Duke Chapel

Last two drawings from North Carolina, both from Duke Chapel.

First, an exterior passageway connecting the chapel to another building.

Second, the Benjamin N. Duke Mermorial Organ. It is one of three organs in the chapel, and was built by Dirk A. Flentrop of Holland. You would think it was very old, but in fact it only dates to 1979. It consists of 5,033 pipes, controlled by four manual keyboards.

Fire Sprinkler Thingamaging

I had an art professor in college who was terrible. But one project she had us do was drawings of water pipes and etchings of manhole covers. She was interested in the ways people control water. I have to admit, the project stuck with me, and I continue to be fascinated with pipes and plumbing systems. This fire sprinkler system is in the theater building at Long Island University in downtown Brooklyn.

Farragut Substation

The Con Edison Farragut Substation, in DUMBO.

Crazy pipes

When I was an undergraduate student studying art, I was stuck for a semester with a terrible professor named Jan. The main reason she was a terrible professor was because she was from the school of art education that holds that teaching technique and process is stifling and limiting to creativity, and that the student should merely be inspired to discover and experiment and create. This sounds great on paper, and has inspired many romantic stories about the creative life, a la Dead Poet's Society. In reality, I find that it mostly just allows a lot of people to get away with a lot of bullshit, and leaves others (like myself) without the tools to actualize their creative ideas. It took me a long time to build that creative tool kit, and I'm still working on it.

The other reason she was a terrible professor was because she had very strong socio-political views that she insisted on imposing on the entire class. Not only would she preach about her ideas (some of which I agreed with), but she insisted that your art be about her ideas. But . . . one of her main things was about how industrial society seeks to control nature, so she had us drawing lots of plumbing and making etching of manhole covers and stuff like that, and I actually really took to it. To this day, I really enjoy drawing complicated conglomerations of pipes and plumbing, like this HVAC system at the Wild Project, a performance space in the Lower East Side.

I have no idea what any of these pipes or gauges or doo-dads do. I don't know why this stuff is on the ground floor in the front of the building, while the actual HVAC machine is on the roof in the back of the building. And I sure don't get that red wire, wrapped all around the entire length of the thing. Is that really how they teach you to do it in HVAC school?

Roadwork

Some drawings from recent days of construction vehicles and equipment. I love drawing this stuff, because A) What do these things do? Some are obvious, like a bulldozer, but even they have all these pipes and tubes and hoses and attachments that make you wonder how it all works. B) They are a really complex arrangement of lines and shapes and a fun challenge to decipher and depict it all. You may think all these construction devices are just blocks, like a Tonka toy, but in fact they are full of graceful curves and complex shapes intersecting in oblique tangents.


I drew this in DUMBO. I'm not precisely sure what it does, but a contractor at the site said it was "for drilling. Like for water." Are they drilling for aquifers in Brooklyn?

A manual steamroller, I guess.

Naptime in a bulldozer. South Street Seaport. Lots of construction there, still rebuilding from Sandy.

Bulldozer with some sort of attachment in front, for lifting heavy stuff, I guess.

Manhattan Bridge

The Manhattan Bridge doesn't get much attention in the popular imagination. The Brooklyn Bridge is a world-famous icon of New York City. The Queensboro Bridge gets its moment every time they make a new Spider-Man adaptation, as they re-create the scene from Amazing Spider-Man #121 when the Green Goblin tosses Peter Parker's girlfriend off the bridge (In that original comic book, though, she dies!). Even the Verrazano Bridge to Staten Island gets its moment in the spotlight once a year at the start of the New York Marathon. But no one pays much attention to the Manhattan Bridge.

I love the Manhattan Bridge, though. I spend a lot of time near it in DUMBO. I like its dull blue steel color. I love the complexity of its structure and engineering coupled with the intricacy of its Beaux-Arts architecture, and overlaid with a haphazard, utilitarian spider-web of pipes and electrical cables and other infrastructural gack. It's not so pleasant to walk or bike across, because every five minutes the subway thunders by mere feet from you. On the other hand, unlike the beloved Brooklyn Bridge, it's not completely clogged with tourists, and the view is just as good, if not better.

