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Here’s a couple more pictures, must have a guilty conscience or someting.

This is a self portrait that I’m going to be working on for Martha Erlebacher’s History of Painting Techniques class. I spent Tuesday trying to get a good drawing done; knowing full well that attempting to please Martha is sort of like giving Heracles bad news. At least she is too petite to physically crush me.

Yeah, I know that I still need to get better at portraits. I’ve centered the center-line of the face which makes my left cheek seem to pull forward too much and I’ve frontalized the distal end of the nose… back to the drawing board (so to speak). Guess I’ll rework that this weekend and come up with a real composition for the figure.

We also started painting with the egg tempera today. For a long time I tried to paint with it. Then it sort of dawned on me that it is really more of a drawing medium. You need to build up tones with lots of short cross-hatching strokes. Once I figured that out, the paint started to make friends with me. Should be better next time that I give it a try. This is really more of a stab at figuring out the medium more than anything.

Tomorrow on to work on my ecorche….

– Jeremy

Julie tells me I have been derelict in my duty to post pictures. Sorry about that…

Here is a figure drawing that I did in preparation for an egg-tempera painting. This was a full-day pose on the first day of classes.

If 15 credits was not enough, I have opted to tack on a continuing ed painting class. It’s taught by Alyssa Monks, an NYAA alum. As she has gone through the academy, it is a good way to get an alternate take on what is taught by the painting faculty at the academy. I understand that her class has become the most popular continuing education class at NYAA and fills every time it is offered.

Here we’ve done a wipe-out. Basically just a mix of Red Oxide and Blue Black to make a neutral brown. The lights are wiped out with a clean rag and darks are added with additional mixed paint. The idea is to get an image that seems to be emerging from the ’soup.’ You want to avoid sharp lines: everything should be smooth, sharp transitions will show through to subsequent layers.

The next layer will be done using the same two colors (red oxide and blue black) mixed with white. This actually give a very wide range of colors and in particular temperatures. One school of thought is that the best way to effectively turn the form is to vary the temperature across the form. Monks asked us to paint a white scene which would force us to see the warm/cool transitions. A white bowl of eggs was suggested, but as there are so many fine white casts at NYAA I thought I’d work on one of those. Here’s the start.

The most coveted in-curriculum class at NYAA is definitely Steven Assael’s painting III class. He is an extremely talented artist who can draw and paint better than about anyone out there. Now that I’ve had a couple of classes with him, I can see why it is that they don’t let him teach first year students. In some ways he is the antithesis of the what the other faculty teach. His technique is very much about painting in a direct method; which works for him as he has enough talent to be able to put down a single stroke that has the right tone, hue and form all in one fluid motion. Actuallly at times he actually throws paint off the end of the brush onto the support. Watching him work is amazing… trying to step into his shoes in depressing.

Three hours for this pose… working with a very chromatic palette. It’s going to be an interesting semester.

- Jeremy

I had a hard time getting out of bed today. Perhaps, knowing that it was a holiday, my mind decided to convince my body that it was okay to rest. Once I did finally get going, however, I attempted to be productive. After some time researching ideas for a possible NYAA diploma project, I decided that it was far too nice a day to sit inside the whole time. I met up with Tara and Loren and we explored the Riverside Park area.

Since it was on the way we decided to learn, once and for all, who is in fact buried in Grant’s Tomb. This is the largest tomb in North America, and Grant was so popular at the time of his death that the land (Upper West Side, right on the Hudson River, mind you) was donated for the monument. This was done to keep the monument from being built in Washington D.C., St. Louis or Philadelphia. 90,000 people donated over 600,000 dollars for the construction of the monument, which was modeled after monuments for Hadrian and Napoleon. Here’s a shot of the interior.

Now for the answer you’ve all been waiting for… technically speaking, no one is buried in Grant’s Tomb. That said, Ulysses S. Grant and his wife Julia are entombed there. It’s a subtle distinction, but I don’t want to get any silly emails splitting hairs.

We continued our stroll down to the park by the Hudson River and past the impressive Riverside Church.

