Author: wjacobr

Visual artist, poet, novelist, activist & Street Medic, living in North. Penn Name: Jacob Russell My blog is a confluence of art, writing, politics. my Art portfolio: Art-by-Willard.com

#489 Basement Stairs: additional work

14″ x 17″ Charcoal, pastel, acrylic on Bristol paper. View from my easel: my dungeon studio. Thinking about Joan Eardley, whose work I wasn’t aware of till someone posted some of her paintings on Facebook… just blown away by her paintings. The write ups on web pages–the kind of dismissive praise I guess you have to expect when male critics write about a woman artist. She’s so much more than a painter of ‘Scottish identity,’ and her paintings aren’t ‘expressionistic’ –just doesn’t capture the tension she creates between her sometimes minimally suggested subjects and the powerful abstract structures that govern and contain them.  They never lapse into a mere expressionist mess. There’s no need to hold their representative subjects in mind to feel the power, the pure visual power or her re-imagining them. So much of what I aspire to do.

Photo with additional work with pastel. What do you think?#489

#489 View from my easel

#482 matted

I matted 36 pieces the last couple days. I’d like to get away from ‘framing,’ but so many of my pieces, especially the smaller ones, none more than the metalpoints, look so much better when they have that focus.

Here’s a crow quill ink piece… the one that started as a drawing of a crumpled paper bag. I think it’s pretty striking in tonal contrast, and in the detail… which doesn’t show so much here.

#482 matted...