U are Free

Postcard to Miss Marvelous.

Joy and Sorrow

When he was asked which was the right way, the path of sorrow or the path of joy, the rabbi of Berdichev said:

There are two kinds of sorrow and two kinds of joy. When a person broods over the misfortunes that have come upon him, when he cowers in a corner and despairs of help—that is a bad kind of sorrow, concerning which it is said, “The Divine Presence does not dwell in a place of dejection.” The other kind is the honest grief of a person who knows what he lacks.

The same is true of joy. He who is devoid of inner substance and, in the midst of empty pleasures, does not feel it, nor tries to fill his lack, is a fool. But he who is truly joyful is like a person whose house has burned down, who feels his need deep in his soul and begins to build anew. Over every stone that is laid, his heart rejoices.

Danser une danse

Postcards from the Edge

On my recent trip to Key West and France I bought these little watercolor postcards at a bookstore in Key west and put up a post on Instagram asking if anyone wanted one from my travels. About 20 people asked. This is a sampling of what I sent out.

Soul

Sketched in Key West

Matt

This is Matt. His father was the first architect I worked with when I moved to Maine 17 years ago. I worked with his father for about a year and it was during that year that I met Matt. He had just gotten married and was starting a family and was busy building a house near his father's property.

I drove out to his house on a snowy day in February to do his portrait. I've been experimenting with filming the portraits so I set up a camera on Matt and another GoPro camera over my portrait to record a time-lapse video of the portrait. I don't usually like to draw and paint teeth so I usually suggest that people keep their mouths closed. Also, it's hard to maintain a smile over the course of the portrait which can last a couple of hours. But Matt was up for it so I agreed to step out of my comfort zone and paint him with a smile - which, I think, actually suits his portrait much better.

I struggled with it the entire time I was there and was so unhappy with it that I wouldn't show it to him. I told him I would figure out the problem, fix it, and he would see it when it was posted. Back in the studio, I figured it out. Of course, it was the smile and the teeth but it was also the amount of chin I had drawn below the upper lip. With the mouth open, the chin and jaw are much longer than I am used to drawing and I was not believing (drawing) what I was seeing. I learn something new in EVERY portrait.

The writing around Matt's head relates to a conversation we had while I was drawing him. And ironically, it contains the solution to the very problem I was struggling with during the portrait. I transcribed it from the video and it's about Matt's own effort at drawing portraits back in college where he tried to do portraits using a minimal number of lines to capture a person's likeness. I've started incorporating this exercise into my portrait sketches as well - so thanks for the idea Matt!!

12x16 pencil, ink, watercolor and acrylic in my huge Moleskine sketchbook. Text added digitally.

Leslie

This is Leslie. She and my wife work together and have become good friends over the past 2 or 3 years. She's a great cook and hostess and pulls together the most fabulous parties. Occasionally, I'll come home and Leslie and Valerie will be hanging out playing cards or working and it will morph into Leslie making the most awesome dinner from the simplest ingredients.

This portrait felt different for me. For one thing, I decided to change over to acrylics from watercolor within the first few minutes of starting to paint. I wanted more texture or character than I felt that watercolor could give me. Secondly, I tried and, at least on some level, succeeded to let go of my usual attempts to appeal to do a portrait that she would like. I've been noticing this "concern for what others will think" almost always creeps in with these "live" portraits and usually makes me tighter in the drawing and painting than I like to be. So lately I've been trying to buck this concern believing that it "compromises" the portrait on some level. Maybe, by using a less familiar medium, I took my mind off one thing ("concern for what others will think")  and put it toward dealing with the more technical and mundane issues of getting paint to do what I wanted. Regardless, I'm happy with the freedom I felt in doing this portrait and think the brush strokes, lines and scratches and rich saturated color reflect Leslie's character. Come in close and take a look.

12x16 pencil, acrylic and ink in my huge Moleskine sketchbook.

