Close Up and Personal - Day 1

Christmas-time Reflection  

Fifty Years of Reflecting Christmas    

- what has this ornament looked out on?    

One of our holiday traditions is using old family decorations, like Grandma's silver and blue glass ornaments, which we have been hanging on the Christmas tree for more than fifty years. Although the glass is intact, the mirrored coating inside the bubbles is starting to break down and get cloudy, in the way old mirrors do. To my mind, this patina of age makes the ornaments lovelier to look at.

Christmas and New Year's is a time for personal reflection, and as I'm photographing this ornament, I am wondering what other Christmas scenes has this bubble reflected over the years?

Happy New Year 2014!

Apples 6

Apples 6

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Graphite on paper, 6.5" x 10"
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The surface of the apple has dappled color markings, as well as tonal gradations from the apple's spherical shape. It also has highlights and shadows from lighting, and more lights and darks from reflections.

Graphite leaves a grey mark on paper, and the softer the grade of graphite, the darker grey the mark is. The trick to drawing with graphite is to use different grades of graphite in order to achieve a complete tonal range that can represent all the lights and darks needed in the drawing.
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Apples 5

Apples 5

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Graphite on paper, 6.5" x 10"

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You don't think of still life arrangements as having movement, and you don't think of apples sitting on plates as giving gestures, but they do. This is a gesture drawing of an apple, selected out of a sheetful of apple gestures.

So what gesture does an apple have? An expression of weight, of sitting balanced on a base point, of mass, of a spherical form, and overall an expression of how the fruit grew from the core out to the surface. That is the gesture of an apple.

Apples 4

Apples 4

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Graphite on paper, 6.5" x 10"
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This somewhat lopsided apple shows highlights from two windows and reflections from around the room and also reflections from the shiny plate it is sitting on. The shiny plate acts as a mirror, too, reflecting the apple back to itself. The only true shadow areas are underneath the apple where it touches the plate, and at the boundaries of the spherical form.
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Apples 2

Apples 2
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Graphite on paper, 6.5" x 10"

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The spherical form of an apple displays beautiful gradations of highlights and shadows. The apple's peel is shiny and reflects its surroundings, so the highlights and shadows are changed.

Drawing a spherical form in graphite could become a mechanical job, but with the irregular form of the fruit and the reflections from the surroundings, observing and recording the apple becomes a lot more interesting.

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