Painting the environs around my town

I've started painting the thing that I love the most about where I live – the landscape. There’s nothing breathtaking about it, nothing like the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland or anywhere in the Farø Islands. The views are typical of the Danish countryside. But there is a “nature park” (naturpark) where people love to walk, and to one side is a Bronze Age burial mound (ransacked ages ago) which now bears the name of the Fox Hill (rævehøj) as it was home to generations of foxes for decades, maybe even centuries. There is a marsh, and a deep pond that is called a lake (sø); in fact there are two more in the same area, and I’m of the impression that these were once peat quarries. That certainly fits with the depth of the pond. There is an 800-year old church, and across the narrow winding road from it, a farmhouse (now publicly owned and the site of parties and meetings) with an intriguing Star of David built into the loft window. There used to be an old mill, and a mill stream, but these have vanished with time. Oh, and in the distance, the control tower of Værløse airport, once a military airport, where the entire fleet of Danish war aircraft was destroyed in a single German attack in World War II. A 10-minute walk from the house is an R&D and manufacturing facility for the pharmaceuticals giant Novo Nordisk. I live in a very storied place, with a beauty that is modest but real. 

I can’t really escape from my penchant for realism, for painting what is there, what my eyes see, and not what my tormented little soul sees. I love to paint the light, the way a feature of the landscape changes with the seasons. So perhaps it is a kind of impressionism I’m moving towards. I start with pastel studies, then paint the same scene or subject in oils. Below are a couple of these studies.

100 Faces project - Completed!

 

And just like that... the 100 Faces project is finished. Face 99 is Astrid, Vagn's 10-year old granddaughter. Face 100 is the beloved family dog Churro, who passed away on June 1 last year -- because pets have faces too. 

I made the deadline, finishing within 300 days of the decision to start the project (July 27, although the drawing that became Face number 1 was actually completed some 3 weeks before). I'm not worried about this, since I drew several other people in the process but decided against including them for various reasons. I'll post the rest of the faces in due time, or make a video or composite image of them all.

For the most part I'm happy with the faces that I drew. Even the bad ones were part of the learning process. And this isn't the end for me, either. An unfinished drawing of a man playing a double bass sits in one of my sketchbooks, supposedly Face 99 until I realized I wouldn't complete it in time, given the May workload (and an oil portrait commission, yay!). Other projects have already been set -- 100 hands, 100 ears (where I'm weak), 101 dreams, 1000 people 1000 moments. These have no deadline, and are therefore not strict goals: the names form a filing system of sorts. Without a structure for grouping what I produce, my art tends to go unphotographed, or if photographed, then lost among the thousands of images that I take in a given year. 

So I'm done -- 100 Faces in 300 days. Time to celebrate. I think I'll go out into the garden and smell the lilacs. 

Oh, and below are Face no. 1 and 2.

Martin Luther King, Jr., I Have a Dream

Why have I reproduced Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech in full below? Because I'm testing the very odd behavior of some visitors to my blog within the last few months. Bots, no doubt. Hundreds of hits within a day or two after a new post. ChatGPT collecting data? Will they bombard this speech of MLK in the same way they have each post that I carefully wrote? Or recognize the words and leave it alone?

If you are human, though, read and ponder.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

I Have a Dream

delivered 28 August 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington D.C.

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.

We cannot walk alone.

And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead.

We cannot turn back.

There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?" We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. **We cannot be satisfied as long as the negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their self-hood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: "For Whites Only."** We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until "justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream."

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. And some of you have come from areas where your quest -- quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of "interposition" and "nullification" -- one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; "and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together."

This is our hope, and this is the faith that I go back to the South with.

With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

And this will be the day -- this will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning:

My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim's pride,    From every mountainside, let freedom ring!

And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.

And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.

Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.

Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.

Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.

But not only that:

Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.

From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

Free at last! Free at last!

Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

*** 
Retrieved from https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm on May 12, 2023. Antedated to May 9.

100 Faces in 300 days, part 10: Dan Keller at 16

 

***

I apologize for the main text being contained in an image,  and hope my words are still reader-friendly. I'm trying to deter ChatGPT or similar language-processing bots from hoovering up my words without my consent. More on this soon.

And my final decision was to leave out most of the hands, since something was wrong with their proportion with the rest of the body. Heck, the challenge was 100 Faces in 300 days.

