Latest news with #drawing
New York Times
2 hours ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
How Long Does It Take to Draw a Picture of Every Pub in London?
At 10:30 a.m. on a recent Wednesday in southeast London, the artist Lydia Wood stood next to a dumpster and set up her easel. She rubbed sunscreen on her neck and sized up her subject: The Lord Clyde, a pub in Southwark, just south of the river Thames, that was built in 1913. Then, for an hour, she drew flat out, her eyes flicking between the tall, tiled boozer and her page. 'Oh wow, that's so good!' said Emily Finch, 33, a passer-by on an early lunch break. 'Thank you,' Ms. Wood replied. 'I've got a long way to go.' That was true in more ways than one. Ms. Wood, 31, is on a mission to draw every pub in London. She has completed about 300, and has about 2,500 left, according to data on the city's pubs from CGA by NIQ, a research consultancy. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Beauty of Imperfect Children's Book Art
I can't draw hands. Or horses. If horses had hands instead of hooves and I had to draw that, I'd be in serious trouble. I'm more comfortable drawing fields or cats. But I had to draw a child's hands — big and up close — for the cover of a book. My first attempts looked like fleshy mittens. When I get stuck, I turn to other children's book artists for inspiration. Barbara McClintock is my go-to artist. I leafed through her books. Her drawings of hands in 'Adèle & Simon' were beautiful but too small. Next I turned to Kevin Henkes and his Caldecott Medal-winning 'Kitten's First Full Moon,' but his drawings of cat paws were no help at all. As I kept messing up — my wastebasket filling with crumpled paper — I felt like I was 6 years old again, trying to draw cows. I grew up on a farm. Cows roamed the fields outside our kitchen window. When I drew them, and their weird bony legs, frustration rose inside me — my cows didn't look right — then burst into a red-faced, paper-destroying tantrum. I would run away from home, up into the apple tree outside the back door. Now when I get frustrated, I head to museums. So I biked to MoMA and wandered the galleries, looking for big hands. I found Picasso's 'Two Nudes,' the women's hands captured in a few quick brushstrokes. Then I biked to the Whitney, where there was a Ruth Asawa exhibit with an ink study of hands. Her line was bold, effortless. How did she do that? Artists often have that reaction to others' art. We look for clues. This is also true for children learning to draw. On author visits to schools, I lead drawing classes. As students sketch the trees outside their classroom window, I look over their shoulders and offer encouragement. 'You call that a tree? Come on!' I don't say that. But I have the urge, especially when the students' teacher says, 'Emily, that's a perfect tree!' I don't think that's helpful when Emily is furiously scowling. I recognize that scowl. I say, 'Look close. Keep drawing.' There's always one child who sticks with it. She makes me think of Simone Biles. Biles was the same age as these grade schoolers when she started tumbling in a gym. Falling down, getting up. All that practice and grit. Now when we see her take flight into a ridiculously difficult twist, we ask how did she do that? Well, easy. That vault took decades. Biking home from the museums, I thought about training. Picasso started drawing as a young child (his father was an art teacher). He was an excellent draftsman before he became the Simone Biles of art. Asawa drew flowers and plants as a child, and studied with professional illustrators. Even when she turned to abstract sculpture, she drew every morning, as exercise. I went back to my bookshelf and leafed through more children's books. The artists I admire all share a certain looseness. Quentin Blake's scratchy ink lines bursting with motion in the Roald Dahl books he illustrated. Christian Robinson's colorful cut-paper circles in 'Another,' bouncing across the page. Sydney Smith's brushstrokes in 'Small in the City,' radiating light. Underneath their looseness is craft. Blake drew countless drafts before finding his fluid line. Robinson's bouncing art was arranged with serious deliberation. Smith's brushstrokes look like a moment's thought but — my goodness — the years it must have taken for him to achieve that. Carefree art takes great care. There was a paradox here. All the training and discipline built up, then came out on the paper in an almost unconscious act of letting go. A splotch of ink, a wayward wash of color. Imperfect but right. Finding beauty in the flaws, and acceptance. As if the artist knew when to walk away. By now there were more books in my lap than on my bookshelf. I saw the same pattern in all the children's book art I loved — in all art really — from Picasso to Sophie Blackall. Craft, imperfection, grace. Before I went back to my desk, I looked hard at one painting in 'Hello Lighthouse' by Blackall — an ocean of waves rendered in exquisite detail and technique, before it exploded into a wild storm of watercolor clouds and her art took flight. How did she do that? Maybe even she didn't know. I still had to draw the hands for my cover. Here's what I did. I stopped thinking of hands as hands. There were other things I could draw. Landscapes. So I painted the hands as if they were fields. Vertical fields, in burnt sienna and burnt umber. An hour later I was done. The hands weren't great, but I didn't rip them up. I wanted to keep some roughness. I love the whole messy process of making children's books. Starts, stops, odd hacks. I appreciate how technology improves books, but I'm also wary. About how it smooths rough edges. Makes art a little too neat. Too perfect, maybe. What gets lost if we don't hold onto the necessary frustration of the handmade? Thinking about the answer to this question makes me sad. When I'm feeling low, I go to the water. So I biked to the Hudson River, took the ferry across it and climbed to the cliffs of Weehawken. It's beautiful up here — Manhattan a mountain of glass and steel, held by the river, with clouds racing above. Sometimes, when I look at our city, I imagine forests. How it must have been. Oaks, deer, Lenape villages. Then fields, Dutch cattle, masts of ships. Centuries of stories and lives, pain and beauty, on this island. Standing at the edge of these cliffs, I close my eyes. Daydream backward, crossing oceans and epochs, to the walls of the Lascaux caves and the famous drawing of a prehistoric horse. Rough, charcoal. Perfectly imperfect. A drawing that looks like it's straight out of a good children's book. I think we know that artist. How she looked at the world, how much she desired to capture it. Her unpolished line, communicating with us across time, connecting us with our past, then forward to our children, to all of us who open a book and hold it in our hands and say yes.
