daBlog by goddess101

Art House

Rudi and I have been enjoying ourselves quite a lot lately, not just programming (although there’s certainly still a lot of that), but also doing art! Rudi began participating in an art group with Edgar Jansen (whose website I occasionally update) in January of this year, which features a nude model posing in the middle of a room for 10-15 minutes at a time while the group sketches or paints her. This particular group (with ever-changing members of course) has been around for 35 years and was recently featured in one of those homeless mags (like Street Sheet in the U.S.) with guess who’s art on the cover? Rudi’s!

What was originally considered a mistake – the elongated neck and misplaced head was not planned – has now been validated as a piece of art by the city of Amsterdam! Not bad for a guy who has been “studying art” for only a few months and sits down to draw once a week at most.

When I got back from my recent trip to San Francisco, Rudi was pretty anxious to have me give this nude-model thing a try. After all, he knew that sketching and drawing was something I loved doing long ago. Unfortunately, the art group is pretty crowded on the days he goes, so he and Edgar arranged for a model to come to our home to do a private session for the three of us. Ooooh, how fun and exhilarating. Yeah, you’re probably thinking, how else are you going to feel with a strange, nude woman in your living room? But, really, the process of drawing is as scary and exciting as a roller-coaster ride, and easily more satisfying. In those 15 minutes, several thoughts go through my mind: where the hell am I going to start?, i’m making her look too fat, now she looks anorexic, this is going to look like crap, this looks like crap!, there’s not enough time, maybe I can strategically hide this one when we show off our stuff to the rest of the group, and so on. Yet, even though I tend to torture myself during each pose, I somehow get passed that, turn the drawing around somehow, and I’m always proud of the final result. No, I don’t think I’ve created true works of art, but it’s extremely satisfying to realize you have created something out of nothing, in just 15 minutes no less.

So, yeah, this art thing is really fun… I started out doing pencil sketches, but after some research on the web, I wanted to try to work with pastels. Yesterday, I bought a set of soft pastels, for just 5 euros, and started playing around with them. Oh, what fun! I used to have a paint set when I was a teen, which contained acrylics and oils, but hadn’t the faintest idea what to do with them. I might have had pastels too, but I never touched them. I stuck to the oils, trying to do my best Bob Ross imitation, but I guess I just didn’t have the patience, and certainly not the focus, so my results were disastrous and debilitating.

Anyways, pastels are such an interesting medium. It’s all about the color blending, which is always done after the color is applied to the paper/canvas. Sounds a bit backwards, but it certainly works. In my “computer guy” pastel, I didn’t have any flesh tones in my palette. So I started off first with a mostly white face, then added a bit of brown, orange, yellow and red, blended it all together, and viola, got a tone that mostly resembles skin. Pretty neat.

This art thing is definitely something we plan to continue. We’re due to arrive back in the states soon, so we’re already on the lookout for nude women to come to our home.