The next day was a gully washer. Andrew and I arrived at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, saturated after fording the street in ankle deep water, and then waited in line with the other umbrellas to enter.
The museum easily held all of us soggy souls, and we soon forgot about the sloshy shoes when we saw the Irving Penn Centennial and Rei Kawakubo’s “Art of the In-Between” , my favorites. The opportunity to sketch didn’t arise til evening.
. . .on the Balcony Bar where Veronica Lawlor’s workshop “Puzzling Out the Picture” was meeting up. The JP Jofre Hard Tango Chamber Band was playing the most passionate music! Can you tell by the way my line changed? I could barely contain myself. I mean this was soul-bared tango music.
Next Morning the workshop met at Brookfield Palm Plaza/the Winter Garden.
Another glorious sketching spot because it opens onto the World Trade Center, 9/11 Memorial Pools and Oculus on one side, and the Hudson River on the other.
Ink and colored pencil in 9 X 12″ Canson mixed media sketchbook
Our exercise was to do lots of thumbnail sketches, composed in dimensional space, as a film director would do.
The Oculus is like a gigantic white raptor crouching at the base of the World Trade Center and inside it’s a transport hub. You really have to be there to even conceive of it.
Next to it is the 9/11 Memorial pools, and that’s where we went next to sketch.
. . .to sketch and ponder and pray for all those who lost lives and loved ones.
Veronica was circling around to all of us to give helpful comments. After struggling mightily with these BIG scenes, I was relieved with her instruction to “Just draw the heck out of it now!” So I did, surrounded by so many different languages I couldn’t even identify.
Then we entered the belly of the Oculus. . .
. . .a setting which made our thumbnail exercise suddenly so easy. Look anywhere for those shapes that enter and exit the picture boundary and capture the energy of that.
And yes! I even found a spot to enjoy a much needed latte while doing my lesson.
Here is the Oculus from the other angle, and that celestial form of the World Trade Center merging with the sky. And me, the little figure in the bottom left hand corner, at the end of a long and wondrous day, crossing with the light to find the subway stop.
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