Beech Hill

Time for a landscape. After the snow. March 2017

Judy WIP

Getting there....

Chuck

This is Chuck. You can see the first portrait I did of Chuck here.

For this portrait, I drove down to his house near Spruce Head. I set up in his living room and started drawing with charcoal but didn't like where it was going so we moved to his dining table and I started over. I worked in pencil and watercolor and ended up with something far different than the portrait I am posting.

Back in the studio, I saw so many errors in the drawing that it drove me to start a whole new painting using just black and white acrylic paint. Then I tried another version in Artrage using the two paintings digitally overlayed. Not liking either of these or the mashed up Artrage version, I returned to the original and started fixing my errors using a photograph I took when I was doing his portrait. This time I used ink, spray paint, and acrylic. I love the effect of the paints and sprayed texture in this portrait.

12x16 mixed media in my huge Moleskine sketchbook.

Jonathan

This is Jonathan. I first knew him as a builder. He would occasionally bid on projects I had designed. But when I met with him recently for his portrait he described his transition towards politics - a transition from shaping living environments to shaping an environment we can all live in. For months leading up to the elections in November, I saw his signs along the roads so when he agreed to let me do his portrait I was eager to learn more about what inspired him toward this new direction.

He told me a story of being out on his sailboat on Penobscot Bay with his grandson on a beautiful summer day. Everything felt perfect - the light, the weather, the setting, the joy in the eyes of his grandson, and the connections to everything and everyone. It all felt right. He looked at his grandson and saw that he was living in that same moment of connection with him. Jonathan described this moment and the moment that followed as one of the big pivot points in his life. The next thought he had was that his grandson would not grow up to experience this kind of world with his future grandchildren due to the impacts of climate change.

I believe moments like this are so powerful in our lives because we see the contrast so clearly. For Jonathan, he not only saw and felt this powerful contrast, he looked within himself and at his life experience and abilities and decided, to borrow a phrase from Gandhi, to make and be the change he wanted to see in the world. In talking to him, I came to see he had thought through many important issues beyond climate change and was comfortable both listening to and articulating reasoned positions. We need more politicians like Jonathan. We need more sunshine.

12x16 pencil, ink, and watercolor with Artrage.

Nick

This is Nick. You can see the first portrait of Nick that I did a couple of years ago here. You really have to see both of them to get a better sense of Nick's personality.

For this portrait, Nick came over to our house a few days before heading back to college after Christmas break. He sat across from me at our dining room table while I sketched and we talked.

Today I took a photo of my sketch and was trying to decide what else it needed before posting it and I thought back to the first time I really got to hang around Nick. I had just separated from my first wife and Alex (my son) and I had moved into a small cottage that happened to be right next door to Nick's family. Alex and Nick became fast friends and spent a lot of time hanging out together in and around that cottage. We only lived there a year or so and then moved to another house a few blocks away from the cottage. Anyway, I remembered a sketch I did about 10 years ago sitting at the dining table in that little cottage and sketching the view out of the window and I thought that would make a perfect background to Nick's portrait. It took me awhile to find the sketchbook it was in but I did and scanned it into the computer and put it "behind" Nick's portrait digitally. It's a little strange in a twilight zone kind of way but it carries a special meaning for me now, and maybe it will for Nick too.

12x16 Pencil, pen, ink, and watercolor in my huge Moleskine sketchbook.

Janet

This is Janet. She was one of my mom's best friends from the time they met shortly after my mom moved to Maine in the early nineties until my mom's death in 2008. Whenever I see Janet around town we always stop and talk for awhile and she usually is wearing something that she was either given by my mom when she was alive or that she bought when her estate was sold. She always says something kind about my mom that was meaningful to her and these little connections and her expressions of love mean the world to me (though I don't believe I have ever told her that).

When I asked Janet if I could paint her portrait she said she would be happy to but asked if she could knit while I was painting her. "Of course", I said. She is a doer. Her hands are much prettier than this portrait would suggest but they came out just the way I wanted. Artistic license and all that...

