The fair-haired boy

The project of making small pastel studies of people’s faces continues. The latest are these three, of the same subject, who I will call DB, short for Danish boy. My references were old photographs, blurry, the face literally thumbnail-sized, taken when he was three and a half years old (right), about five (above) and about 10. I wanted to capture the essence of his features at those different moments in the narrative of his life.  

For the first two drawings, I used my trusty Jaxell soft pastels (the square ones in the 72-color set), which I often employ for sketching or practice, and used rough paper (karduspapir) from Stelling. For the third (the boy at age 10), I thought something more permanent would be in order, namely Rembrandt soft pastels on brown pastel paper. 

All three were drawn freehand, which gave me a solid feeling of achievement.

I love the sun-drenched look of the last picture, the light falling on the boy’s bare shoulders, the cast shadows with a bit of red in them. The lopsided smile. 💕- Bing

Jump-starting my drawing skills

I’d been so occupied with teaching English and working at an online networking company for children that I’d found little time for my visual art. Throughout my teens, 20s and early 30s I’d been an enthusiastic sketcher and pastellist, working primarily with pen-and-ink, pencil and oil pastels, eventually graduating to soft pastels, the more difficult medium. I’d been affiliated with Manila’s Saturday Group, which was founded by the painter Malang, an organization of veteran artists from whom I learned so much just by watching them work. I’d drawn illustrations for the lifestyle/literature sections of various newspapers where I’d been an editor.  

But with the move to Denmark, there was a new language to study, a master’s degree to complete, and then the business of chalking up a minimum number of work hours a week as a requirement for permanent residency.

Whenever I travel, I make it a point to pick up some small, useful souvenir – a bottle of perfume, a lipstick. In Assisi last year I entered a stationery shop and found a clutch of pretty notebooks with marble-patterned covers, and I just had to have one. On the train rides between one city and the next I would take it out and make a quick sketch, from memory, of what I’d just seen from the window. Or I just sat absorbing everything – seeing the pattern of light on the trunks of trees, the dark spires of a row of cypress in a distant field.  

A few months later, in Thessaloniki, I found myself at a stationary store, the kind that sells notebooks in packs of five for school kids. On one of the shelves was a box of soft pastels, the cheap kind, in garish primary colors. I had a full set of oil pastels from Caran d’Ache, but no soft ones at the time. My hand hovered longingly over the brilliant sticks of red, blue and green, then I remembered the mess they would make (on snowy white restaurant linen!) and pragmatically chose a set of watercolor pencils. 

It was on that trip to Greece that I started to work with color again. It started with tiny, diffident renditions of the view from restaurant balconies as we waited for our food: mountains and store fronts and boats that took an eternity to complete. My drawing skills were shot, I thought, but I kept at it, perhaps out of a perverse need to torture myself. The more I drew, the easier it became, and the more I wanted.  It took quite a few more hours of practicing, but I did eventually regain the ground I’d lost.

- 💕 Bing

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The soft pastel above, completed December 2018, is based on a photo I took of the Grand Canal in Venice, from the Rialto Bridge, in March 2009. Below is a sketch of the Parthenon over breakfast from the top floor of our hotel, 2018.