This is the space for our members to discuss and share their creative projects, ranging from written works to drawings, photography, and even craft projects such as knitting and woodworking. Self promotion is welcome (websites where we can view and/or purchase your work). Please do continue to preface if content is NSFW and be sure to properly spoiler/link such content.

One thing (I’ve often mentioned before) I don’t like about my artwork is how little in common my painting and drawing seem to have with each other. There’ve been instances when I do pencil underdrawing for paintings (the way I almost always do for ink pictures), but somehow it never seems as natural as just picking up a paintbrush and going at it. I’ve come to think there’s a space for an artist to have fundamental differences in their own work between the media; the way I’ve come to instinctively handle a brush is overwhelmingly distinct from handling a pen. The separation’s grown so great that I ‘ve wondered whether I should work to make this a feature rather than a bug. That said…

One of my favorite works at the Detroit Institute of Arts is Gaetano Gandolfi’s Venus Ordering Armor For Aeneas at Vulcan’s Forge (c. 1775). This is partly because my favorite isn’t actually the finished painting but the much smaller preparatory oil sketch right next to it. The colors and brushwork are (as intended) more vibrant and intense than those of its intended successor, and it’s a great teaching experience as the museum’s included a panel nearby detailing Gandolfi’s sketching process. My relation to creativity and artwork in general tends to be pretty live-and-let-live when it comes to other artists, but one of the few circumstances therein that provokes actual personal jealousy is how you can trace sketches to finished paintings in the work of so many others—not just established names, historical or otherwise, but people whose stuff I see pop up on Instagram or other social media all the time.

Downloaded Gandolfi’s original sketch (also in the DIA’s collection) and used it as the basis for a painting exercise on Procreate. It’s ongoing (as y’all can probably tell; used a mix of round, Tamar and Plimsoll brush tools) and I’m starting to wonder if I should try this with one of the sketches I’ve done at the Dzanc House in Ypsilanti. I’m still not sure where I stand on all this. I’ve started reading a catalog/retrospective on Alex Katz’s work and he talks about how his sketchbooks and frequent drawing didn’t really have much of an impact on his own painting, which was all about mood and color (even as it often incorporates human figures and especially faces). The precedent helps even if I continue to be at sea (something that increasingly feels like a constant, especially with everything going on in the wider world).

How’s your work going?