Here's a bunch of sketches of aspects of the bridge that I've done over the past couple of months.

On the walkway, by the Brooklyn-side arch

Arch and suspension, Brooklyn side.

Giant cable anchor

Under the bridge at Sands St.

 Top of the anchorage at Water St. and Adams St.

Balustrades at Manhattan Bridge Brooklyn Plaza. According to architects Saratoga Associates, it is "a bold, graphic space that serves as a convenient resting spot for pedestrians." Also, a homeless guy in a red shirt lives there.

"Manual Dry Standpipe INL Manifold Brooklyn Bound Roadway. Fire Dept. Use Only"

Memento Mori

You might be asking yourself, why is this girl chilling with a skeleton?

Well, here’s the thing. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been attending a class at Spring Street Studio. That’s one of the places I usually go for drop-in figure drawing sessions, but this is actually a class (sorta), focusing on human anatomy. These drawings are from the first session I went to. Minerva Durham, the instructor, had us draw the full female figure posed with a skeleton, explaining to us that this type of image was called “Memento Mori.”

Memento mori is a Latin phrase which translates as “Remember you must die.” It supposedly derives from ancient Rome, when military generals would, during their victory parades, be trailed by one of their slaves who would be tasked with repeating this phrase to him as a means of reminding him that although this was his day of glory, his eventual death might come at any time. I can imagine that that would be a job a slave would secretly relish. “Remember you must die, muthafucka. Thas right.”

As an artistic genre, it initially came to prominence in Christian art and architecture, as a humbling reminder of the transience of earthly existence.  As the early Christian theologian Tertullian wrote in Apolegeticus: "Respice post te! Hominem te esse memento! Memento mori!": "Look behind you! Remember that you are but a man! Remember that you'll die!" Tertullian was a real buzzkill at parties. You will see this theme in much creepy Medieval and Renaissance Christian art, including cadaver tombs, chapels made of bones, portraits of people holding skulls, and the genre of danse macabre. Here’s some examples:

Hans Holbein, 1538

Hans Memling, 1485

 

Thomas Smith self-portrait, ca. 1680

This class exercise did not have any theological point; it was merely to get us to visualize the placement and movement of bone structure in the figure. But I had never heard of this phrase or this whole category of artistic tradition. If only I had received training in the arts at an elite Ivy League school, then I would know these things!             Oh, wait . . . No, the visual arts program that granted me a degree didn’t teach me about momento mori. But they didn’t teach me human anatomy, either, so there you go.

 

By the way, she was not posing with a model skeleton. Rather, there was a second model, an older man, who we were  to visually translate into skeletal form. I believe he was the same as this model, who I drew in a sketchpad some years ago.

 

Speaking of Death . . .

Two days ago, Joe Kubert passed away at the age of 85. Every comic book reader must know who he is. He began drawing comics professionally at the age of 12 in 1938, the year Superman debuted, and was still working to this day. In fact, a new anthology of his work had just been announced a few weeks ago. So he had been an artistic presence in American comics for literally its entire history, and if you’ve looked at a rack of comic books at any point in the past 74 years, you’d have seen his work. There are still a few guys from the Golden Age years who show up at conventions to sell sketches and prints and memorabilia, but I can’t think of anyone else from that period who is still actively working.

Kubert had a very distinct style. Even as a child, before I was really aware of individual artists, I could identify a Kubert cover. His compositions were dynamic and fluid. His figures were classically idealized – tall and muscular men and curvaceous women – but his sketchy linework rendered them sinewy and organic. Even his superheroes seemed more grounded than those of other artists. For this reason, he seemed more at home with more realistic genres, particularly the war stories with which he became most identified. Some of the earliest comics I remember were drawn by him. I distinctly remember these covers of Tarzan, as well as the cover to the deeply weird “Super Dictionary.”

