Season’s Greetings to One and All.
Mele Kalikimaka & Hau’oli Makahiki Hou
Drawing on Location Sharpens Visual Acuity
Visiting Swansons Nursery’s annual Reindeer Festival last week, I drew a few vignettes of the featured stars, Dasher and Blitzen. These incomplete views had to be done quickly because of the reindeers’ constant moving about. This exercise reminded me of how drawing from observation sharpens our visual acuity and helps us notice often subtle traits or characteristics. For example, I had always assumed that deer antlers grew symmetrically, but these reindeer had antlers that were not symmetrical at all. In doing some research, I came upon what biologists call fluctuating asymmetry in deer antlers, which can be caused by a variety of genetic and environmental stresses. In addition, these reindeer had a multipronged tine extending over their foreheads on one antler but not the other. This extra blade was supposedly used as a snowscraper!
La Parroquia San Miguel Arcángel
San Miguel Arcángel was built in the late 17th century in the colonial Baroque style, but in the 19th century, a local builder Zeferino Gutiérrez Muñoz was asked to rebuild the towers and facade that had suffered substantial cracking over the years. He was a bricklayer by profession and so he relied on a postcard of Cologne Cathedral in Germany for inspiration. The result is a massive pseudo-Gothic structure that has become the iconic emblem of San Miguel de Allende, 50 miles west of Querétaro.
This sketch, done quickly as a demo, is an example of how it is possible not to complete every detail or part of a scene, especially when drawing symmetrical compositions. It is often enough to merely suggest one part and then let the imagination of the viewer complete the view.
Lahaina Jodo Mission
The Lahaina Jodo Mission is a Buddhist temple founded in 1912 by Gendo Saito with the support of the Japanese immigrants working in the island’s sugar and pineapple plantations. The three-tiered pagoda serves as a columbarium and contains the urns of deceased members.
The celestial buddha, 12 feet high and weighing 3 1/2 tons, was installed in June 1968. On a nearby plaque is inscribed the following: “This image of Amitabha-Buddha was erected here at the picturesque seashore of Lahaina, the capital of the ancient Hawaiian Dynasty, in celebration of the centennial anniversary of Japanese immigration to the Hawaii (sic) Islands…”
Lahaina’s Front Street
Front Street is the main thoroughfare through Lahaina. Now lined with tourist shops, galleries, and restaurants, the street retains the wooden facades and balconies from the mid-19th century, when Lahaina was a thriving whaling port and a hub of Maui’s sugar and pineapple industries.
Old Court & Customs House
Just a block away from the Pioneer Inn is the Old Court & Customs House, which was built in the late 1850s on the site of the Old Fort in Lahaina. It opened in 1860 to serve as both a center for governmental and court affairs and a customs house for whaling and trading ships during the Monarchy period. Originally sporting a wood facade, the structure was renovated in 1925 in the Greek Revival style. Behind is the courthouse plaza, dominated by one of the largest banyan trees in the U.S.
Pioneer Inn in Lahaina
The Pioneer Inn, built in 1901, is the oldest hotel on Maui and the oldest in continuous operation in the state of Hawaii. It is situated in the National Historic district of Lahaina, once the whaling capital of the Pacific and in antiquity the royal capital of Maui Loa.
Santiago de Querétaro II
Another set of demonstration sketches from my recent workshop with Monterrey Tec students in Querétaro. It is always enlightening to stand or sit with individual students, view a scene together, and demonstrate the process of developing the basic structure of a drawing.
Santiago de Querétaro
Spending the week working with students from Tecnologico de Monterrey, drawing in the beautiful historic center of Santiago de Querétaro, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Here are a couple of pages of demos I drew today—quick sketches establishing the underlying structure of a view.
The New Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture
Visiting the new Burke Museum designed by the architecture firm of Olson Kundig, I had intended to draw the lobby spaces. Instead, I was drawn to the rather large mastodon situated in the lower entrance floor, along with the skeleton of a Baird’s Beak Whale. It was difficult to capture the skeletal volume that had been stripped of muscle and sinew. Below is the result of another, freer attempt from a slightly better point of view.
