling out his sketchbook, sharpening his pencil, casting an eye around the room, and focusing on a coat, a chair, or a hand. This sometimes brought the proceedings to a halt until he finished. 

He preferred to draw people unawares, often catching them in unflattering moments of eating, gossiping, or dozing. Once his friend Carl Johann Arnold awoke from a nap to find the artist busily drawing his portrait. “You just woke up five minutes too early,” Menzel told him. 

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This is an excerpt from the Introduction of my new book from Dover. The images in this post all appear in the book. The book contains 130 images, including 32 pages of color. Note: the listing on Amazon shows the incorrect cover.

Here's the link if you'd like to order a signed copy from my website store (I can ship to addresses in the USA only, because of the high shipping rates overseas, sorry). If it's a gift book and you want me to sign it to someone in particular, just make a note on the order form.

Adolph Menzel: Drawings and Paintings from JamesGurney.com

Joe Derrane (1930-2016)

Yesterday we lost one of the great Irish accordion players, Joe Derrane, at age 86. We saw him at the Paddy O'Brien festival in Tipperary soon after his triumphant return from retirement. Joe played the dance halls in Boston in the 1940s in a highly ornamental style that was all his own. 

"When I focus on it, I can crawl inside the music," he said, "and let it take me wherever it wants to go."

Brief video clip: (Link to YouTube) 

Wikipedia on Joe Derrane

Pencil Accents

Here's a sketch of a barn in upstate New York. 

After a quick lay-in where I carefully measure all the perspective and spacing, I lay down some big washes on thin watercolor, very slightly warm and cool, with a few orange color accents.

The pencil then describes textures and details, from the fine wires on top of the ventilators to the rough texture of the shingles. I like to use two pencils, such as an HB and a 2B pencil, one for the light lines and the other for the darker accents.

Getting Scale in a Pencil Drawing

This is a small pencil drawing, only about four by five inches. But I wanted to give it scale, to make the airplane look as big as possible. 

What I did was alternate the big shapes (the fuselage and the big shadow shape) with some very small, delicate touches: the windows, poles, railings, and figures. I also left off the contour lines on the top of the airplane's form, letting it blend into the sky.

Scale has nothing to do with the size of the drawing itself. It's all about the contrasts within the drawing.

Playstation

Who remembers NBA2K on the PS2?

The Ferncliff Gatehouse

Each of the old mansions along Hudson River had a gatehouse. 

Here's the gatehouse for the Ferncliff estate, once owned by the Astor family. It was designed in a Second-Empire style by architect L.A. Ehlers in 1877. 

It was abandoned when I first saw it, and it seemed an ideal setting for a story of the supernatural. I sketched it using pencil and gray wash, because I felt color would have taken away more than it would have added. 

Happy Mother's Day

Jeanette and Dan in 1987

Today I send my gratitude and admiration to my wife Jeanette, to my departed mother and grandmother, and to Moms everywhere for their patience and unconditional love. 

As Felicia Hemans said, "There is in all this cold and hollow world no fount of deep, strong, deathless love, save that within a mother's heart."

A Guy in Old San Juan

A while back I'm sketching on the street in San Juan, Puerto Rico, not far from a fancy hotel. A guy wearing old clothes comes up and sits quietly near me. 

We don't talk much at first. But after a while he tells me he's an artist, too. I ask if I can sketch him, and he says, sure. He says he played bass in all the jazz clubs from New York to New Orleans. 

This is the kind of spontaneous encounter that I'll be documenting in my next video called "Portraits in the Wild," which should be finished in a month or so.

Propeller Powered Sled

Here's one of the more unusual vehicles stored in the old barns out behind the Rhinebeck Aerodrome. Basically it's an aircraft engine and open propeller mounted on the back of a 1920s-era body, with sled runners instead of wheels. 

Old timers told me they would take this thing out on the Hudson River ice in the winter and zoom along at 60 miles per hour. 

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Previously: Morgan Three-Wheeler at the Aerodrome

On the Metro North

I got lucky this time. The guy sitting across from me on the train to New York yesterday spent most of the ride looking at his cellphone.

The sketch is mostly done in watercolor, in a Pentalic watercolor sketchbook, with a few touches of gouache, water-soluble colored pencils, and fountain pen with brown ink. Links take you to Amazon pages for more info.

You can see a brief video clip, and hear the sounds of the train, if you visit my stream on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. I demonstrate a variety of watercolor techniques on my tutorial Watercolor in the Wild.