Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Painting Plein Air in Egypt

(click on image to enlarge)
(click on image to enlarge)

Unfinished Obelisk, Aswan
Watercolour and crayon
©2008 Charlene Brown

This is a fairly realistic sketch I did during a University of Victoria travel study program a few years ago. I’ll let the comments of one of the bystanders (referred to as Roving Art Critic in the following Drama of Painting Plein Air) explain why I say it’s ‘fairly’ realistic.
RAC: How can you see the top of that thing from here?
Artist: I can’t – I climbed around it to where those people are standing up there to draw the broken point, which is the most interesting part.
RAC: That’s sure not the way I learned to draw.
Artist: I use a Cubist approach developed by Picasso – my sight of an object is the sum of many different views and my memory of it is not constructed from one angle.
Okay, I didn’t actually think of saying that until two weeks later back in Canada, when I had a chance to look up Cubism. What I said was more like:
Artist: I’m doing the best I can.