Today’s sketch is from the Seattle Art Museu’s extensive collection of West African masks. This one is a wooden Baga headdress from Guinea called a Baga Nimba or D’mba.
The D’mba serves as a symbol of motherhood for the Baga people. They were also an inspiration for Pablo Picasso who bought two from Gertrude Stein in 1918.
For today’s sketch Is one I did last November at the Seattle Art Museum of 
‘s Lamentation over the Dead Christ, It’s a small and very complex bronze statuette which I’m comfortably sure I could spend days on doing sketches at different angles with hardly a single image being remotely the same.
Today something a little different. The mad scene from Donizetti’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor. Okay, technically not a rhapsody, but it’s rhapsodic in form, so it counts.
Just had this skit pointed out to me, enjoy.
Well this week I took another crack at my old nemesis, the 15th century wooden carving of St. Luke the Evangelist from Flanders. As I’ve mentioned in the past it has a really weird forced perspective that I’ve yet to get right… but I keep trying.
This one went pretty well. I tried working from a different angle than usual that paid off. I also had the benefit of a chair this time. Seattle Art Museum’s medieval collection are in a hallway and I generally prefer not to get in the way of traffic, but since this was a week day right before closing I decided to chance it.
I got rushed in the end and I screwed up on the proportions which i managed to fix by redrawing the head, but otherwise this is one of my better attempts.
A quick happy birthday to one of the greatest Jazz vocalists ever. Couldn’t decide on what was the best song to show her off with but I decided to go with one of her signature pieces, “Strange Fruit”.
It’s a powerful work, even if you miss the subject matter, and Billie’s voice is the perfect tool to show the bitterness and anger behind it.
So sit back , enjoy and join me in wishing Billie Holiday a happy birthday.
Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh!
Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
