Inktober

I've been doing a bit of sketching while also pulling prints for the fall show season and continuing to work on oils on paper for November. It's "Inktober," which a lot of artists I know really post for online, and I'm always a little spotty since this is always deep into show prep for me. But I want to do it as much as I can. So I've started off the month with a bunch of ink gestures.

Being an artist means I don't go out to a lot of fancy evenings, but I decided to actually buy concert tickets to Rhiannon Giddens last Friday. My sister really likes her, and I had loved the snippets I'd heard on npr. She absolutely knocked it out of the park. It was one of the best and most powerful concerts I've ever seen. She did a wide range of songs, nailed every single one of them, told gripping stories, and also told hard truths in a way that brought a room together instead of dividing it. What a gift in this (or any) age. Go see her if you get a chance. I did just a couple of quick sketches (on the left just below) in near darkness because I wanted to have this moment in my art journal to remember.

The next night I ended up at the symphony (which was good, but which didn't rock my world the way Rhiannon had). Fortunately after the break (which is always the place I lose most of my ability to really concentrate on something both purely auditory and non-verbal), they had a piece about Ellis Island which wove in spoken accounts of various immigrants who had gone through there. It was powerful, and I also enjoyed sketching the actors. And the hats.