Holiday newsletter, 2008

I have recently sent out a booklet to friends, family, and supporters for whom I had addresses. I thought that I would post the text of my writing, with the pictures embedded, in case anyone online was interested, but I didn't have their physical address. Thanks! (If you would like a copy, I might still have one I could send you!)

Dear supporters, friends, and family,

Thank you for taking the time to look through this booklet that I have put together to show some of the work that I’ve done in the last year and a half, since changing careers to engage my interests in developing artwork of things that I find beautiful and inspiring. It has taken some time to come to grips with a new career path (not helped by the ongoing recovery from being hit by a car in May 2007), but the range of possibilities that awaits me is very exciting. In these last 18 months, I have started to explore a few themes and I am looking forward to expanding those with more and larger works.

I have been inspired by beautiful things. Some of these are works of nature - fossils, skeletons, and living animals. Others display our potential to create things of great craftsmanship and beauty - cathedrals, castles, lamps. Drawing all these objects helps me to see them in a different way, and each of them generates currents of dreams, thoughts and reflections.

I find drawing fossils particularly thought provoking. One of the great challenges that we face is the rapid change in climate that we are causing. We are and will continue to cause the extinction of many organisms, with the potential to eliminate ourselves in the process. I am hopeful that we will be provoked into serious action and that our intellect will be enough to dodge this danger. But other great and fearsome animals that ruled the earth in the past went extinct – albeit not through their own efforts. Their skeletons are a good reminder to me that apparently powerful things can go extinct.

I’ve done three drawings of dinosaurs in the past year – shown on the cover and as you turn to the next page; the skeletons themselves are on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, but if you always wanted a dinosaur and didn’t have the space… originals of two of the drawings are still available, as well as reproduction greeting cards and posters (here).


I love the detail and craftsmanship in old carvings and stonework. Trevi Fountain in Rome is amazing in its entirety, but I found that spending time to look at the detail was very rewarding. Old stone castles – Edinburgh, in Scotland, and the tower in Vernazza, in Cinque Terre, Italy – were ones that I saw in the last year. They have so much detail to them, which I have tried to portray, both in the small drawings themselves, but also by looking closely at the gargoyles. I have many more images that I would like to draw from both places, but I would also love to go and spend some time drawing other castles. A friend gave me a great book on castles as viewed from the air last year for Christmas – some of those are on my list of places to visit. Places and objects of religious significance, whether old stone churches and cathedrals in Europe, or Shinto temples in Japan (I haven’t drawn any of those, yet), or Aztec, Mayan, or Incan relics, are often great examples of craftsmanship. I was impressed by the gargoyles towards the top of the tower of the cathedral in Bern, Switzerland (you have to peek out the archways of the narrow steps as you climb the bell tower). St. Jude’s church, which is near my sister’s apartment in London, intrigued me partly because the stonework on the steeple is slowly degrading.

I find it particularly poignant when beautiful buildings are falling down for lack of recent upkeep, given the amount of effort their creation took in the first place. On a lighter note, I stumbled across a statue of rabbit in a niche over the entryway of a friend’s house. The entryway looked like the entry to a temple for the worship of rabbit gods. I then discovered that actually, rabbits were worshipped by the Aztecs. They had 400 rabbit gods, for these are the gods of drunkenness; according to Aztec mythology the rabbits gathered together for divine parties. God #2 is the leader. (God #5 is the god of hangovers - he may be receiving much worship during the holidays.)

There is also great craftsmanship in lighthouses; they are an impressive combination of strength, utility, and elegance. Gibbs Hill Lighthouse, in Bermuda, is visible from almost the entire island (and its light is easily visible from the ocean all around). It’s a great example of a hugely tall lighthouse that was only possible after the transition from stone to cast iron. I enjoy watching the path of light sweeping out from a lighthouse, especially on a slightly humid night; I tried to capture some of the feeling of the beam of light approaching in my drawing. New England lighthouses are often squat, stone constructions. The one at Montauk at the eastern tip of Long Island is made of sandstone blocks, has a beautiful iron railing, and the multi-pane windows around the lamp were nicely challenging to draw.

I am also (obviously) intrigued by animals. Whether it is the beauty of the Golden Lion Tamarin (and they almost always give birth to twins, how cool is that?) – coupled with the sadness of its imminent extinction – there are only about 500 to 1000 left in the wild, whether it is trying to capture the dappled coloring and the sunlight reflecting off the backs of deer, or whether it is trying to get across in a two dimensional static drawing the different characters that different bird species have, there is so much potential for beauty. For anyone who doesn’t have a cat, I would highly encourage them to put up a bird feeder where they can see it from a window. Watching birds and seeing the different methods they use to approach the feeder, to feed, and how they watch for predators, is immensely satisfying and endlessly entertaining.

