Hanging with the rats
I find that while it’s fun to seek out cool art to be inspired by, nothing fuels my own work like observing and interpreting the world itself. This is something I’d lost sight of in the last couple of years and was eager to dive back in to, so I spent as much of my free time as I could drawing by the East River in December and January before it got prohibitively cold. There are a few scattered drawings of rocks, plants, and water in my sketchbook, but below is the only double page spread of this kind of stuff exclusively. It focuses on one of my favorite things to study - waves, and how light behaves on them.
The writing is a mix of tips for myself and random thoughts. In case it’s difficult to read, here’s everything, from top to bottom:
- There’s more and more people at my rock spot.
- Dark reflection on water = more blobs
- The water surface always rests on parallel planes. (This only really applies from a relatively low angle.)
- Wet moss looks the same as wet leather cut into strips.
- Higher, drier, more discernible details
- I’ve seen rats pop up the last three times I’ve been here.
- The busier the wave, the more abstraction.
- Reflection gets more lost in wave abstraction the further from the source.
✦ ✦ ✦
I’ll leave you with a video I managed to get of an insane sunset at Brooklyn Bridge Park. The music is Bob James & Earl Klugh’s The Afterglow.
