I've been quiet here partly because I'm working on two illustration projects for Memphis Magazine that I can't show yet and partly because I was having some serious internet problems and couldn't share my scans. So I don't have a lot of new material I can share, but here are a couple of recent(ish) sketches that didn't make the blog. The first was an art lunch with friends, which is one of my favorite things to do, and I clearly had tea.

The second was a really neat lecture at Dixon a couple of weeks ago. I got to a number of those and usually sketch, so I'm trying to figure out different media and styles to vary the sketches from lecture to lecture. This was local artist Carl E. Moore, whose work I admire a lot, talking about his practice and his art. Instead of diving into paint I kept it just fountain pen and brush pen. I also used a higher vanishing line than I usually do. Often I'm drawing what's on the wall behind the speaker, but here I left more space for audience and kept his figure central to the sketch. I was pleased with how it turned out, which is not something I say a ton about my sketches. I love doing them, but they don't usually measure up to the image I had in my head before starting. This one was different than I meant it to be, but I was pleased with the result.

The Mid-South Cartoonists Association kindly arranged for the Memphis Urban Sketchers to join them at the Fontaine House, one of our old painted ladies which is now a museum. I've loved this house since I was a kid, and it's always a treat to go there. I sat outside with my big sketchbook to begin with and sketched the house full on. I started at the tower and cut off the very bottom but got more of it than I thought I might when I began. I used a big brush and tried not to get bogged down in all the gingerbread, just to get the impression of the place.

By that time I was cold, and I joined friends inside. I love this view in the top hall just below the tower stairs. I sketched it several years ago (below) and had another, quicker run at it yesterday. The light was glowing pink that I couldn't quite catch, but it was fun to try.

I do love the tower. Sometime I need to go back and sketch this view that I took a photo of out the round window. And Christina got a shot of me when I was still outside sketching the facade. Fun to see myself from a bird's eye view.

I gave myself an art day out today after turning in the cover art for Memphis Magazine's February issue a couple of days ago. I know artists who are disciplined in their work hours and days, but I am not one of them. I work through a lot of weekend time but give myself days off while everyone else is at work (which is the nicest time to take them except for seeing friends who are off work on weekends). Also my time off is muddy anyway, as non artist friends have pointed out to me, since sketching is often part of a day out for me.

Elizabeth Alley was talking at Dixon on her art residency in the arctic circle, which was fascinating. I love the noon Wednesday lecture series because it gets it on my calendar to take a museum day. And I love vicarious travel and artists talking about their craft. A perfect excuse to get out. And it was great. I chose paradise blue ink to do some of the sketching in because it felt as appropriate for the chill of the subject matter as it does for the blue of the Caribbean. That was the one I spent the most time on, but then she got to her slide of a polar bear track, and I grabbed my tiny purse sketchbook to record that.

It's 70 degrees today and gorgeous, so after walking through the printmaking exhibit again I ordered a peach tea latte and a blueberry muffin to take out into the gardens. Day out indeed. The drink making is delicious but a little slow, so I sat down to wait and sketched the croissant in the case while I waited. That's my gamboge Windsor and Newton watercolor marker as color. I love their juicy, saturated markers.

Sitting outside at Dixon feels a tiny bit like Paris. There are tables behind rows of  pruned trees and boxwood hedges with a view through to a Rodin statue. It always makes me think of the sculpture garden at the Rodin museum just a little, and it's a happy place for me. Sometime I'll sketch that view, but Elizabeth's talk about drawing patterns on her trip stuck with me, and when I looked down at the table base, I drew that instead. I did a whole series of sketches of my black boots when I was traveling in Paris, so again it felt like a small flashback to good times. It was a truly excellent day out.

Mary K VanGieson, a fellow urban sketcher and longtime, hugely active participant in the Memphis art community (she gets out to ALL the shows I miss), gave a talk at Dixon today about eco prints and her current exhibition in the museum. She was funny, informative, wise, and inspiring. I love this free lecture series at Dixon, and I was thrilled to see a packed house show up to learn from her. I saw so many friends. It felt great to catch up with art friends, learn about a new printmaking technique, and see the trio of printmaking shows currently hanging at Dixon. What a happy day. I didn't take in my bigger sketchbook, but I used my tiny purse one to both sketch and take notes.