100 Faces in 300 Days, part 9: Vagn Plenge

 

100 Faces in 300 days, Part 8: Drowning

A self-portrait from a photo taken when I was 17. It was a bad photo, slightly blurred, full-face, hair on either side of my face (parted bangs, short in front and long in back -- very 80s). Very much the photo of a landlubber.

This drawing, though, is a nod to the two times in my life I nearly drowned. The first, when I was seven, a quiet struggling right beyond the wave line. I could hear my extended family on the shore saying, "Look, it looks like (someone) is having trouble." (In Cebuano, a sentence like this does not need a subject). Then my grandmother waded in and fished me out.

The second time was on a beach in Zambales, in my 30s. Struggling silently against a wicked undertow. Unable to call for help. Then, the intervention of a brawny Filipino-American filmmaker, Michael, with whom we were swimming. He grasped me by the collar of my shirt (I had not brought a swimsuit) and hauled me unceremoniously onto the rock ledge.

Here I'm sinking, unable to speak, but seeing everything with perfect clarity.

***

Panpastels and charcoal.

100 Faces in 300 days. 95/100

100 Faces in 300 days, part 7: Four girls

I've switched to charcoal -- not pencil, but the sticks you break into stubs and hold between thumb and two fingers. Very nice, very tactile. Blended with a finger. 

The first drawing below this text is of Laumi, one of my best friends in high school. Reference was taken at our HS graduation in 1985. Where are you now? We are all looking for you.

Second is Melanie, one of my all-time besties. The reference photo was blurred -- I know I have more pictures of Melanie from our childhood/early adolescence, but darn it, I can't find them. I need to digitize. I didn't get the pretty bump on the bridge of her nose.  Sigh.

Third is Karen, another classmate, from her own reference, which may have been taken in 1988 or 89, from the hairstyle and clothes. The thing with charcoal is that it can resemble those made-to-order mall-art drawings, especially if the person in your reference was shot in a formal studio pose.

The girl with the bangs at the top of the page is me. Lakambini Sitoy, aka Bing. At my high school graduation, the same shot that Laumi appears in. I sleep-walked through the event, smiling so hard my cheeks hurt afterwards. You can't tell -- I look very happy, very pretty, in all the pictures. I was quite nice-looking, back in the day. Youth wasted on the young, maybe. Or just a girl struggling very hard to keep her head above water and make it look effortless, in which case I was the victor. 

I don't think these drawings are exact likenesses. They do resemble the people they are supposed to be, though. I still have a tendency to make faces slightly longer and/or narrower. As a result, Asian or Latin American faces look more European. Never mind. Draw and learn. Besides, if my face looks prettier than it actually was, I can always claim it's not a portrait of me but of imaginary Bing, my double self, though in 1985, she was not just on the way out, but already consigned to a box beneath my bed, abandoned (still trying to decide between boyfriends) as I learned to navigate the real world. 

100 Faces in 300 Days, Faces 85-88, 90.

Leilani Sitoy (April 19, 1966 - November 18, 2007)

 

My sister Leilani (April 19, 1966 - November 18, 2007).  At 20, a new B.S. Psychology graduate, she had it all figured out. Her little orange typewriter, the carefree smile, the movie star pose, the hand-lettered desk signs that read “Smoking Area” and “Silence: Writer at Work.” Her red t-shirt says “I’m an alcoholic. In case of emergency, give me a beer.” Her name in cut-out letters (hand-made as well) on the shelf behind her, and a Menudo collage by the window. Her little Post-its, her colored markers and her lighter carefully arranged before the typewriter.

The words on the large cowrie shell read “Golf Club.” These were her new barkada, her new friends; they liked to hang out at our house happily drinking. “Golf” was for “golf-golf-golf,” i.e. “gulp, gulp, gulp” which can sometimes sound like the same word in the Philippines. A few weeks before, she had taken a treasured photo album with the name of her old barkada, her group, on the front, stuffed the photos into an envelope, and replaced them with pictures of these new friends.

She left to take a master’s degree at the Ateneo de Manila the following semester. Manila – the sudden absence of community support, the different culture of that Catholic university, the urban fashions and the disquieting coexistence of extreme wealth with extreme poverty -- changed her. As these things go.

