Understanding Years of Sketching

The sketch is the life of the artist.

The artwork depends on the life of the audience.

Pen and ink, 3" x 5.5".

The Rotundity of the Earth

Modeled on a figure in an old textbook, “A Textbook on Coast and Lake Navigation”, International Correspondence Schools, International Textbook Company, Scranton, PA. 1902.

Another study in aboutness

Watercolor, watercolor pencil, 8.5" x 5.5".

Shrimp and Grits at the City Grocery

… followed by coffee and poetry on the balcony of Square Books, Courthouse Square, Oxford, Mississippi.


I had to post a picture of this chair.

pen and ink, 3 " x 5.5".

Yet more bones

blue fly comes near makes a hand cleaning motion makes a prayer enormous spider rope of spider silk sails upriver all this coming and going


Walking out I passed this sycamore.


My sketch spot.

Understanding years of sketching, Part 3 of 3

For me now, the drawing should rarely be “about” anything.

Pen and ink, 3 " x 5.5".

Part 1 of 3.
Part 2 of 3.

Understanding years of sketching, Part 2 of 3

Sketched sometime around 1983, on a trail next to a railroad, somewhere along the Platte River south of Omaha, this landscape is one of the first drawings I ever made en plein air.

The sketch has many obvious faults, but all the pieces were already, unknowingly, in place: river, hiking, nature.

Of the hundreds if not thousands of walks and hikes I've taken, I've forgotten almost all of them, but not those I've sketched.

Part 1 of 3.
Part 3 of 3.


Pencil, 14” x 11”.