ManicDDaily

I am lucky enough to be taking “Bootcamp Drawing,” an online drawing course with Peter Hristoff, an artist and professor at School of Visual Arts.  Peter encourages those taking the class to expand their limits through quick and free drawing—you don’t have time to get intimidated or to step behind some artistic pose.  (Only the models, who are absolutely terrific, are posing!)  

It is a marvelous class.  Peter uses artifacts, wonderful models and prompts from poetry as objects of drawing. He offers a great deal of quiet inspiration and kind encouragement. 

In any case, here are a few of the drawings I’ve done in some of the recent zoom classes.  (One does a great many in each class, as they are done in time frames from 20 seconds to two minutes so. Note, however, that many quick drawings are rather randomly layered.) In any case, I’ll just post a few now, and maybe a few others in the future.

I hope they can encourage others to reach out—and take Peter Hristoff’s zoom classes at SVA! (He teaches Bootcamp Drawing, the Vigorous Figure, Inventory Drawing, A Metropolitan Museum Drawing class.)

Take care! 

(All rights—such as they are—reserved!)

Characterized As

We may be characterized as a couple,
but you are a tree and I am the breeze
that settles in its branches, the oh-so supple
breeze—I say this conscious of its cheez-
iness, and all the jokes arising from wind,
knowing too that usually when I nestle,
fold up in your crook of trunk and limb,
we tend to do the crossword puzzle.
Still, it’s not fair to call us simply a pair,
when you have been my hearth, and my hearth’s desire–
And I have been your—I don’t know—fresh air—
For sure, you could have sung without my lyre,
grown outside my ground, but once our wounds wrapped ‘round,
we were bound, we were bound, we were bound. 

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A sonnet for a Monday. Have a good day.

(The drawing and poem are mine; as always, all rights reserved.)

After the Injury/Nights

If only you could sleep
like a horse, standing. 

Though I guess your feet, then,
would have to be hooves,
and I don’t think I could sleep
next to four hooves.

But you cannot sleep standing, so,
as it is, you wake through the night, try to pace away
the pain, readjust the pillows and
the hard foam wedge, re-build
the pyramid. 

Because you also cannot sleep
lying down,
and so you swivel to the side of the bed, stand,
pace a little more—
I ask if I can do anything—
you say, no, you say it helps
to move. 

I ask again, later, is there anything
I can do—
you say no, again, later, that it helps
to move—

I ask again, later,
you say, no again, later—

So, it goes, these twists of fate and later
that end up shuffling in the night, trading pain
for exhaustion. 

Then, at last, you do sleep;
and now it’s your breath
that softly paces—
I listen, not asking
for anything more.

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Hello!  I’m sorry to be so out of touch!  Mishap has come my way, and I have had little time.  I hope all are well. 

P.S. The picture is mine.  I have a lot of drawings of horses, but they were none quite right, so I thought the hourglass was a bit more fitting.  Take care!