Our best and closest years were when we were young. Not young-young, but young teenagers, starting from when I was about 10 and she 13, up to when I was 15 and she 18. We had the fantasy world that I have written about previously. She had her imaginary boyfriend, and I had mine – in fact, she had tremendous influence on whom I chose to be with in there. Of course, in this alternate universe we were both exceedingly beautiful and irresistible, as were all the other girls who populated it (no female bullying, no nasty put-downs). We were not sisters, but distant cousins – I think I must have been an embarrassment for her, with my glasses and my awkwardness and my bad Cebuano. And incidentally, we were war orphans, because in a fantasy world, parents tend to complicate things.

We developed this world through stories and pictures. When people interview me about my published work and influences, they always ask, “Who is your father? What is his occupation?” Rarely, “Who are your parents? Who is your mother?” and never “Do you have any siblings?” They probably think I formed my worldview reading the Bible and Dickens at my father’s knee.

My sister never got a chance to get interviewed for her published work, because she stopped writing fiction in her junior year at college, at around the time she began to work seriously on her grades. She ultimately graduated Magna Cum Laude at Silliman University. As far as I know, up to the time of her death she never wrote fiction again, although when I was a lifestyle editor around 1997, I pestered her to write a few pieces for my page. She complied, and the work was (of course) brilliant and funny. My editor asked for more, but Lani declined; the first baby had come; she had no time. If she drew at all, it was chubby, pleasant little cartoons of her co-workers, for birthdays and such.

We fell out, actually, nearly overnight when I was 15, and really did not reconcile until a few weeks before she died, which is a weird thought, considering there are studio photographs of our grinning selves, and me and her daughters playing. But our relationship was fraught. (Come to think of it, the only boyfriend of mine she’d really approved of was “Paolo”, and he was a jointly created fantasy in the aftermath of a movie we’d seen. When I fell in love with another movie boy but wanted to string “Paolo” along, she wrote a short novel about a man-made plague that killed off the new boy AND the entire world including herself, leaving “Paolo” and my character along with two or three others, presumably with the task of repopulating the earth).

So why am I remembering this now, why am I writing this now? Especially since it is not the hagiography we are expected to write of a loved one who has died? Because I cannot find her anywhere but within my memories and a sad boxful of notebooks at the bottom of a closet. She died before Facebook, before Pinterest. When I Google her name, the only things that come up are the brief tributes I posted shortly after she left.

Lani (right) and Bing, 1996

With our mom, 1979

July 1969

1970

Tween misery

 

T. Valentino Jr, Rondeletia, Lakambini and Leilani Sitoy
(aka Bill, Pinkie, Bing and Lani)

Too good not to share.

Me with my family around the first quarter of 1982. I would have been 12 going on 13. My sister is all dressed up, probably for some end-of-the-year event for high school seniors (in the Philippines until a few years ago, these were 15 or 16 years of age).

What the hell was going through my head? Had someone yelled at me? Was I practicing my Italian war orphan stare? Was I wishing a crushie-boy would yank me by the arm and whisk me into a realm of endless summer and heavy firearms and little kisses? I was a shy and eyeglasses-wearing teen with a secret imaginative life and with no social skills to speak of, not even – and this photo proves it – in the bosom of my own family.

I was such a pathetic kid (always in the top three in my class) that, when a far more popular classmate asked me to write in her slam book, I acquiesced at once (albeit with a bit of a sneer). There were a couple of blanks labelled “Favorite Artist.” At last, I thought, a kindred spirit -- who would've known? So I wrote “Edgar Degas” and “Pierre-Auguste Renoir.” Too late I realized, leafing through the other entries and coming upon names like “Gabby Concepcion” and “Dina Bonnevie”, that “artist” was a direct translation of artista: “actor/actress.”

Less than a year before, I had stood up onstage at my grade school graduation and, before a packed auditorium, delivered a memorized speech full of grand ideas that my father had written. I was elementary school valedictorian. At the same time that I was committing that speech to memory, I was writing a loooong story, called “Raid on Rio Nova”, directly on a typewriter that was missing an “n” (a reject of my dad's). It was an adventure story filled with blood, guts and explosions featuring the boys of Hornet’s Nest and a stable of gorgeous girls loosely based on myself, my sister and some kids we had known but no longer hung out with.

