Blog: Latest Sketchbook works from Washington DC

David O. Smith — January 31, 2022

Sunday, January 30, 2022

I am on a plane from Washington DC back to Seattle.  I’ve spent the last half-week decompressing from an undertaking I’d neither expected to attempt nor attempted before.  It was not completely intentional, but the trip was.  I was in DC to visit my someone I’d met a few months ago.  In Seattle, I had been working, alone.

Starting just before Christmas and lasting 33 straight days with no breaks or days off, I researched and applied to university teaching positions all day every day, submitting applications to 21 positions so far.  Once I get back to Seattle, Monday, I’ll re-fire the engine and continue. 

There are different models for long-term success in the visual arts.  The best method, by far, and the one I recommend most to any aspiring visual artists - is inherited wealth.  If you can, inherit wealth.  A huge majority of “success” in the visual arts (and many art-adjacent high-end fields of entrepreneurship) comes down to this.  Inheriting wealth, and not having to attempt to develop a practice with stakes, has by far the greatest likelihood for success.  Try to find that in a how-to entrepreneurship text!

Another model, a harder route, is to teach.  But teaching is not as challenging, and much more rewarding, than the severity of relying only on sales of works.  Teaching at the university level is where my heart pulls.  The collegiate environment is the best arena for what I have to offer as an educator and practitioner, so I am understandably eager to continue to pursue this career.  However, I would not recommend that anyone in their right mind try to put together 21 applications in 33 days with no breaks.  At least now this process is kickstarted.

Along the way, I was drawing and painting most days.  I didn’t plan to, and I could not help myself.  A compulsion to secure a sustainable future for my practice spurred my other compulsions (healthier maybe), and so I create and offer interpretations of my immediate world, dreams and observations.  “Professor Seagull” and affiliated artwork came out of this time.  At the almost-end of it, on my second-to-last day, Sunday week, I painted what is my most advanced watercolor to date, without meaning to, just inspired by the afternoon light (which begins this blog entry).  I’ve been waiting to make this watercolor for some time, since coming back from Santa Fe.  I’d known a work like this was possible, I just hadn’t made it yet.  It represents the kind of painting of which I am currently capable.

The best artwork of this period by far, though, came once I’d taken a breath, boarded a plane, and touched down in DC to visit a perfectly lovely, kind and sharp young woman.  We met a few months ago through mutual friends, and this was my third time visiting DC to see her.  I cannot get enough of her company.

She had work Thursday and Friday, so I spent most of those days outside, in museums and streets, my feet halted occasionally by the beauty of my surroundings, a call to draw.  I never travel without a spiral-bound sketchbook, a 9 x 12” hardcover that’s been my go-to for decades, as well as a rotating set of pens, graphite, erasers, colored pencils, markers, chalk, and sharpening apparatus.  Coming off of the mania of job applications and the dullness of spirit that invoked, I knew this trip would be special.  Her roommate out of town, we would have time to ourselves.  

I wanted to arrive with a thoughtful gift in hand, day one.  I’d tried to find a gift at a favorite bookstore in Seattle, but the shelves offered nothing that matched her.  It’s difficult to buy a book for someone else, especially someone like her, someone who loves and pays deep attention to books.  Wednesday night when I arrived, she mentioned that she wanted to take me up on the drawing lessons I’d offered.  Of course - here was the gift - a sketchbook for her and the requisite drawing media to populate the pages.  I picked up both on Thursday afternoon as I walked back to her apartment after a full day of city exploration and chilly drawing.

Thursday morning I didn’t make it too far towards the museums before the light in an alley struck me, stopped by the optics of the blue cloudless freezing sky reflected in the glass windows of a shadowed building, the ironwork of fire escapes, the deep golden green of backlit laurel leaves in my foreground.  A truck driver coming down the alley leaned out his window to ask to see, but I’d only just started to draw and had nothing.  He rolled forward almost squishing a man crossing his path - “Look out!” I yelled, and he laughed: “then you’d really have something to draw!”  I enjoyed the wit, and even more so enjoyed how absurd it would be, if he did injure a pedestrian, my reaction would be to… draw the scene?  I kept on drawing, moving aside for other trucks and their drivers, but no other driver asked to see.  A pedestrian might have paid me a compliment, I cannot remember.  I was fairly focused on the work, my first real drawing since finishing the tedium of round one of job applications.  With the practice I’ve been putting into my plein-air drawings recently, I knew this drawing was likely to come off fairly successfully.  It was fun to go solo around the city, drawing and sharing photographs of the results in real time via text to my companion back in her home workspace.