The Guardian
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘It went black': Maggi Hambling describes life as artist after finger amputation
Maggi Hambling's morning routine involves making one drawing with her non-dominant left hand as soon as she gets up – a practice that has come in particularly useful lately, after having her little finger on her right hand amputated. 'On November the 17th, I fell down the stairs, and I had a glass in my hand. And it's cut through the hand and cut through the little finger,' she told the audience at Charleston festival in East Sussex, holding up her four-fingered hand. After the accident happened, she said she 'just sat at the bottom of the stairs with blood everywhere, because I thought Ipswich hospital would be full of drunks and everything on a Saturday night'. She waited until the following morning to go to hospital and, after an initial operation, she and the doctors decided to 'wait to see how it does'. 'But it just went black and began to stink,' the artist said. 'So I had to have it off.' Ever committed to her art – she gets up at 'about five in the summer and six in the winter' and works every day – Hambling was back in the studio as soon as she got back from hospital. She started drawing her right hand, which was in a 'great big bandage', with her left, 'and it felt fine'. Her therapist told her that hand injuries were 'most difficult for musicians and artists because a lot of their brains are in their hands', but that was 'news to me', Hambling said. 'Two of the funniest things' about the injury, she said, were when her plumber came into her studio in Suffolk, 'saw I was working with my left hand, and said: 'Is it going to be half-price then?' 'And then I sent a photograph [of her hand] on my telephone to my friend Carol and she immediately texted back and said: 'You'll have to go to Prince Harry's Invictus Games',' Hambling said. 'And that's the end of that.' The artist was speaking at the festival, held in the grounds of the former home of the Bloomsbury Group artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, alongside the artist Sarah Lucas. The pair have just announced a winter show at Sadie Coles HQ, for which they will each select works by the other. The art scene is 'a stinking, bitchy world', Hambling said, with Lucas adding that a lot of artists want to be in the 'success club', 'get rich' and 'get a yacht'. 'Like Tracey Emin,' Hambling joked.
The Guardian
12-05-2025
- General
- The Guardian
The one change that worked: I started sketching
I've always battled with phone use. I resent how much my sense of being alive in the world – feeling it, doing things, making stuff happen – is affected by my screen time. So a few years ago, I decided to do a sketch every day. I had always wanted to draw, but I was embarrassed about starting out because I was so bad at it. Then I bought a few black notebooks: a small one for my jacket pocket, and larger ones for my bedside and for the kitchen table. As no one would ever see my drawings, I decided I didn't need to care about what anyone thought. One day I grabbed one of the notebooks and a pencil and went out to the Cornish cliffs. I spent 10 minutes hastily drawing some cows and wild ponies. Standing on a cliff, pencil in hand, I felt like an idiot and an impostor, but I had started. It was a happy moment. I had never drawn a pony before but, to my delight, one quick, simple sketch seemed not bad for a beginner. Next, I drew our cat snoozing. Then our dog, Foxy, staking out a mouse in our kitchen. Beside each sketch, I wrote the date and little notes. Having the pencils and sketchbooks within easy reach – in my car or lying around the house – meant these small moments built up. Within weeks what might otherwise have been buried in photos on my mobile phone became a tender profile of my life unfolding on pages. My favourite drawings are often of people. Our daughter, Elizabeth, is usually furious when she realises I'm surreptitiously drawing her. Drawing strangers at airports, in cafes or on the tube is fun. I enjoy the element of danger. Will I get caught? Can I finish the drawing before that person moves on? It helps to pass the time on long journeys instead of spending it on screen. Lots of my sketches are dreadful, but the quickest ones – of people or animals – can have good results because drawing at speed makes my self-consciousness fall away. One unexpected benefit of doing a sketch a day is I spend less time doomscrolling on my phone. Like most people, I am anxious about the state of the world, but drawing slows things down, makes me pay attention to the moment. I lose myself in the act of drawing, and I'm using my hands, which is soothing in itself. Drawing also brings me back to the analogue world. It makes me happier and more patient. Art is known for being therapeutic and transformative, and I've definitely felt the benefits. In two years our daughter will be leaving home. In the future I'll be able to look at those drawing diaries and think, yes, we were together when I did those.