A few weeks prior to this picture being taken, in a notebook I’d marked “Big Christmas Edition”, I’d written a story that was a shameless (or shameful) rip-off of Little Darlings, gender-reversed, in which the lead character, Paolo, nearly loses his virginity (on a dare) to a beautiful girl with straight black hair called Bing. They both end up weeping and saying “No! It would ruin everything!” I suppose it proves that as a sexual enchantress I met with zero success – not even in the bosom of my own imagination.

But some years after, I got contact lenses and learned to smile and to wear crop-tops and flip my hair, and above all to play wide-eyed and somewhat dumb. Things got marginally better.  😉

100 Faces in 300 days, part 6: one person (Dan Keller)

These are all drawings of Dan Keller at various ages. And I don't think I'm done yet.

I've moved from random strangers seen on holiday to people I know or have communicated with -- newer friends and those from way back. This happened after I'd drawn 59 faces and was feeling a bit more confident about my skills. I started with self-portraits and then did the picture of Dan that you see above, taken in 2011 in Hawaii and found on his website: www.dan-keller.com.

Work in progress. From a 1970 photo on his website.

Dan is the Daniel Keller of Hornet's Nest (Il Vespaio), so that could be what is at the root of my fascination with him, the fantasy boy of my sixth/seventh-grade self. But it is more nuanced than that. I will ponder. I will articulate the results of said pondering. Soon.

 Above: As Tekko in Hornet's Nest, 1970 (Il Vespaio). 

Filmed in 1969.

1972

100 Faces in 300 days, part 5: family resemblance

I thought a bit of families and family resemblance in the Easter week. These  drawings are of my sister Leilani (1966-2007), her daughters Sofia and Bea, and my stunning cousin Carolyn. The men are my husband Vagn's sons. (Faces 80, 79, 70, 82, 68 and 2 of the 100 Faces project.)

Getting a likeness is incredibly exciting (and also quite demanding). Building up someone's face through pencil strokes (tentative and experimental ones) is also an extremely intimate and personal process. It is as if one were touching a person's mouth, their teeth, their eyes -- what human beings use to see, eat, plead, stare each other down, etc.  It was actually on account of this (the feeling that I was intruding on a person's space) that I started drawing strangers: an effort to desensitize myself, not get excited, keep a cool distance from their humanity. But then it became time to find out whether I could still maintain that objectivity while drawing someone that I knew.

With the shift to subjects I knew -- or more correctly, subjects who would know that I had painted them -- the notion of accountability was there. I would have to work harder than I already did.

In drawing freehand, so to speak, without guidelines or grids, a dialogue begins between me, the artist (the viewer and capturer) and the image -- though not necessarily with the person himself. A commitment is forged in the hour or two that it takes: a pledge to be as faithful as possible to what I see, out of respect for the subject. A promise to put my ego aside (the part of me that says, "I am the artist and this is you -- deal with it!"

Sometimes the end product merely reflects the moment that I stopped erasing and redrawing, thus letting myself off the hook and declaring the picture finished.

100 Faces in 300 days, part 4: People who encouraged me

100 Faces in 300 days: People who've been supportive of both my writing and my art over the years. My former boss and the closest I had to a work mentor, journalist Inday Espina-Varona; Filipino-Canadian poet Albert B. Casuga and Danish-Filipino journalist and NGO organizer Filomenita Mongaya Hoegsholm. Faces 78, 75, 81 and 67 of the project.

100 Faces in 300 days, part 3: Self-portraits

 

Self-portraits. At least the first five. There will be more.

I used to do a lot of these — in a mirror — as a young girl, particularly after I discovered the joys of 6B pencils. One of these days, I'll find those early sketches (out of proportion, but at least drawn from life) and post them. For the moment, these: taken from photographs of me from my childhood (lots of those) and early teens (very few — why was that?). The last one, of adult me, is from a photo taken in December 2022. I dislike my adult face so much I couldn't bear to give it the same realism as the others, so, eschewing graphite, I decided on colored pencil: red and violet. Whatever happened to the big brown eyes (hidden behind glasses most of my life, but nonetheless part of my self-image)? Is it possible to ever love one's aging face?

It would be great to start painting again, with big bold strokes, but the 100 Faces project must be finished first, and it really isn't a good idea to crack out the oil paints while we have the heating on and the house remains sealed against the (late) winter. I would like to do more dramatic, more critical, more subjective self-portraits, bordering on the un-pretty if need be.

