Dan’s Squeezebox

My son Dan plays Irish accordion. Which is funny, because Jeanette and I aren’t Irish, and we’re not musicians either.

Dan figured out how to play the squeezebox on his own, starting when we gave him a toy accordion at age four. He played it and played it until it broke. He listened over and over to a CD called “The Big Squeeze” while reading Hardy Boys books.

So we did what every sensible parent should do…we kept him up late in pubs.

At age seven he got to meet some Irish squeezebox heroes—Father Charlie Coen, Billy McComiskey, and John Whelan. They became musical mentors and set him on the right path. He bought a real accordion with his lawn mowing money. I did this life portrait of him when he was 11. Since then he won the North American Irish accordion championship six times.

Now he’s twice that age, 22 years old. Yesterday he graduated from Harvard College with a concentration in music.

The commencement ceremony was full of pomp and pageantry. It was funny to see all the alumni, with their bow ties and panama hats.

What’s next for Dan? Well, he collects accordion jokes. One of his favorites is: “What’s the definition of an optimist?” “An accordion player with a business card.”

This summer he will travel throughout Europe as a writer-reporter for the Let’s Go travel guide book company. He did this the previous two summers in Thailand and Greece.

For the remainder of 2009-2010 he’ll be on a fellowship in Ireland, where he’ll learn more about the music tradition from the legendary players there. He is grateful to the Shaw and Payne Foundations for providing the fellowship opportunities.

Within the last month he has played for the president of Ireland and for the passersby on the sidewalks of Cambridge (for which he needed a busker’s license.) Congratulations, Dan, and may you always bring the gift of music to confirm the joys and to lighten the sorrows of all sorts of people.
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Dan's new travel blog "Have Accordion Will Travel" link.
Dan's website: dangurney.net.
Hear him playing at his MySpace music page.
His band is called "The Hay Brigade," and they were interviewed on PRI's The World.
Listen to the Hay Brigade at their MySpace page.
Read his amazing travel blog posts about the Monk from Sukhothai. and The Hotel of the One-Eyed Cats

Lawrence Summers

Lawrence Summers is the former president of Harvard University and Secretary of the Treasury under President Clinton. He is currently the Director of the National Economic Council for President Obama.


I sketched him yesterday in his home in Brookline, Massachusetts. If you’re wondering why I’m here in Massachusetts, stay tuned until tomorrow…I’ll explain.

This is a tiny Woodnotes pocket sketchbook, only 3.5 x 4.5 inches, with a Derwent Inktense watercolor pencil and a fountain pen, softened up with a water brush.
Above, photo by Kerry Anne Bradford
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Wiki on Summers, link.

Ancient Pixel Knowledge

Take a photo of a face and break down to about 30 pixels across, and you’ve got a low-res deconstruction in the manner of Chuck Close.


It seems like a very modern notion until you see how the Romans did the same thing a couple thousand years ago.

The mosaic artists in Tunisia created these faces according to the same kind of reductive thinking. They were mostly itinerant artists, carrying a huge batch of tile colors.

They would cover a whole floor with scenes of mermaids and animals and gods, working pixel by pixel.

Catcher in the Rye Cover

The reclusive author J.D. Salinger is in the news today. He's suing to block the publication of an unauthorized sequel to his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye.

Many of us remember the novel from its plain red cover (right). But its first paperback edition went through 27 printings with a cover by James Avati. Salinger was against showing Holden Caulfield on the cover of the book.

After some tense meetings, Avati won over the editors, arguing:

"Mr. Salinger felt that since he had not described Holden in physical detail his face sould not appear on the cover. We always had that problem. It is, in fact, quite frequently the core of our cover thinking, to the extent that it is the resolution of personality as expressed by some graphic device that makes up the cover. We try to find a way of conveying the mood of the book rather than describing some particular scene. Within reasonable limits it has proved true that physical characteristics are of much less importance than reactions expressed."

Which cover do you prefer? Please vote in the poll. (Added later: The plain red cover won 87 percent of the voting with 178 votes, compared with 25 votes for the Avati cover.)

More about the Salinger lawsuit, link.
Quote from "The Paperback Art of James Avati" by Piet Schreuders, link.

The Düsseldorf School

The Düsseldorf School of painting had a big influence on 19th century landscape painting from the 1830s through the 1860s.

The school was notable for its dramatically lit historical subjects, often featuring scenes like shipwrecks, noble peasants, or epic mountainscapes.

