Drawing in the round

Treasures from the attic putsch.  A robust pencil drawing of the duck casserole from our student days in the late seventies (old, huh?) at the Art Institute under the boot of Norman Baer, an illustrator in the Howard Pyle tradition.

You weren't just drawing when you took a Norman Baer drawing class.  You were drawing "in the round."  You were sculpting in 3-D with a pencil on the flat page.  Or else.  Not bad, huh?  We love the "thinking" expressed by the fainter lines cutting away everything that didn't look like a duck casserole before we pinned down the darker, telling lines that the learned hand sensed would express the in and out of the flow of space around the object. YAH!

Here's the little guy today, spared from the normal shattering process of being a ceramic object in a working kitchen.

A zillion or so martini glasses have gone the way of all breakables in our 24/7 kitchen, but the sweet little duck casserole -- a gift from JuJu perhaps 30 or more years ago -- survives to this day. Probably it's 'cause we use it not for serving food but for hiding the extra set of house keys. It just sits there looking pretty year after year.

Comments

[Teresa]

I can't even draw stick people, so your drawing looks wonderful!

[Sissy Willis]

LOL

[asher - Dreams Into Lightning]

I just cleaned out my parents' house last year. Found Mom's old photographs of her first apartment, circa nineteen fifty something (yeah, before I was born), including pictures of the bookshelves with books ... requisite exercise for all young adults, I guess! I was able to match a number of the books in the basement with their likenesses in the old pictures.

So I know just how you feel about that old duck casserole and its likeness.

I love Howard Pyle! If you visit my blog, check out my tribute to the late Trina Schart Hyman.