Rhapsodies

One of my favorite exercises and pastimes is to take my sketch book to an art museum. This has several uses. The most obvious being the exercise of drawing, drawing and drawing some more. The second is that it forces you to hyper focus on the image you’re working on and in the process really looking at it and in the process taking in everything about it.

Today’s sketches are,  of a piece that I have mentioned before, from the Seattle Art Museum, a wooden carving of St. Luke the Evangelist from Flanders sometime in the fifteenth century. This is a difficult piece to work on. It is clearly intended to be looked up at from a distance and because of that it is done in an extremely forced perspective and because of this I’m really yet to get it right. I give it a try about twice a year and have almost a love hate relationship with it. Also it amuses me that Luke’s symbol, the Bull, looks almost like some sort of bizarre house pet hiding beneath the writing desk.

The two sketches here include my my most recent attempt along with  one of my more successful ones.