Russell Black - Sketches

"Outback Shack"

Getting back to work is always tough at the beginning of the year, especially since I had to take a part time job due to low class enrollments. I usually shut the studio down during the holidays anyway, and getting started up again generally takes me a few weeks. However, since I have a watercolor demonstration coming up on January 14th, at the Heritage Days Festival here in St. George, I needed to get my act together and get back to work a bit sooner than usual.

This small sketch (4" x 6") was done at home while sitting in front of my fireplace. It's a "remembered" scene from over in Mt. Carmel, UT, and is from my excursions out that way last fall. I either sketch on location or from memory, choosing to work this way rather than from photographs (and tracing from a photo is definitely out!).

I often get asked this question during a demo ("Do you work from photos?"), and it's becoming a sad state of affairs when artists can no longer draw for themselves, but must resort to tracing from a photo because they lack any real drawing skills. The general public always assumes that art is somehow made this way (take photo, trace photo, put paint in between the lines and copy photo - yuck!), and based on what I see these days, I can't fault them for their assumptions. I can certainly spot the "traced" from a photo painting a mile away and as Henry Fukuhara always said, "If you can't draw, then you can't paint." I have to agree.

In any case, my work is always original and is done by hand without the aid of the camera. Leave photography for the photographers, and let's make real art with our own hands. I now have to enlarge this small sketch up to a full sheet of watercolor paper (22" x 30"), and this will be done by simply drawing it larger, directly on the paper. No projectors, no tracing, and no grids. Just good old fashioned drawing skills and most importantly, no erasers! They damage the paper's surface, so I never use an eraser on any of my work.

If you are going to be in the St. George area on Saturday, January 14th, then I invite you to attend the demonstration (it's free), at the Arts and Leisure Building, 82 South Main Street here in town. I'll have three hours in which to complete this full sheet painting and I'm excited to be doing this one "live" in front of an audience.