Memphis Urban Sketchers met at Brooks on a drizzly Saturday. The museum is free till noon, so it suits our group for free and open (and available bathrooms). I sat out on the front porch under cover and chatted with a couple of friends and did a frustrating line sketch with a pen that was getting clogged up (below), and then I went inside to sketch in the galleries. I've enjoyed drawing museum spaces lately, even though that limits me to pencils only (in the US, at least). So they always turn out a bit more candy colored than I'd like. I've really enjoyed the pencils lately, but generally I use them for the drawing and add more subdued paint on top. I did take this one outside and added water after. Maybe I need to experiment with much lighter tone and water RIGHT after so I still remember and can tone things down better. Brooks is near my house and a good place for me to get in and out of. It was good to get back and remind myself to go there more often.

Now I need to go refill some pens and see if I can get this one flowing better again.

I walked through the entrance hall and stepped out into the first cloister and fell immediately in love. I had only spent a handful of days in New York and had never before had the time to take the longer ride up to the north end of Manhatten. The Cloisters is a bit remote, which I am sure protects it from the worst of the crowds, but it is so worth the journey.

In my more restricted last few years I have been missing Europe badly. I love traveling places where the history is old. I love being surrounded by Medieval buildings and carvings. The Cloisters was such a balm for me. It's a crazy mish-mash, but it is so beautifully done that it utterly works. Barnard, a sculptor, lived and worked on the continent in the early 20th C and became a compulsive collector of Medieval carved stone. He bought a whole chapter house in France that had been reduced to usage as a barn. He bought three cloisters, none of them complete but with enough original pieces to put together evocative and beautiful spaces. Every door and doorway in the place is historical and different, but the stone structure that houses all of these disparate pieces is so simple and sensitive that it all feels almost inevitable. Rockefeller saw Barnard's collection and donated this museum that brought all those pieces into one living building. I miss the time when billionaires built museums and schools and libraries, but we continue to be richer as a society because of the ones who did.

Another thing that feels European is the way the indoor and outdoor spaces flow together. I am still masking in public, and it was such joy to have so much of the museum open air. There are some lovely galleries too, plus one stunning Robert Campin altarpiece that I had studied in college and was surprised to meet face to face. The windows, like the doorways, set panels of Medieval glass into simple, diamond shaped glass panes with glimpses of the Hudson through the gaps. The stained glass is alive and vital in a way that it never is that funeral home way of artificial lighting from behind. It doesn't all match, but it harmonizes. I truly fell in love with the whole place. My dad had been telling me for years that I needed to go, but I was never in the city for more than a day or two. I'm so glad I made it, and I will definitely be back.

The collection of artwork is gorgeous too. I fell in love with this small English saint and sketched him in my smaller purse sketchbook. I also had a lovely long conversation with a summer intern at the Met (what a dream job!) in the unicorn tapestries room. She's an artist as well, and it was so fun to hear about her big adventure of a summer and share our work a bit. I love traveling solo because it leaves space for me to meet and spend time with people instead of being more walled in a bubble of companions.

The first sketch was the cloister with the cafe. I loved being able to get a nice salad and real tea and sit at a table and draw the beautiful garden in the center. After lunch I came back up and drew the biggest cloister that was the first thing I saw. I love the twisted trees in this one. It's only a third the size of its original, but they made it the size that matched the capitals they had, and they filled in some of the columns and surrounding walls with stone from the same quarry. I was on a bench back underneath the overhang, and the colors got a little bright on me. I also think I was just so uplifted that I leaned into the pinks and purples. I toned it down a bit later in better light, but it's still a slightly over the top emotional response to the beauty of the place, and that's ok.

I spent all day there and just missed the bus as I walked out. There was a lot of traffic, so a group of us waited a bit for the next one, and I did a much quicker sketch of the outside, using ink and a red watercolor marker since I was fully outside the museum. To end the day I pulled out my smaller sketchbook again and sketched a couple of the fellow would-be passengers. It was a congenial group and a marvelous day.

My second full day in New York I headed for the Frick. Reading about their small Vermeer show had been the tipping point for buying my ticket and taking the plunge. Plus I've been reading all fall about their newly opened second story -- galleries in the family rooms that were offices, closed to the public, for decades. They've done a gorgeous job. I would love for them to have more benches, but otherwise it was wonderful. I did find a great bench at the top of the grand stairway where I could look down to the main hall and the organ and grandfather clock. I had so much fun drawing the birds eye view of the museum, using my Inktense pencils again. They are more candy colored than my normal palette, so I put a few grey washes down later to try to keep it from being quite so bright, but overall I was delighted with how it came out.