Upon finishing that first drawing, I was very, very cold.  My hands were shaking.  My back hurt.  I stand when I work, holding the sketchbook in the crook of my left arm, drawing with my right.  It was high time to advance south to the Mall, to a museum, any museum with a restroom.  My Aunt had recommended I investigate the relatively new National Museum of African American History and Culture, open since 2016.  I knew the building sight unseen as soon as I saw it, from the novelty and idiosyncrasy of its facade alone.

I loved the building’s cubic immensity, the inverted pyramidical lattice and beam structure so radically different from the architecturally typical classically-derivative stone columns.  Inside, I observed military uniforms, admired photographs and videos of various legends of boxing, tennis, golf, music, cooking, listened to poetry and read histories of firsts, and appreciated a thoughtfully curated assembly of paintings and sculptures.  I was on my way out, exploring the uppermost floor, struck by the sunlight glowing through the gaps in the facade lattice and glass.  At the edge of a balcony was a constructed view looking down through floors along the entire interior of the glass and metal facade structure, an intentional sight line to a bird’s eye perspective of the ground floor gift shop.  In the afternoon winter sun brilliance, the light was changing minute to minute, the long shadow of the National Monument outside like a sundial for the gods.  I wanted to get the leaping expanse of interior space into my bounded sketchbook page, especially the perspectival drama of convergence to the bright horizon outside.  I started with ballpoint pen, going back to add colored pencil over the wireframe of the ballpoint structural outlines.  This technique is very different than the optical drawing of the alleyway - where I had used marker and colored pencil tonally, like oil painting more than drawing, thinking in optical realities, not perspective-based space construction.

I was not going for optical truth, just approximations and believable enough conditions to communicate the space, speaking a language of design more than painting.  I thought of how I used to see, before Santa Fe.  I would never have been able to draw this.  Within the knowable, attainable design reality of the space of what I was seeing, the more subtle differentiations of the shadows, the reflections, the tones, the optics…would once have been un-drawable confusion to me.  What I’d learned from Tony Ryder in Santa Fe, his optical oil painting methods in seeing served my design observations well.

In the evenings, my host and I did a drawing lessons together, going over optical approaches and linear ones, dipping into pen and marker without too much prescription, not yet.  When I teach people who are fairly new to drawing, I try to hold back, to let them make mistakes and discover for themselves what works well and and less well.  For drawing subjects, we started with what was at hand - clear glasses on a glass table.  While the form of the glass wasn’t too complicated - optically the challenge was high - a good thing.  It’s best to jump in the deep end with drawing - there are no risks, and we can’t get hurt.  The worst thing I could do for someone just starting out is to limit their progress with my limited preconceptions.  I was pleasantly surprised with her work when she approached a bottle of wine on the table from an “optical” perspective, rather than outlining - just going for patches and shapes of tone.  From a structural perspective the piece was much more accurate and solid - despite no outline whatsoever. The next night we drew with graphite, observing my wristwatch together.

Friday I set out again in the morning towards the museums, with a notion to visit the National Gallery, one of my favorite places on earth.  I was crossing Thomas Circle, when I saw three banners hanging from the front of a church, in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, with striking yellow and black graphics, and the duotone bald face of a black person with their head held high, seen from below lit from above, both halves of their face (or two slightly different faces?) astride a central banner with the three words of BLM.  The banners flapped gently in the cold from a slight wind in an overcast sky.  I stopped to draw. 

A man stopped to compliment the work and ask me about my media and process.  He seemed homeless but I couldn’t be sure.  I didn’t have any money to give him when he asked, and said my hands are pretty cold, I should get back to finishing this before it snows.  “Don’t you have any gloves?” He asked me, I said yes, I do, but they prevent me from feeling my pencil.  I gave him a business card, just in case he wanted to check out my other work on my website.  He gave me hand-warmers.  I tried to turn them down - but he insisted, and went on his way.  A few minutes later, as it began to snow, I heard a commotion coming towards me.  A woman, definitely homeless, shouting and raving to no one in particular, was making her way towards me from the far side of the traffic circle.  I thought, well, I better wrap up this drawing before she gets here… I might have to stop if she engages me in this manner…

She came over, saw what I was doing, and immediately became calm and gentle.  She looked me dead in the eyes and said, with a kind smile “that’s really nice.  Really nice,” and walked on, slower than she had approached, saying nothing else.  I was able to finish the drawing.