#OneWeek100People drawing challenge, 6-10 March 2023

March 6 to 10 was when artists around the world buckled down to the #OneWeek100People drawing challenge, introduced by Marc Holmes and Liz Steel on Facebook in 2016, and still going strong. I did my own, beginning on Tuesday, March 7 and finishing all 100 by the morning of Saturday, March 11.

DAY ONE:

There was a snowstorm in Denmark, making it impossible to go out and find people to sketch. I've found it practical to do my drawings surreptitiously on the train on the way to and from work, but it was late and I was certain a trip solely for the purpose of sketching would culminate in being stuck in subzero temperatures at some station halfway between Copenhagen and our suburban town. The husband was travelling, so no hope of rescue in the car. The upshot of this was I stayed home and used a travel photo as reference, this one taken at an intersection in Bucharest in 2012. It's the image at the top of the post. I used a pen and my go-to 24-pan White Nights watercolor set -- cheap but with vibrant colors. 

DAY TWO: I'd started a second drawing right after the first, using people from the other half of the photo, applying the same procedure: draw the lines, then color in with watercolor washes. I finished it to my satisfaction the following day, using a different brand of watercolor (Daniel Smith). The result has quite a different look from the first day's.

DAY THREE: 

Did nothing but draw the whole day, starting off with another of my travel photos, this one taken at the My Son ruins in Vietnam. Then I headed off to the town library, where I found a seat on the second floor, overlooking the parking lot of a grocery store. It was 4:30 pm, just when people were doing their shopping or getting off the train from Copenhagen (or heading back) so there was plenty of activity.  Finally, actual urban sketching of real people in motion. When I got home after an hour, I added some watercolor, and even managed to come up with three more watercolor sketches, no prelim pencil work. Hit 70 on the third day.

DAY FOUR: Did a lot of teaching on Friday the 10th, so I barely had the energy to pick up my pen. I'm an English teacher at a private language school in the heart of Copenhagen, with about half of my students being Danish and the other half foreigners, generally from Europe, Latin America and East Asia. They're adults, all of them, and most need the English for work or to stay afloat in a graduate or postgraduate program.

The school conducts English-language exams, and I serve as a speaking exam supervisor from time to time. One of my duties is taking digital photos of the candidates, who very often are in their mid to late teens. I decided to draw a bunch of Danish young people from the imagination. I started with the girls, and was too tired to do the boy equivalents afterwards.

Some of the character of those hundreds of exam candidates, over several years, has seeped into these faces. I started with tiny pencil marks to designate the placement of the features and head, then did soft watercolor strokes to indicate their bone structure and hair color, and finished by defining their features with brush pens. The names of the girls, incidentally, are typical of Gen Z’ers in the Copenhagen area. They are entirely fictional.

DAY FIVE: It was Saturday, March 11, in Denmark, which is six to nine hours ahead of North America, and I had planned to go to the Statens Museum for Kunst (the National Gallery) to sketch the museumgoers, then meet some friends for lunch.  But once again I had no energy to make the 45-minute journey by train, metro and bus. I was scrolling in some desperation through my Facebook feed when I came upon some photographs taken by high school friend Nancy Ugsad just a few hours or so before: of Silliman University early on Saturday morning (the Philippines being seven hours ahead of Denmark), with the varsity athletes practicing their pitches on a playing field, and members of the marching band sitting on the apron of concrete in front of the Luce Auditorium, each in their own world as they practiced on their instruments. I got Nancy's permission to use her photos, took up a Pitt brush pen, and with quick strokes fulfilled the rest of the challenge, filling in the outlines with a neutral tint (well, Daniel Smith's Jane's Gray, which is a mix of Burnt Sienna and Ultramarine Blue). I photographed the pages of my sketchbook, posted it to the #OneWeek100People Facebook group set up by Marc and Liz ... and was done.

OR so I thought.  I was loathe to put away my watercolors, etc. Having abandoned it in late 2021, I was in love with small-scale painting once again. So after a bit of schoolwork, I closed the day with this little (A5) portrait of my email friend Dan Keller, from a black and white reference photo taken in the summer of '69.  #OneWeek100People plus One.

                                                                                                            

I consider the portrait of Daniel as the first in a new self-imposed challenge called "1000 People, 1000 moments", and which will be done in watercolor, alone or in combination with drawing media, no deadline, so as not to compete with all the other stuff I long to do.

    

                                                                                                                --- Bing <3

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