When the Earth Was Young

Once upon a time I could draw. That was way back before the dinosaurs roamed the earth just about the time that dirt was in fact invented. Then life happened and Master Card sort of insisted I go to work and then there was the Long Sufferin who thought being a professional television watcher was not an appropriate career path and I had to feed the dogs and then we had cats and you see how it all went terribly wrong.

So after many years of helping Master Card become the dominant world power, I retired, moved to Oregon found myself knee deep in an art community and decided that I needed a skill to allow me to participate in all of the creative activities here on the coast.

Okay, as you know, skills do not come easily, they take constant work, nurturing and development and you can’t just decide to wake up one day and acquire skills. It don’t work that way.

Well, I thought, a painful and seldom practiced process and after much screeching of gears and the smell of burning insulation it occurred to me that I might want to brush up on a skill I actually used in this millennia.

You will recall that there was an ice age and for many thousands of years the whole of the globe was covered with snow and ice and the great mammals like the mastodon and mammoth walked freely except for the times when those pesky little hairy apes men started chasing them with fire and sharp sticks and that is about the same time I got interested in photography.

I did not personally know Louis Deguerre, but I was interested in photography just a few years after he developed the process. I missed Mathew Brady by a hair too, but you’ll get the point that I have been doing photography for a long, long time.

I was a serious photographer way back in the 60’s. I know I should have been killing off brain cells, wearing bell-bottom pants and enjoying free love, but the Age of Aquarius sort of passed right over Texas and wearing bell-bottomed trousers would get you arrested or rolled or maybe both before anyone thought to ask if you were really the sort of person it was worthwhile to roll and so most guys in Texas passed on the whole bell-bottomed look and even if really long hair might get you past the Draft Board it wasn’t any wiser than the whole bell-bottomed thing so mostly the long-haired thing was something we saw on television and thought, “My those guys would get their asses rolled if they came to town of a Saturday night.”

So my rebellion was limited to photographing girls and trying to crack the advertising market and I did do a bit of serious, creative photography and even won a national award or two, mostly I was trying like a lot of creative people to not let the lights get turned off and make this month’s rent.

Which is why when it came to skills, my photographic chops were a lot better than my drawing chops and that’s what happens when you neglect a talent for many a long year and only come back to it at an age when all of the parts aren’t working so well together any more and the things you used to do with ease now come slowly and with blood, toil, tears and sweat when they come at all.

So finding myself in an artist community it was much easier to pick up my camera again and brush off those dusty skills and get out into the community and start trying to join the whole game plan.

And for the most part I did. There were some who didn’t like the idea that photography was art but that’s okay cause there are things which I don’t think of as art so if someone else has an idea about art which doesn’t fit with mine they might just be right and I could be wrong or they could be wrong and I could be right and the whole debate goes round and round in a big circle and gets us nowhere so let’s move on, shall we?

Thing is even though I had a skill which I could bring back to reasonable status without too much work, I never forgot that older skill and never stopped trying to revive it.

It did not come easy.

I’m still struggling and I’ve shared some of my less notable efforts with you over the months, but I am beginning to get there and so I thought I’d take a minute and share with you some of the ones I didn’t do completely wrong.

I mentioned I do women’s faces because God Lov’em they spend so much time and artifice on erasing every line and wrinkle they simply have no nooks and crannies for the light to catch in and that makes for a very difficult thing to capture cause the whole trick of getting an image down on paper or canvas is getting the light to make the planes of the subject pop out.

As with everything else some models serve better than others. I find this one particularly suited to my skills at this point.

Just enough shadow to get a bit of curvature into the face and the wash of bright light, smoothing out all of the shadows offered another interesting challenge.

 A tiny bit of separation allows the three dimensional trick of light to cause the lips to appear closer and the one eye farther away and gives the hint that this lady is looking right at you.

I fought this one, the eyes are set a bit too close together and the nose never did come out right, but it isn’t all that bad. Brittany will forgive me for roughing her face up, I hope and no, it isn’t that Britt.

This is where I am today. The style is a bit loser and less labored and that probably is a good thing. I can and do work a drawing until it is a smudgy mess of graphite and erasing. True I ruined her nose, again and the off-side arm is a tad out of proportion, needs to be bigger I’m thinking, but all in all it ain’t bad. I’m pretty pleased with the torso and the angle of the back and shoulders, so it isn’t prefect but I’m making progress.

All I need now is another hundred or maybe two years and I’ll have all of my skills back and can actually create something like the “real” artists.