Color: part 1

It was a beautiful sunny winter day out by Montauk Point Lighthouse (no traffic on the way out there, and no crowds while there -- a huge bonus) and the gulls were skimming the waves and riding the wind currents that pushed up over the bluff on which the lighthouse rests. It was a little after noon, but even with the sun at its highest point, its low angle gave that distinctive quality of winter sunlight. The sky looked especially blue behind the white gulls and the sunlight was highly reflective off the feathers.

It seemed like the only way to make the gull stand out appropriately on the paper was to use color. It was my first foray into color, and an enjoyable one. The sky was darker blue above the gull and lighter down towards the horizon, which allowed me to experiment with combining some of the shades of blue in my pencil collection. It is always interesting how after such an exercise one sees things differently -- both other things in nature and other people's artwork. The "how would I do that?", or the "how did they do that?" question. The blue sky offset the gray, white, and black markings on the gull nicely and I didn't have to worry about colors in the main focus of the drawing.

Herring gull, 2008.
Graphite and colored pencil on paper, 5" x 7".

One of the things I enjoy about this kind of drawing is that I then get to find out interesting things about the subject that I was engaged by. Although I wasn't aware of it before, many of the gulls by the shore, even though they can look markedly different from one another, are actually the same species (see photos in link below). Herring gulls take four years to reach adult plumage and the plumage on this bird indicates that it is three years old. It still has some juvenile markings under its throat (the darker feathers), but its body is mostly white feathers now. The intermittent dark feathers on its throat made it much more interesting to draw.

For anyone interested in further reading, Cornell's ornithology department has useful information out on the web; there is an interesting page on birds molting with a useful set of images on herring gull molting at the bottom of this page.

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

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!