Tel Aviv Corner
It was fun to take the bus down to Tel Aviv for the day with friends. We visited three small museums each honoring an Israeli founder, Ben Gurion, the first prime minister, Chaim Bialik, the poet, and Reuven Rubin, the artist. With so much to see I was lucky to get in this quick sketch of the corner of Ben Yehuda and Shalom Aleichem Streets.
This is pencil, pen and watercolor sketch on multimedia paper.
Hooray for Teachers of Pi!
March 14 is a wonderful day for teachers due to a delightful coincidence between the way March 14 is written and the approximate value of Pi, a mathematical constant.
Irrational numbers can be mysterious and teaching students to understand and use Pi requires patience, multiple approaches, and rich activities. It turns out that an approximation of Pi and March 14 can both be written as 3.14. Teachers made a big deal out of Pi Day because understanding that the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter is about 3.14 is elusive. All the thinking, ritual, and fun of the annual Pi Day celebration helps make Pi a friendly idea to children.
This is my first Pi Day as a retired educator and I am thinking about the many wonderful teachers who made this day so special for their students. Even more worthy of celebration than Pi, is the dedication of teachers to teaching ideas like Pi. Hooray for teachers and the efforts they go to as individuals and teams to make the seemingly incomprehensible ‘as easy as pie’ for their students! Have fun today!
This sketch is done completely in Procreate, an app for digital tablets.
Sketch of a Henry Moore Statue
The Hebrew University has a huge Henry Moore bronze statue, “Draped Seated Woman,” on its lawn. It is angular, somewhat abstract and totally commanding. Besides being beautiful, it never gets up and walks away in the middle of a sketch.
I sketched this stature several times lately as part of the work I am doing on conveying the look of stone. I am beginning to catch on to showing the sheen of the bronze and of the stone the figure is mounted on.
This is a pen and watercolor sketch on multimedia paper.
At the Next Table
We went out to lunch and I was happy that our table provided such a good view of a stone wall since I am still working on capturing the look of stone. It was a bonus that I also had a great view of the two women at the next table. I like to tell a story with my sketches and the one talking while the other checks her phone suggests a narrative. I wondered why the one of the right spent so much time on her phone, it seemed kind of rude. But then I spent just as much time sketching during lunch so maybe I was the rude one.
This sketch started off as an ink and watercolor sketch. When I got home I thought the mortar on the stone wall was too carefully drawn and that it distracted from the two women. This evening I used Procreate, an app on my iPad, to make several versions of this sketch to compare and think about. Most of the changes were about making the mortar less dark and defined. I eventually settled in on this sketch because the blurry stone is interesting but not dominating.
Outside Yad Vashem
Visiting Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial for the victims of the Holocaust, left me feeling pensive, sad and worried. How could this happen, could it happen again? Other visitors seem to feel this way too, you can see it in their body language as they sit outside the entrance waiting for their rides. Their heads are down and they seem to be looking inward to their own thoughts.
You have to worry when the news is full of politicians using bigotry as an election tool. We are seeing blatant manipulation. The blaming of victims, encouragement of physical and psychological abuse of minorities, proposals for ethnic expulsion, pledges to change laws that protect rights and citizenship, and use of nationalism to justify it all brought Hitler into power. It has all been done before and the playbook for it is in our museums.
This is a pencil, pen and watercolor sketch.
I was just finishing up when a young woman jaunted down the sidewalk into my sketch and made all the difference. I love the tilt of her hip and head and the way it turns my landscape into a story.
Stone is still my focus and I have been practicing away at depicting it, since it is part of nearly every Jerusalem view. In the distance the village of Kfar Sha’ul sits off on the green hills above the Jerusalem Forest. Although it is late the faces of its stone buildings catch and reflect light but the details of its buildings are not visible. To suggest the stone buildings, I used the side of my round paintbrush to apply single strokes of paint. The stone wall and sidewalk have shifting blocks of color and a strong edge. Here I painted with a larger flatter brush but still applied wet strokes of paint to suggest large stones.
This is a marker and watercolor sketch. Later back at the apartment I added some pencil and gel pen marks to make more definition and texture.
The morning fog was still lifting and people were out and about at the Hebrew University. From time to time I sketch this view. I love the way the four triangles of this landscape, sky, lawn, deciduous trees, and evergreen trees, come together as I look down the pathway. Today there was just a hint of green in the trees on the right so soon this view will be very different.
This is an ink pen and watercolor sketch on multimedia paper. I added a few white lines in Procreate.
Deliberate Sketching 