Recent round-up

A few sketches from the last few weeks.

People seeing out the last few days of winter, looking forward to the energy of spring.

Well I am at least.

The Audience is important.

In one of his comments, Peter got me thinking the other day. Who is more important in the contract of "ART" ? The Artist or the Viewer ?

Look at this...

Okay. This is, at the end of the day, just a load of dark marks on a lighter surface. They mean nothing in themselves. They are inert. They can be easily destroyed. They offer no life, no resistance, no fight.

Without your eyes and brain they are nothing. It is your skill as a sophisticated information processor that gives them any hope of validity at all. My camera has an amazingly good face recognition thingy, and can even pick out the happy people on advertising billboards, ( it sometimes even wants to read electric sockets and things as "faces" - like that Two Ronnie's optician sketch "No Sir, you're just reading the furniture now") but it just looks blank at me when I point the lens at my sketchbook. So, by my camera's estimation, I am not doing faces properly.

So who decides that the sketch above is a face ? More than that, a male face, wearing glasses and an open collared shirt ? ( which is what it's supposed to be by the way... just in case you are seeing a mongoose licking an oil drum or something !!! ) You do. The viewer. And as I have no control over how you see things, that makes my part in the interaction between you and it negligible. Yes ? No ?

What do you think ?

Guys will always make passes... x2

...at girls who wear glasses.

Folded specs.

I like it when people are absorbed by reading as they hold reasonably still, and, more importantly, keep their heads in roughly the same place long enough to draw them properly.

This girl was reading a very dense text book of unfathomableness to me. ( I once tried to read a book on tree theory - I liked the title - and, honestly, struggled to get beyond the first sentence ) So I could have done her in oils for all the signs she showed of moving.