August 11, 2009
Up against it. Went home for lunch and tried to get some traction on the art issue cover. Ruined a couple boards, but finally got a bit of traction on this one:

Needs a bit of whispy clouds nipping at Billy's shoulders and waist, and a New Mexico adobe at the bottom with a wooden cross. Oh, and a cedar infested ridge out back of the house, like in this study:

which is from a sketch I did of one of the old adobe houses west of Lincoln when we were there last April. I'm on the road all day tomorrow (going right back by this same adobe), and if I go by your house, sorry, I can't stop, but I'll honk.

Oh, and I'm trying to work with shapes and avoid lines. When I entered the University of Arizona Art Department in 1965, my first drawing teacher, Mr. Dennison, said, "You do good lines." I said, "Thankyou." Then he said, "I don't want to see another line from you for the rest of this semester." Ouch! I felt totally stripped of my security blanket (which was the point) and it forced me to think in terms of shapes and forms. Gee, I wonder what Robert Henri has to say about this?

"I think I am safe in saying, until you became an art student, you never saw a line in nature—you never took the outline into consideration. You saw forms and these forms had character and motion. . .don't become a victim of line."
—Robert Henri