I was teaching students how to do contour drawings and in the Zoom classroom everyone showed their pups to fellow classmates. I explained that I always share aspects of my life with sketches. So I took my iPad classroom into the living room and started to sketch Sprout who was napping on the couch. I was afraid he might be hard to draw since he isn’t used to my being in the living room during class, but her was a trooper and gave me plenty of time to sketch him.

The main point of the sketch was that each line that went on the page was drawn while I stared at the subject. I never watched my hand as it put lines on the page. This is critical to allow the lines to meander and remain open ended. The one temptation to look at the page is to close off a shape. A contour drawing will often not have closed off shapes.

Since my student work a little slower than i do, I went ahead and added some color.

I was born in the 239 Larch Avenue, Dumont New Jersey master bedroom. I lived here for the first ten years of my life. The basement is where visiting family would gather on holidays. A folding table would be set up along with folding lawn chairs to allow seating for everyone. The thing I remember most vividly were three paint by number clown paintings that I believe were done by my oldest brother. I suspect I may have done a paint by numbers painting in my youth as well. I remember the small of the oil paints that came in tiny little plastic cups. I remember stirring the paint with a tooth pick. I however cant recall what I might have painted. It certainly never stood framed in the house. Chances are I painted outside the lines or mixed up the numbers.

I remember seeing a picture of myself as a baby getting a bath in the basement sink. I don’t know where that photo went. I remember being really impressed with a biology project of my older brother. He dissected a frog and glued all the bones together to make it look like the skeleton was jumping. He also once did a detailed drawing of a knight on a horse covered in armor which impressed me.

In the back half of the main room of the basement I arranged the furniture and hung a large black sheet to create the bridge of the star ship enterprise. Friends came over and I sat in the cushioned chair as the captain of the enterprise while friends sat at folding card tables and acted as the crew working the bridge controls. Cutouts of Klingon star ships would be moved o the black sheet as we were under attack.

My mom was great about bringing the family together. After she was gone, the families drifted apart. Photos exist of extended family seated around the basement.  I remember sitting on the couch and being told by my grandmother that a doctor had left one of his surgical tools inside her when he sewed her up. She was prone to telling tall tales. In one Christmas photo, I can spot a Major Mason astronaut that I had been given. He had a helmet with a sliding visor. I could bend his arms and legs but they tended to spring back until I broke the inner wire armatures. I used to suspend him in the duct work, so he could explore the home’s inner passages. The string broke and he fell down an air shaft. He might still be there today.

This past Sunday Crealde Urban Sketching class, we did thumbnails.I always like to do quick sketches and in this case since I I forgot my art bag at home, I didn’t push these to watercolors. Instead I finished the sketches digitally back in the studio. This isn’t my usual working method but it gives passable results. Since the sketches were just pencil on paper, the line work was not as dark as if I had used a pen.

My three thumbnail sketches all featured the tent behind Crealde which we get quite a bit of use out of. Temperatures heat up by noon so the students are told to always remain in the shade and the tent helps keep them shaded.

For some reason many students find perspective challenging, so we return to that base premise over and over. A sketch is usually blocked in in the first five minutes and the rest of the time is spent adding small intricate detail. By sketching smaller, my students get used to finishing sketches faster. Eventually they may feel the rush of trying to capture fleeting moments in a quick and spontaneous sketch. No sketch is perfect, so I try and get them to abandon any sense of preciousness for their beloved sketch. It is always a pleasant surprise to see all their work lined up at the end of class.

Ca’ d’ Zan was the palatial home of John Ringling in Sarasota Florida. Created as a love letter to his wife Mabel, the mansion was designed in the Venetian Gothic style of the palazzos that ring the Venice canals. Ca’ d’Zan means, “House of John”, in the dialect of their beloved Venice.

The Ringlings had been traveling throughout Europe for nearly 25 years, acquiring circus acts and art. They both greatly admired the architectural style of Venice’s Ducal Palace, Ca’ d’Oro and the Grunwald Hotel. When they decided to build a home in Sarasota, Florida, where they had been winter residents for a number of years, The Ringlings took these palazzi as their inspiration – and Sarasota Bay as their Grand Canal.

Pam, her house guest and I traveled to Sarasota over the July 4th weekend and the one thing I definitely wanted to do was revisit the Ringling Museum. Before exploring the museums we first waled to Ca’ d’ Zan. I had sketched Ca’ d’ Zan before but decided to sketch it again from a different angle while they explored inside. When I opened my art bag, I was shocked to discover I had left my case of pencils and brushed back at the bed and breakfast. I went through every pocked and crevice of the bag and found one tiny stub of a colored pencil. I sharpened it by plucking away wood around the remaining “lead” and got to work. There was just enough of the stump left to complete the sketch but I didn’t have a brush to paint with, so I lived with the line work and painted it later back in the studio.

When John Ringling died in December of 1936 he bequeathed his estate to the people of Florida, but legal wrangling with his creditors went on for a decade until the property finally passed unencumbered to the state. During this time Ca’ d’Zan remained closed. Finally, in 1946 it was reopened to the public.

But the care that older buildings require was neglected due to a lack of funds, and by the late 90’s, Ca’ d’Zan was in such a state of disrepair it was used as the location for Miss Havisham’s decrepit mansion in the 1996 Hollywood remake of Charles Dickens’ classic Great Expectations. Later in 1996 renovations began and today it is back to its former glory.

I was seated in a spot where people left the mansion after their tours inside. At first I pulled my mask up each time a group passed but then I just left the mask in place so I didn’t have to focus on pulling it on and off.