Change of Scenery

I am the first to acknowledge that academia affords some incredible bonuses, one being the time to travel and recharge between semesters. Regardless of circumstance or geography, I think it's vital to see and work from new material as often as possible, activating the visual spark that keeps drawings vitalized. Is this all a rationalization for being on vacation? Nonetheless, I recommend the coral...

Happy holidays and enjoy the new year ahead!

http://www.realcolorwheel.com/colorbook.htm

Watercolor Disaster

No, not a studio tale of terror, but a link to a Australian film from 2005 that uses watercolor and drawing in a decidedly dark and therapeutic manner.

Global Drawing Feel-good Yummy Time

Hopefully you spent the day drawing with others who love it as much as you do! The SketchCrawl here in Columbia spanned four hours and three locations, with good will and fine lines, all in abundance (and leaves, lots and lots of leaves).

You can see highlights from the local tour here and be sure to click on to the next level up to see results from cities around the world.

Columbia SketchCrawl this Saturday

A local plug for a global phenomenon! If you are within reach of Columbia, South Carolina, please join us this Saturday, November 21, at 10:00 in front of the McKissick Musuem as we launch our first SketchCrawl. SketchCrawl is a network of simultaneous drawing events - people from 150+ cities assemble and draw together, then post the results to www.sketchcrawl.com. Go to their Forum section for the list of participating cities, and get your crawl on!

Nikhil Chopra at the New Museum

Whilst enjoying your tea and scone in the cafe at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, you can also enjoy freshly-shorn piles of human hair, slowly decaying histories (and produce), and the artist Nikhil Chopra drawing high and low (and often in his underwear). "Memory Drawing IX" is a drawing performance that unites mark and theatre, chronicle and memory, allowing for viewers to physically enter the space of making (pictured, me, physically in the space of making).

From the NMCA press release: "Nikhil Chopra combines approaches associated with theater, portraiture, landscape drawing, photography, art actions, and installation to chronicle the world through live performance. As the Victorian draughtsman Yog Raj Chitrakar, Chopra haunts bustling market squares, forgotten old buildings, city streets, and museum galleries to make large-scale drawings. Within the performances, daily actions—washing, eating, drinking, sleeping, dressing, shaving, and observing—are transformed into ritualistic spectacle. While an ambiguous past collides with an unstable present, Yog Raj Chitrakar reveals the process of documenting what he sees while exploring self-portraiture, autobiography, history, fantasy, and sexuality."

More information about Chopra at the New Museum is here.

Compass in Hand at the MoMA

Christian Rattemeyer introduces the exhibition "Compass in Hand: Selections from The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection." A stunning collection of work - do do do see it if you can, or the catalog is available from MoMA for $60 USD. Click below for video.

Quick Link to a Great Idea

This just in from Patrick Nugent, an inspiring union of drawing and digital projection.

Drawing Voyeurs Needed

From now until Friday, you can watch artist Stephen Wiltshire draw a 20' panorama of the New York City skyline while in residence at Pratt. Yeah, okay, you say - what's so interesting about that? Wiltshire carries a combination of autism and photographic memory - he does photorealistic renderings of cityscapes after seeing them for a short period of time. For this project, he was flown in a helicopter over NY for 20 minutes, enough time to lock the image in his mind, enabling him to render it in striking detail.

See the article and live webcast of the drawing-in-progress here.

Thanks, Jane!