12x16 pencil, watercolor, and acrylic in my huge Moleskine sketchbook.

Andrew - Part 1

This is Andrew. And this is why I LOVE this phase of Portrait Project. When I approach each friend for the portrait I'm about to do, I have been letting them know that I see these portraits as collaborations and invite their ideas in the making of their portrait. I was especially excited to see Andrew's name come out of the jar because is a creative artist, sculptor, and maker of interesting things so I was pretty sure he would have some ideas on the making of his portrait.

We met at his studio, which is in a large steel warehouse that has been partitioned into studios and workspaces where artists, sculptors, metalworkers, cabinetmakers, an architect, and a builder work separately on their own projects but also share a common bathroom, kitchen, meeting area, and woodshop tools. We talked about the portrait and Andrew came up with an idea of using a multi-plane canvas. I'm not really sure that's the right term but I'm also not entirely sure how this portrait is going to finally turn out. Andrew suggested I work out 2 portraits - one of half his face straight-on and the other at a 3/4 view - and then he would do the rest. "Sounds good to me", I said. Then he cut 2 panels, slapped some gesso on them and dried the panels with a heat gun. Then I got to work sketching and spraying and finger painting as fast as I could go because we both had other things to get to that day. This morning I threw a little more paint on and took some photos. Tomorrow, I'll drop them off at his shop and he'll finish them up. Can't wait to post the final piece!

Pencil, acrylic, and inks on 1/2" MDF.

To see the first portrait I did of Andrew for the Portrait Project 250 series, go here.

Lauren

This is Lauren. She's a co-owner of the Kelpie Gallery, a local fine art gallery in South Thomaston, Maine. This past summer her gallery invited me to participate in a wet paint auction to benefit the Georges River Land Trust. The basic idea of this wet paint auction was to set loose a large group of artists near the Weskeag River over 2 hot days and let them paint whatever they wanted and then try to sell all of the paintings the next day at auction. I was inspired to paint a whimsical piece I called "Yellow Submarine" because that's exactly what I painted. When my piece went up for auction I was honored to find that Lauren was the winner of my painting.

For this portrait, Lauren came to my house and sat across from me at our dining room table. When I started drawing her I asked if she had ever had her portrait painted before. Then she told me about the time Andrew Wyeth painted her portrait. Yeah, THE Andrew Wyeth.

Watercolor, pen, pencil and spray ink on paper in my huge Moleskine Journal (12x16).

Sully

This is Sully. He and my son have been friends since they were young kids. Now he's in college in Colorado and skis whenever he can get some time off. A couple of years I did his portrait from a photo as part of the Portrait Project 250 series that you can see here. This past Christmas break he stayed with us for a few days and I was able to do his portrait one afternoon. 

Truth

This is Truth. I met her a couple of years ago at a weekly life drawing group we both attend. Her actual name is Truth Hawk. I really don't know of a woman with a cooler name than that.

I did this portrait almost 3 months ago when I first announced my intention to do live portraits of all of my Facebook friends. I think Truth was the first to say yes to the idea so we scheduled it right away. At about the same time, life got busy with other projects so I put off scheduling any more portraits. Anyway, I'm back.

Happy New Year

Just looked back over my January posts for the past 8 years. I love having this online sketchbook. Not too many people see it. Just the interested (and interesting) few. These days it feels like it's just Wildside and me. I like having this place and this year I hope I post more because I like seeing the journey of my artistic expression unfolding over time. Happy New Year Wildside! Hoping I explore more of mine this year.

Oh yeah, this is a work in progress actually. I took a photo of the painting I was working on and then played with it in PicsArt app for iPhone that Truth got me on to.

Asya

Asya Tkachuk. Tumblr Girl

Chasid Story in Progress via Instagram

Chassid (Jewish) story ready for the text to be added.