This was the painting that was chosen by Les Amis de la Grande Vigne for their collection. Unfortunately, I believe this is the only photo I have of it.

While in Dinan, Jen and I had no television, no internet and no phone to speak of, so we spent most evenings either reading or watching one of the four movies we had uploaded to her laptop. I would also take advantage of the fact that I had a still model to do some drawing, and occasionally some painting.

The piece above is stage one of a painting that is still not finished, but that I will get around to working on soon.

Thank you, Lawrence Weschler.

View from the Clocktower Coffeeshop that we frequented in Dinan. A quick hello to Mike, Angela and Justine!

The empty interior of Pub Saint Sauveur. The waitress and barman were out on the front stoop sharing a smoke.

Some of the people enjoying a late morning drink at Pub Saint Sauveur in Dinan.

One of my first sketches from France. This is our Parisian hotel room, right next to the Sorbonne.

I had the occasion to see Hirst’s exhibit End of an Era at the Gagosian, which they supplemented with some of Hirst’s works from their own stock. On display were four types of his work: butterfly paintings, pharmacy-related works, including the spot paintings, spin paintings and the new exhibit, which can only be described as bling.

The butterfly paintings I found to be his strongest works, since they are exquisite micro-horrorshows. They encapsulate most of what’s compelling about Hirst perfectly. Although the shark-in-a-vitrine entitled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living is probably going to end up as the work that he’s most known for (if For the Love of God doesn’t overtake it) I think the balance of beauty and revulsion is just right in these butterfly wing paintings.

The other stuff was much more hit-or-miss. The spin paintings are no more profound than the toy that inspired the idea, and Hirst himself has acknowledged that. The spot paintings were interesting in the effect they have on the eye. Namely, the eye cannot rest looking at one of the spot paintings. There is no center, there is no weight, and so you end up with a sensation of your own ocular saccades. But whether or not that was Hirst’s intent is unclear. I’ve never heard it mentioned about his work. The End of an Era display, up by itself in a couple of rooms, was either a heavy-handed elucidation of greed at the top levels of human society, or it was self-parody, since Hirst himself is the richest living artist on the planet.

Valentine’s Day weekend, I was in NYC. I did the usual pre-visit rundown of the local museums and galleries to see what was in town. Since art viewing time was limited, I picked a couple of shows in order of preference. Top of the list was a visit to the Neue Gallery which was showing a collection entitled “From Klimt to Klee”. While there were less than a dozen paintings from Klimt and Schiele together, there was a room full of original sketches from the both of them.

One of the things I find most interesting about the two of them was that they tried to find a place for their art on the dividing line between realism and abstraction. One of the major influences in art at this time was the influx of art prints from Japan (and basically any East Asian culture, though they were subsumed under the term “japonisme” during that go round.) One of the things that this led to was a strong and unswerving emphasis on line, and as a former comic book artist, this speaks to me in a powerful way.

Schiele’s piece pictured above on the left, “Female Nude seen from the Back, 1913″ had such wonderful and powerful exaggeration of the lines of the female leg. I needed to absorb it in a more intimate way than looking at it, so I pulled out my sketchbook and copied it there on the spot. Not only was it the lines of the legs that were so strong, but their contrast against the drunken, misshapen quadrangles that block in the areas behind her.

Other artists I discovered while there were Lyonel Feininger and a couple of head studies by Emil Noble, which I felt had great proportions and shapes. I’ll post more on them when I have done some of my own research.

The former governor’s house on Rue du Jerzual in Dinan.

Place des Merciers, Dinan. This was sketched on Christmas Eve. The lines for the bakeries came out the door and were at least a dozen people deep from open to close that day.

Sitting atop the ramparts from yesterday’s post was this great building. What a great set of wiggly angles to draw! This was lots of fun to sketch.

This is one of the ramparts at Mont Saint-Michel, about a 45 minute drive from where we stayed in France. Jen didn’t want to believe me about how people in castles used the bathroom, but there it was: the stained walls were direct evidence of medieval toilet custom.

One of the great things about being in Europe is the rich architecture that is everywhere. So this week, we’ll be taking a look at some of my sketchbook pages that show some of the great buildings that I got to see.

This is the Place de Beaumanoir, right in the center of Dinan. It kept raining on and off, though it was clear for about an hour while I did this sketch.

Ok, so technically this isn’t an experiment except for the fact that I’m using some shading external to the outlines of Jen’s face to soften and round the forms. Otherwise, this is just straight pencil work. I had to include it because Jen is such a good sport at letting me show all of my ugly experiments that use her. This is what she actually looks like.

Finally we have a piece that looks like Jen. This one was done very high key, with me doing modeling in aquarelle pencil over the top of dried washes and then accentuating with a brush pen.

Here’s another, experimenting with the blocky underlying washes and various colors of fine linework over the top of it. Poor Jen looks ancient here.

In this piece, I was experimenting with the angularity of the brushwork and its interaction with the underlying pencil lines.

My wife gets used as a model for many of my artistic experiments. I have to thank her, because often, I’m not looking for a flattering, or even and accurate likeness. I’m playing with styles and experimenting with effects and techniques. Anyway, this week, you get to see the results of some of those. Most of them are not flattering, but the most accurate ones I’ll post on Thursday and Friday. The one above is me experimenting with fluid linework.