I left the columns as blank paper, because the effect of the banners was my focus for this work.  Drawing in a sketchbook on-site is a chance to give the audience the gift of your experience in that place at that time.  A drawing made plein-air will always carry less volume of visual information than even a causal phone photograph (so much less) but gives the viewer your quality attention, your record of being.  A phone photograph gives the evidence of a fraction of a second of time in full undiscerning resolution, even if carefully considered.  I wanted to show how beautiful the flowing forms of the banners were, as well as the graphics printed upon them.  I began this work with yellow pencil and black marker - the graphite was the third stage, before then working back into all aspects of the work with all three media.  

I’m not sure how long I was standing there, but I knew when I was finished that I was desperately, utterly frozen.  I couldn’t feel my fingers.  I was so cold I could barely put my materials away.  Signing my signature had been a task.  I took the hand warmers given me out of their plastic, shook the bags, and stuffed them in my thin gloves.  While they slowly (barely) chemically stirred to warmth, I walked briskly to the nearest possible museum, which happened to be the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.  

My host and I had planned to go there together on Saturday, so I promised myself I would only arrive, use the restroom, and see no exhibits before starting the journey home.  I couldn’t help but admire the tremendous taxiderm’d elephant in the main hall, over 4 meters high and elevated further on an eye-level platform.  I lingered, taking in the gray bulk, the textured skin, the enormity of the tusks, lower jaw, full-sail ears, imagining what this animal must have been alive, what presence, what noise and gray gentleness.  

Saturday, back at the Natural History Museum, in my arrogance I believed I could “quickly” sketch the aforementioned towering elephant in chisel-tip marker.  She patiently waited as I struggled through a very, very difficult drawing, having to resort to white chalk to balance my mistakes in marker.  The crowd, a fair number parents with children, were generous with their words to me as I worked.  “Did you start that today?” One man asked, “yes, a few minutes ago,” and my companion giggled.  Parents pointed out my task to their kids.  I always stop to show someone who wants to see.  Drawing a bit of attention, even a crowd sometimes, comes with the territory.  My difficulty obvious, and a bit embarrassed by the time it was taking me, I asked my companion for her honest opinion and I am glad she gave it - instantly she was able to point out a few areas for sculptural improvement, and the drawing is better for it.  

After 30 continuous years of drawing, still, I know nothing, and when I call on skills or abilities I think I “have”, they vanish, nowhere to be found.

Finally, I wrapped up, apologized and thanked her for my trying behavior / compulsion to draw things I see, most anywhere anytime.  Understanding and kind, she said don’t worry about it.  We moved on, exploring.  The modern made-for-social-media exhibit layouts were atrocious - I couldn’t even find some of the fossils buried or obscured behind the distracting oil industry info-graphics - but the more “institutional” exhibits, like the intact rooms from 1960 showing how various animal skeletons inform their similarities and differences in mechanical motion, were downright magical in their effect, modest in their simplicity.  I learned that a swordfish has a ring of bone ring the size of a grapefruit around its eyeball, like a great hollowed white coconut, or a punctured cannonball made of chalk.

Before I boarded my plane back to Seattle, one DC drawing remained.  She and I drew each other’s silhouette portraits at the Hirshhorn Museum.  In an exhibit welcoming the audience to take after Duchamp in bit of interactive and creative fun, a light illuminates a magnetic wall, adjustable on a pole to align with one’s eye level.  A friend (or oneself) takes a sheet of colored paper and traces the silhouette of one’s face, finishing the work at a nearby table for the purpose.  Several groups of children were drawing, and having a good time with it.  A wall held previous attempts by museum visitors, all attached with needle-less pushpin-shaped magnets.  We chose blue, the least represented of the colors, but forewent the graphite offered, opting for the white chalk I’d brought with me.  We traced each others’ shadow silhouettes, then worked further from life, taking turns posing and drawing.  She stuck to chalk, I added some ballpoint pen and black marker for her features and mask.  The children at our table said “whoa, those are really good!” (“Thank you so much”), and asked their mom, or aloud to no one in particular, “how did they get those pastels?”  

When we wrapped, we affixed our drawings to the wall, took the requisite photo-documentation, and celebrated making artwork that hangs in one of the National Museums on the DC Mall.

About time.

(Edited and published Monday, January 31, 2022)

Below is a complete Gallery of works from this entry.

Enjoy, - David

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