In the Visual Fringe room I had the rare pleasure of watching Toni Taylor working on one of her refined and luminous canvases. I sat at a round table across from her and began to sketch. I had just about finished drawing her when she placed her pallet on her portfolio and walked away to talk to some friends. While she was away I started drawing paintings on the walls and the insane number of fliers lying on the table. Several people started flipping through the portfolio and turned the pages over right onto the wet paints. Had I been paying attention I might have been able to stop them. When Toni returned she had to scrape off the paint with a pallet knife and wipe the pages clean with a rag. We had a good laugh about it when the damage was all cleaned up.
As I was finishing up my sketch Toni finally noticed that I was sketching. She was a bit shocked, she thought I was just writing notes. We started to talk and found that our lives had run near identical courses intersecting often. She lived in NYC at the same time I did and even was at the School of Visual Arts at about the same time as me. She lived in Washington Heights only blocks away from where I lived while in NYC. Then she moved to Orlando as I did and now she has a studio less than a mile from my studio. I seems crazy that we had not bumped into each other before. The Fringe continues to radiate its crazy unexpected magic.
Love your work – nice to meet another analog artist in a digital world 🙂 (although I cheat a bit and import my sketches into Photoshop). I really love this one – great figure drawing, her expression is great, the colours are lively… Do you paint directly in your sketchbook all in one sitting? Really great!
Thomas, You are ne of my favourite contributers to Urban Sketchers. You are unbelievably skilled and your body of work is hugely impressive – a pleasure to keep up with.