Floral

“Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.” – Henry Miller

| ssemchuk

April 1, 2019

 

My drawing theme for March was plants and flowers. I had thought that this subject matter would be a good opportunity to use coloured media and I envisioned pretty little watercolours and coloured pencil drawings capturing delicate colour transitions. It was a busy month for me though, and not only were the drawings not turning out as I had hoped, I was frequently pressed for time.

So I switched to Sharpie and pigment pens and started playing with line thickness and quality of line. Sharpie is not a medium conducive to a slow or faltering line and I quickly chose to sacrifice accuracy as a result. This changed the experience of drawing considerably and I really enjoyed it. Instead of placing my lines carefully and erasing and correcting, I had to commit and when my lines were clearly wrong, I had to work with it to make the drawing work independently of the subject in front of me.

While drawing I spent more time looking at my subject than at the paper and I believe my accuracy improved over time. I’m pleased that these drawings have left me with a new approach/style that I can adopt when I want to do something different. I will come back to this and work on evolving it further down the road.

“The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you’re an artist.” – David Hockney

| ssemchuk

February 26, 2018

Oct 10, 2017
Oct 14, 2017
Oct 21, 2017
Nov 6, 2017
Nov 12, 2017
Nov 14, 2017
Nov 25, 2017
Dec 2, 2017
Dec 4, 2017
Dec 16, 2017
Dec 21, 2017
Dec 31, 2017

It’s been awhile since I posted sketchbook drawings, so here are my favourites from the end of last year. These are the drawings I do before my daily drawing as a warm up and they are often more experimental – and sometimes I end up with something I’m proud of and want to offer up to be seen.

“My art may be conceived during a hedonistic Bohemian love-in with the muse…

| ssemchuk

July 4, 2016

“My art may be conceived during a hedonistic Bohemian love-in with the muse, but it comes into the world, like any birth, with labour. Always.”
Vertical Tulip, Jul 2, 2016, Oil on Canvas, 24″ X 36″
Vertical Tulip, Jul 2, 2016, Oil on Canvas, 24″ X 36″
Finished! I feel like this painting has taken far longer than it should have. It’s been a busy June. July looks like it may include a little more freedom and so I have taken up a daily challenge this month. For each day in July, I will create one small ink drawing and play a little with watercolour. I have almost zero experience with watercolour, but I do have this great little travel set of paints to use. So far, I am finding it … challenging. Perhaps by the end of it I will have gained some sort of proficiency. … or not. Either way, it’s something new. I’m posting the images to Instagram daily and will add them to my weekly posts here as well.

July 1
July 2
July 3
July 4

“On the internet no one knows you’re a dog.” – Peter Steiner

| ssemchuk

June 6, 2016

Vertical Tulip WIP, Jun 4, 2016, Oil on Canvas, 24" X 36"
Vertical Tulip WIP, Jun 4, 2016, Oil on Canvas, 24″ X 36″

I’ve started a new piece – I’m seemingly not straying far from my typical subject matter with this painting of a flower against drapery, but I am going to try to keep this more painterly if I can. I need to push my comfort zone and see what I can do.

A note on quotations:

I love quotations. I have collected them since I was a kid. I love how they lead me to consider new and alien ideas and old, familiar ideas from new perspectives. Something that I hadn’t considered until today was how labelling a sentence or two as a ‘quotation’ changes how we understand it. It adds a certain ‘weightiness’ to the statement – like an implication that these few words are the distillation of a lifetime of experience and contemplation that we are fortunate enough to be graced with. And that is why today’s quote appealed to me so much. I discovered it in my email inbox after I subscribed to the site WhoSaidThat.com. As I began creating this post, and following the quote to it’s source, I discovered that it was from a cartoon in The Washington Post. As funny as the cartoon itself may be, I would never have latched onto this one had I first discovered it in its original context. It was good there, but far better as a stand alone statement about the nature of the internet, and by extension, about the world itself – advice that I choose to live by.