As I write this, I realize that one theme that I have been exploring with my work is the combination of strength with gracefulness. Whether that is displayed in a corner of a building, the curves of bone in a dinosaur, or the porcupine fish that I drew in the aquarium at my gym: he looks so happy, cute, friendly, and peaceful as he floats around, but he is an aggressive predator with a great set of spines – I find it intriguing. I think that we are at our best when we create things of beauty from otherwise dull and cold materials. One of the features of wrought iron that makes it so interesting is that there is great effort (indeed, part of the point is) to make the work look elegant and light. I think that the lamp I drew in Charleston, South Carolina has that quality; the shadows from the angle of the sun were just an added plus.


If you are interested in following my work as it progresses (or if you were interested in buying a piece, but it has already sold), I post new drawings online at: http://www.nicholasjudson.com. I have also recently started documenting some of my thoughts behind the artwork at: http://nicholasjudson.blogspot.com. For anyone who is interested, subscribing to the blog with a newsfeed aggregator will provide a convenient way to automatically see new work that I have finished.

Many thanks for supporting me in this endeavor -- whether that support has been moral, word of mouth, or financial, it is all greatly appreciated. Your financial support has been crucial to allow me to continue creating works that inspire me and, I hope, you. On the last pages of this booklet, there is a listing of the artwork that is still available for sale, along with the first set of reproductions that I have had made – greeting cards and posters. If you are interested in buying any of these items, you can either write back to me at my mailing address on the front of this letter, by email, call me on the phone, or place an order through my website: www.nicholasjudson.com/purchase.
If you like the work that you see here, but have something specific in mind that you don’t see represented, I also do commissioned work and would be happy to talk more.

Thank you for reading and have a great holiday season,

Nicholas

Ironwork: Charleston, South Carolina

Wrought iron has long interested me -- it is a nice combination of the apparent fragility of the object: its elegant curves, leaves, or flowers, with the strength of the iron. Many places in Europe have great wrought iron, but many fewer places in the US do.

Charleston, South Carolina has wonderful examples of wrought iron. Some of Charleston's wrought ironwork goes back to the Revolutionary war, but much has been made recently. The recent work has been done by one man, Philip Simmons, who has devoted much of his life to the creation of beautiful objects.

I was in Charleston in October 2007 and while walking down Church Street, saw this great lamp above an entrance way. I took several photographs and just recently was inspired to complete a larger drawing of the lamp (19" x 24").

Wrought iron, 2008.
Pencil on paper, 19" x 24".

Beautiful things: part I, Siratus beauii

In keeping with my efforts to write about drawings as I finish them, this drawing was just finished recently. I was in Bermuda earlier in the year and when visiting the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute (just on the left as you come into Hamilton from Middle Road), I spent some time in their Jack Lightborne shell collection. It is an amazing collection of shells from all over the world. There were many there that caught my eye. I was particularly intrigued by the fact that this one was almost pure white, with only a few pale tan streaks -- this made for an interesting challenge. The shell was labeled Siratus beauii and was found near Guadeloupe in the French West Indies. The species falls into the family by the name muricidae -- all members of this family are carnivores and they prey primarily on bivalves and marine snails. After I got home and finished the drawing, I did a little further research: their range extends from Florida down to Uruguay and their morphology and coloring can be quite varied. A very pale example of the species, such as this one, does not seem to be very common (at least if one uses the sample size of the 10-20 images available on the web as comparison... probably not a good mechanism for determining frequency). It seems that the species was renamed Chicoreus beauii; both names were given in 1857 by P. Fischer and Bernardi (at least according to this online source). The shell has also been featured on a Brazilian stamp (shown at this link).

Siratus beauii, 2008.
Pencil on paper, 7" x 5".

Artistic interests, part 2: Birds

The Blue Tit, Cyanistes caeruleus
(Blue Tit, 2007. Pencil on paper, 12" x 9".)

Part of the challenge that intrigues me with drawing birds is trying to catch them in a position that portrays them accurately and captures an essential part of their behavior -- whether that is a bird which is particularly curious, flighty, aggressive, or sure of itself. Artists since the development of high speed cameras have a distinct advantage over those before cameras in their ability to both work from still images taken of the birds when alive (as opposed to working from solely from memory or stuffed animals) and the ability, due to those still images, to see accurately how animals move. (Recall all those old paintings of horses and hounds in typical English hunting scenes where the horses' legs are all incorrectly splayed out because the mechanics of the movement of the legs of a running horse was not understood.)