I never really had a lot of Kubert work in my collection. By the time I was really into comics, he was mostly doing war comics like Sgt. Rock and Enemy Ace, which weren’t my thing. But I always really dug his art when I saw it. In recent years, he had written and illustrated a couple of graphic novels. I thought his writing was, well, not so good, but they were still great to look at. Like I said, he was still going strong producing material, and there was no public indication that he was in poor health, so despite his age it was a surprise to hear the news of his death. Rest in peace, Joe Kubert, and momento mori, everybody.

Garments

One thing that's always been a particular challenge to me is drapery. I've been trying to figure out how clothes lie on the figure, and how to depict folds and draping. I never figured out how to draw clothing out of my head, probably because I learned to draw by copying super-heroes, whose costumes are basically body-paint.

So here's some drawings of dresses. They're copied from photographs. I don't know who the designers or photographers are. Sorry, designers and photographers. They're not fashion illustrations. I don't really get fashion illustration, with their exaggerated, elongated figures and simplified silhouettes. I mean, a lot of them are cool drawings to look at, but I never quite see the connection between those stylized drawings and the actual clothes. There are no folds in those drawings! And folds are what's fun to draw, though super-complicated to figure out.

 

Holy Houses Pt. 2

More recent drawings of churches.

 A little church out on Long Island. I pass it on my way to my adjunct teaching job. It reminds me of New England.

 West Village

 West Village

 Downtown Wall Street area

Nestled amongst the court buildings near City Hall

Holy Houses Pt 1

I've been drawing a lot of churches lately. Not because I have any interest in what goes on inside them, but because I want to practice my perspective drawing, and a lot of these buildings are really interesting, challenging subjects to draw. When I went looking for them to draw, I was surprised to realize just how many churches there are in New York City. When my parents moved to North Carolina, the first thing I noticed right off the bat was that, down there, there's a church building about every five yards. Maybe it's because this city is so incredibly dense, the multitude of churches (and former churches - converted to other uses) is not as apparent. But there really are a shitload of them around, all over.

A lot of them are really simple, humble buildings (which I, non-believer though I am, believe suits the original conception of 'church' more closely than a grand cathedral), and some have some amount of architectural design applied to what is basically a simple, utilitarian structure. But there are so many with really interesting, complex shapes, planes, and forms to draw. A lot are too much so. There's a church in my neighborhood that I've thought of drawing, but it is so tremendously complex in its gothic complexity that it's hard to take it all in, but less draw it. I may just start sketching it piece by piece.

The Soldiers' Monument at Trinity Church, Lower Manhattan, on Broadway. When I was finishing this drawing, a group of about a dozen little Japanese school girls walked by, saw it, and started saying, "Woooowww! Woooowwww!! WOOOOWWWWW!!!!" Then they all pulled out their phones and cameras and started taking photos of the drawing.




Our Lady of Vilnius. SoHo, near the Holland Tunnel.

Tifereth Israel Town and Village Synagogue. Strangely enough, while there are also plenty of synagogues around, not a lot of them aren't particularly interesting architecturally. I drew this one in the East Village sitting on the sidewalk outside a Duane Reade. A woman saw me drawing and told me that she likes to sketch as well; that it's a calming, meditative, and therapeutic activity for her. I knew what she was talking about absolutely.

Third Church of Christ. Park Ave. Not sure why it's called the 'third' church. Wouldn't you want to call your church the first church of Christ? It reminds me of this diner in a small New Hampshire town where I used to work. It had a sign out front that read "Second Best Breakfast In Town!"

St. Cornelius Chapel, Governor's Island. There are all these unused buildings out there from when it was an active Coast Guard station with a permanent resident community . . . an empty theater, an abandoned little stripmall, a leftover Burger King, etc.

The Shrine Church of St. Anthony of Padua. West Village. The oldest existing parish founded for Italian immigrants in the U.S. As I drew this, two Franciscan Friars were sitting nearby, chilling out with their dog. One of them was on the phone trying to score tickets to some concert. Several times, people - younger people - stopped by to talk and ask about religion. The friars didn't seem too interested in engaging with them. I was under the impression that the Roman Catholic church had a real problem with an aging and declining membership in America, and I woulda thought that it was one of the main jobs of these friars to try to recruit new members and bring back lapsed ones, but perhaps I was mistaken. Or maybe they were just on a union break.