Slices of life

The following is reprinted from Cedar Street Artworks, posted February 7, 2014

  Friend John left the table to refill his coffee mug.  I used the interval to sketch a young man in a nearby booth.  He had an I-Pad bud in at least one ear.  He was holding his radio telephone to the other.  He had the far-focused look of the typical cell-phoner, so I knew he wouldn't notice that I was drawing him.  John and I had been discussing the value that "drop-in" artwork adds to text.

  The phoner closed his conversation.  John returned to the table.  We resumed our talk.

  We recalled the old New Yorker magazine.  Before color-printing had usurped the elegant and expressive lines of its contributors' contour sketches, its editors brought life to gray pages of agate typefaces by adding column-filler drop-ins of tiny sketches, doodles, if you will.  They seemed to be mostly of street scenes -- a trash can, a fire hydrant, the wheels of a vendor's cart.  Another might be a rapid drawing of a dog walker, with the dog's tail extended into a curlicue of stars.

  When I published my Tacoma's Express magazine some 20 years ago, I reminded John, I filled out my columns with similar sketches.  That led us into a discussion of my drawing technique.

I start with the eyes, I explained.   The pupil, the lids, the eyebrow.  I find these easy to lay down in relation to each other.  Simple strokes.  Simple lines.  When you have an eye, you have the soul.  Then the second eye, if visible.  The curve of the nose where it leaves the plane of the forehead.  A nostril.  The septum, that groove that drops between the nostrils to the mouth.  The line of the cheek where it departs from the nose, and drops down to define the widest edge of the mouth.  The chin. 

  Once I have a few lines on the paper, I  use triangulation to place the others, in turn.  I find it easiest to plot three points in a problem.  I hold up a pencil to see how far to one side of a vertical line the edge of the jaw might be.  I hold it horizontally to see how far above or below the tip of the nose the ear should be placed.

  My working rule of life-sketching, I told John, is to draw what I see, not what I know.   If the model moves, or as my cell-phoner did -- set down his phone, flip closed the lid of his laptop computer, gather up these and his jacket and walk out -- I stop drawing.  And sometimes that makes for a satisfying sketch.

  But John, I've seen your work.  You knew all this all along.