The ubiquity of bird feeders in England provides ample opportunity to see the same birds day after day and to see the feeding behaviors of different birds. The small, flighty Blue Tit (the first image, above) spends more of its time looking around for predators than it does trying to dig out nuts from the feeder. When it does dig out nuts, it is fast and furious, its head hammering away madly before it is compelled to glance nervously over its shoulder for any approaching trouble. His constant readiness to spring back into flight was part of what I wanted to capture with the drawing.

The Great Tit, Parus major, is a larger bird and much less flighty. He can become accustomed to movement behind a window and feeds at a more leisurely pace. He also keeps a watchful eye out for predators like the magpie, who will sometimes feast on the unwary, but appears less concerned than the Blue Tit. I did two drawings of the Great Tit in 2007, a small sketch of a complete bird at the same feeder in London and then a larger, more detailed drawing of the head. The second drawing was a good experimentation with a 6B pencil, which was used for some of the black highlights in the small feathers of the head. It is funny - a 2B pencil looks pretty black when that is the only pencil that one has used on a page, but when you then add more shadows with the 6B pencil, the 2B pales in comparison. [sorry, couldn't resist]

A small sketch of the Great Tit
(Great tit #1, 2007. Pencil on paper, 5" x 7".)

A larger, detailed drawing of the Great Tit, Parus major
(Great tit, 2007. Pencil on paper, 12" x 9".)

One of the interesting things about drawing is trying to bring out an object's three dimensional nature and to try to lift the object off the paper towards the viewer. Birds are interesting to draw in this regard in that they have lots of curved surfaces - eyes, body, legs, talons - this gives you many areas to add three dimensionality and show that the areas are all illuminated from a constant direction (if, indeed, they are). One of my goals in my drawing is to portray three dimensionality accurately enough that the person looking at the drawing doesn't even notice. It seems to me that there are two approaches with this kind of thing -- either be obvious about not trying to show 3D, or do it well enough that people don't notice that you have done it correctly. The only time people will actively notice the 3D nature is if you have something that is out of place -- then the internal comparison-with-reality-checker will speak up. As said, I strive towards the latter approach. I have also enjoyed the challenge of reducing colored feathers down to shades of gray that are of (I hope) the correct tonal character. Perhaps at some point I will branch out into colored pencils for a drawing like this, but not yet.

More later; thanks for reading,

Nicholas
PS -- By the way, if you like either of the larger drawings and would like to send reprodutions of them as greeting cards, never fear, I liked them enough, too, to have them made into blank-inside greeting cards with interesting information on the back. You can buy them here (scroll down slightly). Your purchase will be supporting the artist, too, which would be great!

Artistic interests

There are many things in the world that I am interested in drawing. The overarching theme for me is that I like to draw beautiful things. I feel that you sharpen your sense of observation and have a better sense of the way things work by looking at drawings and by the act of drawing. In my drawing, I try to focus on distinct areas of interest, bringing to light portions of the scene that may otherwise be lost to the surrounding detail.

Of the things that I am interested in drawing (animals and plants, fossils, architecture, and people, just to name a few), many of them fall into themes that I would like to explore as my drawings progress. For example, one of the crises facing our generation is that of the human-induced extinction of other species (with the potential for our own extinction along the way). Our potential failure as caretakers of this planet is of utmost importance in my mind. I was inspired to start exploring the topic of extinction when I was in Bermuda earlier this year.

At the Bermuda Aquarium and Zoo, there are about four or five Golden Lion Tamarins (Leontopithecus rosalia) in a big outdoor exhibit that you can walk through. The animals are beautiful. They are also highly endangered. They are New World monkeys and we have degraded their natural habitat down to just a few spots in Brazil. There are about 500 to 1000 animals in the wild and another 500 or so in zoos around the world. (There is more info at this U. Wisconsin external website.)

I photographed several of the monkeys while I was at the aquarium and then drew one of them soon after I got back.

I thought that the look in his face was one of great sadness (yes, I am anthropomorphizing). The first position of the monkey that I drew was lit in a way that the eye was highly reflective and you couldn't see the iris and pupil. I was also inspired to work on something much larger, so I thought I would try a slightly different view and would draw all of the body that was visible to me in a separate photograph that I had taken. This was the first relatively large drawing that I was attempting (well, I consider 19" x 24" quite large, given the time that it takes); I was very happy with the way it turned out. So happy, in fact, that I even had posters made of the drawing (and as a shameless commercial plug, you can buy them on the "purchase" page of my website). The second drawing of the tamarin I called "Contemplating extinction?". It would be sad if we let them go extinct.

These images are also shown on my website: "Golden Lion Tamarin" and "Contemplating extinction?".