If you had the feeling that I had walked all the way to southern France, you have a better sense of architechture than I. Apparently this Gothic-looking building was modeled after the famous 13th-century Chartres Cathedral. It is right on Riverside Drive, and I understand that this may be the very place where Julie’s paternal grandparents were wed. It is, as I take it, a very politically active interdenominational church, and the inside of the church is supposed to be quite something. I’ll defininitely have to make time to see that and hopefully snap a few pictures.

There is a great pathway just on the edge of the Hudson; I hope to be able to use it for jogging before the weather starts to turn cold.

And here’s a photo of my compatriots, Tara and Loren, on the bank of the Hudson proper.

We concluded the day by walking back to civilization around 72nd Street, and had dinner at nice southwestern restaurant called Santa Fe, that Tara and I had discovered on a previous outing. We then decided that 50+ blocks of walking was quite enough for one day and took the subway back up to where we live. Quite an enjoyable day—I hope that everyone had such an agreeable Labor Day.

– Jeremy

Last night, on a whim, I decided to walk over to campus to attend a harp guitar concert. Now, I really didn’t even know what a harp guitar was, but Willamette is sponsoring a whole harp guitar conference this weekend, thanks to Professor John Doan, so there were some very talented players in Salem, and it seemed like a good way to spend an evening.

Turns out I was right, though I wish I had had the foresight to bring my camera. Harp guitars are a variant of the guitar that incorporate both a fretted guitar neck and additional banks of open sub-bass (and sometime super-treble) strings that are plucked like a harp. Dozens of variations on this form, spanning over 100 years, were displayed on the stage. Some instruments were acoustic, some electric; one had sympathetics strings inside the neck of the guitar, one had even been cobbled together in the past week from an electric guitar and bass with a zither attached to it; and the range of sound the artists coaxed from them was incredible. Several artists sang as they played, and some were able to make their harp guitars sound like other instruments entirely. As might be expected from the instrument’s design, however, the concert was predominated by classical fingerpicking, made richer by the addition of the open strings.

With 13 harp-guitarists from around the country to perform, the concert was a long one, around 3 hours. It concluded with all of the conference attendees coming on stage to play together, a group of at least 20 and some sort of world record, from what I understand. When it ended, I rushed out to buy a compilation CD that contains quite a few of the songs just played, and have been enjoying it while I write this post.

Thank you to everyone who wished me luck and for your prayers. I have (finally) found a home for the school year. I will be staying at the International House. Built by John D. Rockefeller Jr. and the Cleveland H. Dodge family in the mid-1920’s, it was designed to foster interaction between foreign and american graduate students studying in New York City, a mission it maintains to this day. There is a screening process and applicants are selected for rooms that are heavily subsidized. In addition, they are renovating the main dormatory building, so there are fewer rooms available this year than in general; so I feel very fortunate to have been selected to stay here.

Of course, even a heavily subsidized room in New York is not going to be extensive. The room is somewhere in the neighborhood of 8′ x 13′. There is also a small sink and a small closet just to the left and right respectively which are not visible in the picture. But that is it, the length and breadth of my personal space—though I must say, it feels like such a luxury to have my own room this year.

The International House is near Columbia University in the Upper West Side, an area sometimes referred to as Morningside Heights. The building itself is just a block away from the Hudson River and Grant’s Tomb. Here is the view from my window. I am told the Hudson will be visible once the trees lose their foliage in the fall.

Guess I’ll finally have an opportunity to learn the answer to the riddle, who is buried in Grant’s Tomb. Here’s an image of the front of the monument. I am sure you won’t be able to read in the picture, but upon the building between the two reclining figures is written Give Us Peace.

John D. Rockefeller apparently decided that a church was needed next door to the International House. Here is the view from the park just in front of the I.House.

And here is an opposite angle. Don’t know if you can quite make it out, but there is a life-sized trumpeting angel on top of the church in both pictures, which should help to orient you.

This area is a bit more ‘hip’ than Brooklyn Heights. There are many students, from Columbia and other schools, living in this neighborhood. Though I am in Manhattan proper, it will be a longer commute to get to my school in Tribeca, but all in all, I feel than I’m better off than I was last year—especially with Tara and Loren living just a couple of blocks away. I’m sure I’ll be seeing more of them this year.

– Jeremy