A Little Sketchy

My husband and I visited Old San Jan (Puerto Rico) at the end of October this year in an act of denial of the end of summer. We criscrossed the blue brick roads on foot in a color-induced daze, for San Juan is an archi-sketcher's dream city. I get a sense that the building owners of San Juan have collectively agreed that no two buildings in the town can be painted quite the same color, but all of the colors should be plausible options for fruit-flavored cereal pieces. The overall effect is simultaneously ancient, yet tropical. In the sketch, these buildings could belong to a street in a small town in Spain or Italy, but the colored version places them in Puerto Rico, at least for me. Buildings reveal so much about a community. Given the history of hurricanes, the choice of bright colors for nearly everything in Puerto Rico, so vulnerable to wear and weather, strikes me as optimistic.  Old San Juan has preserved its historic layout well. Given the narrowness and brick-ness of the st

I've tracked over 14 years my visual obsession with radially-oriented life forms. So when I sought new painting subjects, the cactus astrophytum, which resembles a green, bedazzled, peeled-but-still-contiguous orange, of course caught my eye. It looks as though an overdressed canteloupe attempted to transform into a star, but quit halfway. When it grows a flower, it appears to be wearing a fancy hat. Down the side of each of its orange slices is a neat row of buttons, which if unbuttoned, would draw back the curtain into another universe. I drew on three different photos for this acrylic wash, which you should have guessed. The astrophytum is charismatic enough that it does not want to sit in close proximity to others of its kind outside of my paintings.

There are really two reasons as to why the rainbow eucalyptus could look the way it does: The bark simply can't decide what color to be. The fruit of the tree is Skittles, which inevitably melt in the sun and rain. Whichever it is, I felt like attempting to pay homage to Jacob Magraw-Mickelson .  Media: acrylic wash on watercolor paper

A little over a year ago, two friends of mine purchased a house encircled by sumptuous Japanese landscaping. Cloud-pruned evergreens and spiritually-positioned rocks abounded. So when my friends decided they wanted a paved courtyard and a privacy fence in one portion of the yard, an exquisite specimen of a Japanese maple had to move. We're talking a lacy, 9-foot-wide cascading affair with, as it turned out, a surprisingly robust root system. I was recruited to assist with the transplant on the understanding that I would receive the tree after it had been removed. The reader is spared the expense of watching the moved tree through winter, March, and (painfully) April with no sign of leafing. I eventually admitted failure, though the maple retained an air of majesty with its tangled grey arms, refusing as they did to issue buds. By late April, I had despaired of running outside after work to stare at the branches and will them to bud, so I decided to represent them in paintings inste

 A sketch of Victoria Street, an adorably elbow-shaped thoroughfare in Edinburgh. I enjoy when streets make me feel like I'm indoors. I feel like this one could swallow me permanently. There's always a bit of falsehood in sketching architecture in a locale one hasn't actually visited, so I'll have to remedy that someday and walk it.