As an East Coast resident, I don’t get the Chronicle, but I can imagine that, for some, the feature was a source of confusion, despite the paper’s introductory article; but for others the reaction must have similar to the one I had when I first encountered All Over Coffee on the web: “Wow. What is this?”

The feature consists of a drawing, usually a beautiful pen and wash drawing of buildings, streets, rooms or architectural elements in San Francisco (and sometimes Paris, Amsterdam and elsewhere) accompanied by a short bit of writing, a few lines to a few paragraphs.

The writing consists of seemingly random musings, comments, suggestions, observations and generally enigmatic phrases written into and juxtaposed against the subtle beauty of the wash drawings. The “strip” ostensibly revolves around two unseen characters, Maurice and Sarah, whose abstracted thoughts and conversations form the text.

The drawings themselves are sometimes as wonderfully quirky and thought provoking as the writing, bits of seemingly incongruent architecture, flashes of streets, textural patterns of rooftops, storefronts, house sides, museum interiors, apartment lobbies, alleyways, cornices, telephone wires and TV antennas, often wrapped in geometric shadows and rendered with an intense affection and attention to detail

Is it art? Sure. Is it literature? Yeah, that too. Is it poetry? Sometimes. Is it comics? Well, no (in that it’s not sequential storytelling as far as I can discern). Is it fascinating and rewarding? Almost always.

Madonna’s wash drawings are simply wonderful; his sensitive linework, sure draftsmanship, masterful applications of wash and keen eye for light and shadow produce images that are uncannily evocative of place, even for those of us who have never been to San Francisco.

Even though I have been to Paris, I don’t find those images any more or less resonant than the ones of San Francisco; the “place” he evokes isn’t as much a geographical location as the immediacy of one’s own surroundings, the sense of noticing the scene, and the moment, in which you find yourself.

Combined with text that, almost regardless of its actual content, has the common thread of causing you to slow down and contemplate, the final piece produces a poetic suspension of the ordinary; or more accurately, a reframing of the ordinary as extraordinary.

Madonna’s drawing style manages to retain some of the informality of travel sketches (and some of the journalistic immediacy of sketchbooks by Robert Crumb and Chris Ware), even while refined to the point of a finished work. He seems to have found a delicate “just right” spot between the two. He exercises that balance within individual drawings, with passages of intense detail against blank walls and great negative shapes of skies, often criss-crossed with telephone wires, window frames and the edges of architectural forms in a rich and playful compositional geometry.

His website opens in rather newspaper like columns with news, announcements and links to various features and projects. All Over Coffee has it’s own section.

There is a book collection of All Over Coffee that is available from Amazon or directly from the publisher, City Lights. As announced on the All Over Coffee main page, a new collection, Everything Is Its Own Reward (the name of which is taken from this panel) is due in April of 2011.

Madonna has also provided illustrations for other books, including A Writer’s San Francisco: A Guided Journey for the Creative Soul by Eric Maisel, and Nikko Concrete Commando by Delfin Vigil (a magazine-like MagCloud publication, click on “Show Preview” on the page).

The bulk of the All Over Coffee images available online are in the Purchase section, in which you can purchase either original art or fine art prints of All Over Coffee pages. You will find some redundancy between the two, but the features are numbered, and I doubt you will object to seeing a given piece more than once.

In his presentation of the images on the site, Madonna gives the date and location of each drawing and a brief comment on the piece and its creation.

All Over Coffee is also, of course, a continuing feature in the San Fancisco Chronicle and its online edition SFGate. You can follow the online version here and access the archives here.

In whatever form, in print on online, take Paul Madonna’s invitation to slow down, look around and maybe contemplate a bit, all over coffee.

[Vis Escape into Life]

St Louis artist Mary Sprague creates ink drawings, sometimes in colors, often monochromatic, in which delicate sprays of line and hatching coalesce to create her tree forms.

When seen at the scale at which her work is reproduced on her website, her groupings of short but flowing lines, and the way she applies them in textural passages, give her drawings some of the feeling of softness and delicacy characteristic of etchings.

I suspect, given the scale of her previous work, that these drawings are relatively large, and some of the feeling of the line comes from the relationship of the size of her drawing tools ot the size of the composition.

In her online galleries you will also find older work with different subject matter. In particular a previous series centered on large scale ink drawings of chickens. These are occasionally worked in color with brush and either watercolor or colored inks.