The three Vermeers gathered for the show all centered around letters. There was the Frick's own epistolary piece, one from the Rijksmuseum, and one I had never seen in person from Dublin. It was funny. There was a line down the block and sometimes around the corner to get in, but once you were inside the museum you could flow into the Vermeer room at will. It would sometimes get a little crowded, but most people looked at each piece about a minute and cleared out, and there were plenty of quiet times in between. I got to stand with each piece as long as I wanted to. Vermeers are a rare treat and worth savoring. Oddly the other two Vermeers were almost ignored in the main museum. And when I got back to the Met, they had five in a room that was also mostly empty. People are funny. But I'm glad I went to see the ones that live further away. It was such a good day, made better by a lovely chat with a bookmaker who now lives in Colorado. I had my lunch outside and was working on my sketch a little in the better light. I love that art is so often an introduction to people when I'm traveling alone. (Hi, Rosemary!)

Here's the sketch I did waiting for the museum to open that morning. The Met had opened at 10, so I had (foolishly) assumed the Frick was on the same schedule. Turns out it was 10:30, but I had a sketchbook to entertain me.

Walking back up to the bus at the end of the day I spotted this bright pink food truck and had to sketch it. I am so visually drawn to the fever dream colors and fun shapes of food trucks. Sometime I'll end up with a whole series of them I'm sure.

There is a huge Sargent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, and I had been hoping all year to get up there and see it. I was just about to give up because of health and logistics, but I felt better several days in a row and decided to just go for it last minute. It was SUCH a good decision. And I was lucky to be flexible and able to go last minute. I spent Monday to Friday in New York, home on Saturday, and I just drank in art. I went ahead and joined the Met both to support a great museum and so I could go in and out at will. And hopefully I'll go back again and use it some more in the next year.

The Sargent show was great, a wide selection of work from the earlier part of his career, the part where he was based in Paris. He was ridiculously prolific, and there were many I'd never even seen reproductions of. There were a bunch in private collections but also old friends I've seen in other places in other years.

I found benches and sat and sketched a good bit, also just sat and looked deeply. The gallery sketches are all Derwent Inktense pencils. The NY museums have a pencil only policy, and I love the Inktense ones because they have more depth and saturation than most pencils. They're made with ink instead of watercolor, and when you put a little water on them (I usually use a water brush for a blender), they really pop. I tend to get in the habit of drawing with fountain pens at home, so it's fun to mix up texture and use the pencils sometime.

I enjoyed drawing people with the art a few times, including that first full length portrait of the doctor in the super saturated red. After lunch I went back in and drew the Daughters of Edward Droit, one of my favorite Sargent portraits anywhere (aside from Lady Agnew in the Scottish National Gallery). I had seen it in Boston a decade ago and been completely blown away by the composition as well as the beauty of the brushstrokes. I drew it straight up, just looking deeply and enjoying the painting.

Toward the end of the day I wandered through the American wing and saw a father and son in blue stripes and checks hanging out in front of an orange Helen Frankenthaler. It was a wonderful sight. It took me a couple of minutes to get out my book and pencils, so it's a super fast sketch as they moved on out, but I was happy with feel of it.

Two weeks in a row I've managed to make it to the midweek lecture at Dixon. This week it was their membership person Dorothy Svgdik talking about why she loves museum. So fun, and I did three quickish sketches while I was listening. I'm still really enjoying having the small sketchbook in my purse with a handful of pens for easy access. I'm so much more likely to sketch instead of looking at my phone if I make it super easy and accessible for myself. And I'm invariably happier afterwards if I do make that choice.

Afterwards I took a walk with friends around the garden and then went back inside to sketch in the gallery. I love the spaces in museums and have been seeing a lot of online sketches lately inside museums. Not exclusively copies of the art, but drawings of the space. I would love to do more of those myself, though I so miss being able to sketch in pen and watercolor. American museums tend to be really restrictive about materials in a way most European museums aren't. So it didn't come out as hoped, but here was my bigger sketchbook gallery landscape in pencil and watercolor crayon. I had fun sitting and looking at the space and light even if it didn't turn out the way I'd hoped. Honestly no sketch ever matches the vision in my brain that I have when I start, but some get closer than others. This one wasn't close, but that's how it goes. On the other hand, I was really happy with my sketch of pewter and people above, a couple of audience members off to my left.

Colleen Couch gave a lecture at Dixon today on her joint show with mentor Dolph Smith, and it was great. I listened and enjoyed slides of Dolph's methodical sketchbooks/studio journals where he worked out his ideas (or sometimes not, as the last page here shows). I did sketches in my tiny purse sketchbook with a fountain pen, a brush pen with black ink, and a couple of watercolor markers for the last two. I sat with friends and had a great talk about art careers, making your own goals, and the ongoing need for discernment. I have several friends trying to figure out the next chapter or streamline the current chapter to make it work more smoothly.

It was a timely talk, and it's always good to hear that sometimes even art heroes like Dolph end up with "shit!" on occasion.