The artists associated with the school include Wilhelm von Schadow, Karl Friedrich Lessing, the brothers Andreas and Oswald Achenbach, and Hans Fredrik Gude. Johann Wilhelm Schirmer is shown above. Some of them had experience painting theatrical backdrops, and they took some of those sensibilities into their easel paintings. Some of those pictorial features include:

Realistic and detailed treatment of form.
Strongest accents and focal point in middle ground.
Dark framing masses at the sides of the compositions.
Stormy skies and dramatic lighting.
Road or trail leading into the picture.
Filmy or atmospheric distances.
Literary references in genre scenes.

Americans who studied there included George Caleb Bingham, Eastman Johnson, Worthington Whittredge, William Stanley Haseltine, James McDougal Hart, and William Morris Hunt, and Emanuel Leutze, who painted "Washington Crossing the Delaware" in Germany using American Dusseldorf students as models.

Although he wasn’t formally enrolled at the academy, Albert Bierstadt worked and studied among the community of artists, and became probably the best exponent of the style. The Russian painter Ivan Shishkin also spent time there soaking up the landscape vocabulary.

Above: Oswald Achenbach, "The Bay of Naples."

The goal of the Dusseldorf artists was to infuse the landscape with “stimmung” (mood). Their romantic sensibilities were tied to “Volkskarakter” or national character. According to Henk Van Os,

“The idea is that the soul of a people is expressed through its countryside, its landscape; painters make this soul visible. This was to become the cornerstone of realistic landscape in the second half of the nineteenth century.”

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Quote from Russian Landscape, National Gallery exhibition, link.

Dead Tech: Zipatone

Zipatone is an obsolete graphic design material that would let you place a halftone dot screen across an area of a black and white illustration. Also marketed as Letratone, it came a thin plastic film with a slight adhesive over a backing sheet.


The dot pattern came in a variety of gray-tone percentages and in different sizes of dots, measured as lines per inch. The one shown here was a very sophisticated gradated tone.

The way you used it was to place it over your drawing on a light table, cut out the shape with a very sharp knife, carefully lift it, and place it over the drawing. For a very complicated shape, you could place a larger piece over the drawing and cut away what you didn't want.

There were a lot of pitfalls to those steps: cutting through the drawing, getting the stuff to fold up on itself, getting a speck of junk behind it, where it attracted a noticeable shadow. My memories of the stuff aren't that happy and glowing.

Previous Dead Tech post on waxers.

Spiderwick Meets Dinotopia

Tony Diterlizzi asked a bunch of his art friends to do drawings set in the Spiderwick cosmos. The drawings will appear in the back of an upcoming omnibus edition of Spiderwick stories.

I drew Hogsqueal riding Bix.


Here’s a movie of the work in progress, drawn with a Niji water brush filled with Higgins Eternal ink.


I gave the original to Tony and he reciprocated with this nifty drawing of Will Denison meeting a befeathered Bix. I love it!

Read how he developed his drawing on his blog, link.

Blog Hardware

Everyone's saying how the Internet is going more and more to mobile platforms. So I’m just curious: what sort of tech do you use to view this blog? Please check all the boxes that apply in the poll at left.
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Poll results added later:
Desktop computer: 232
Laptop: 195
iPhone: 24
Other mobile device: 9
At work: 102
At home: 249
Art studio: 117

Flying from the Nest

Remember the four robins that just hatched from their eggs on May 15? Link to that post.

In exactly two weeks, they grew up, opened their eyes, and fledged. Both parents helped with the feeding, something that doesn’t always happen in robins.
This morning all four flew successfully from their nest platform into the big dark woods. The parents gave them chirps of concerned attention after their first unsteady flights.

Pyle on Light and Shadow

Today we continue looking at Koerner's notes from Howard Pyle.



LIGHT

All things in sunlight are lighter than white in shadow. (See GurneyJourney post on this subject, link.)

A picture is more articulate where the light is concentrated on certain part rather than on all of it.

In a diffuse light everything is soft and close in tone.

Treat lamplight similar to sunlight, only shadows are denser.


SHADOW

Keep your shadows the same strength.

If you face strong sunlight in a picture your color is in your shadows.

In painting anything, don’t get different qualities in your shadow.

After picture is right in tone, finish up by studying edges and keep your shadows out of the light.

If two or more figures are together you can bind them together by running a shadow of same strength from one to the other.
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Images from the Atheneum, link.