art!

I've been drawing David and Peter from The Keeper of Lonely Spirits over and over again, but this doodle of David is by far my favorite so far because. look at him!! he's so soft!! he's gazing at Peter!! he adores him!!

I'd like to redo it bigger and paint it (this was done in my mini watercolor sketchbook)

me: okay I think I'm finally done drawing my old men
me, deciding to do linocut prints for the first time since high school art class: what if I did a print of them holding hands


(I had two prints to hang on the wall upstairs, one I bought and one from a friend, but the space really needs three prints to look right, so I was like, what if I just made one lololol. did a practice run with my kit yesterday just freehanding whatever nonsense I could think of, and then today I did this!)

RIGHT, I remember "I'd like to redo it bigger and paint it" from this post? Well,


(This is the portrait that made me go, "okay, I'm probably done drawing my old men, now that I've got a portrait of David I'm happy with," but then I did that linocut of them holding hands instead, but it still counts because technically it's not a drawing 😌)

Another linocut print! I might do a series based on my granddad, possibly with a single bigger piece where the prints would be the background and a portrait would be in the middle, but idk don't quote me on that.

Anyway this was his go-to drink when we'd go to lunch at a certain place. We'd sit for an hour with nothing but our drinks, and I'd write or draw and he'd read Writer's Digest, and when he put his empty glass on the corner of the table, the waitress knew he was ready to place his lunch order.

I am become a linocut print fiend

Here's one I did with a quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince, although which translation it's from is a mystery to me. The only translation I've read is Richard Howard's, but the line in his (as I realized only after I'd made the print and finally thought to check my copy of the book) is "anything essential is invisible to the eyes." I've always incorrectly remembered the quote as "what is essential is invisible to the eyes." Online you can find the quote as "what is essential is invisible to the eye," but I don't know what translation it's from. So I seem to have mashed translations together, or perhaps I simply misremembered Richard Howard's translation because I tend to do that.

This print is the most recent and my first one using ink that isn't black. (I finally caved and bought a bunch more supplies because it's obvious I'm just Into Linocut Printing now.)



It's based on this tapestry (silk embroidery on silk) called Penelope Unraveling Her Work at Night (1886) by Dora Wheeler Keith. Apparently, this tapestry is the only remaining example of an artistic technique patented by Candace Wheeler, the artist's mother; the other examples have long since disintegrated. I think that fact, as much as the image itself, really spoke to me and is the reason I wanted to recreate Dora Wheeler Keith's work.