You will find more of her work at the Duane Reed Gallery. There is an article about her from the March/April 2007 issue of Stanford Magazine.

This proved to be impractical, but she began to give away her drawings to those who donated to wildlife recovery.

AOL, the huge internet service company, got behind her, hosting Olivia’s Help the Gulf Region Wildlife Project and making a substantial contribution in her name.

The project has been a hit, the original AOL story raising $20,000 in three days.

Bouler had to cap the offer at 500 original drawings (I don’t know if that’s been reached), after which contributors get limited edition prints.

Bouler’s drawings are on that wonderful borderline between childlike exuberance and the beginnings of sophistication and the understanding of traditional artistic principles.

She is at the age at which some of us are told we have “talent” and are encouraged to continue; and the rest, mistakenly believing the convention in our society that only “artists” continue to draw in adulthood, are subtly encouraged to abandon the practice.

In addition to being encouraged to explore her artistic inclinations, Bouler has already experienced something of the impact that art can have as power for social change.

[Via Metafilter]

Her drawings, both black and white and color, are based on wonderfully calligraphic lines — dancing, looping and jogging across the page; at times almost seeming to construct an image in their wake as a byproduct of their movement.

I don’t know whether she works in traditional media or works digitally with a stylus and tablet, but she prepares her finals in Photoshop or Illustrator.

Along with well spotted blacks and judicious applications of fresh color, the fluid and playful character of her lines, in the tradition of line wizards like Al Hirschfeld and Saul Steinberg, gives her images an additional level of visual interest beyond their immediate impact.

Rathke’s clients include The Washington Post, The Village Voice, Vanity Fair, The Economist, Time Warner and Paramount Pictures.

[Via LCSV4]

After a successful career as one of America’s noted illustrators, creating memorable illustrations for magazines, advertising and book covers, most famously his striking series of covers for the Bantam Doc Savage novel series, Bama moved from New York to Wyoming began to devote himself to his personal work and gallery art.

Bama’s intensely focused realism draws its power from both his keen observation of his subjects and the graphic strength his compositions inherit from his years as an illustrator.

Underlying both phases of his career is Bama’s skill as a draftsman, and that aspect of his art is brought out beautifully in a new book from Flesk Publications: James Bama Sketchbook: A Seventy Year Journey, Traveling from the Far East to the Old West. I received a review copy from Flesk and was delighted to find it full of Bama’s wonderfully realized drawings and character studies of his Western subjects.

Most are preliminary drawings on which finished paintings were based, though many were of subjects that never became paintings. The book also includes small color studies, a very nice series of travel sketches from trips abroad, notably to China, color studies from his days in advertising, and even drawings from his time as a student at the Art Students League, where he studied with Frank Reilly, among other notable instructors.

Most of the drawings in the book are done in a style that speaks to Bama’s approach as both a draftsman and a painter, in which delicate pencil outlines contain areas of graphite tones, value studies set in strong compositions against minimal backgrounds.

The character of the faces of his subjects is Bama’s main focus, but a strong second is the character of their clothing, whether the traditional and ceremonial costume of Native American tribes, the rough denim and leather of cowboys and ranch hands, or the simple dress of Chinese farmers. Bama captures them with a sharp eye and deft hand.

The book can be ordered directly from Flesk Publications, who also published a previous book on Bama’s color work, James Bama: American Realist. The latter is still available, but in a limited quantity.

Flask has done their usual superb job with the book’s production values, right down to the color and nature of the paper on which the sketches were drawn. However, even though Flesk’s online book previews are getting better, I could still wish for more and larger sample pages from the books on the web site, particularly for those who might be coming across an artist like James Bama for the first time.

Bama does not have a dedicated site that I’m aware of. JamesBama.com is the Jerry W. Horn Gallery offering limited edition prints, and Greenwich Workship has a gallery of limited editilon prints on canvas. I’ve listed some additional resources on both the new book and on James Bama below.

The graphite drawings of Brian Boulton, on the other hand, are an exception. His current series of drawings is rendered in detail and is the result of close observation, but Boulton’s command of texture, value and compositional emphasis puts the rendering in the service of his artistic vision, well beyond the realm of mere photorealist representation.

His figures are most often turned away from the viewer, inviting us to grasp the figure as a human form, but without the obvious point of focus of a face with which to interact. The result is a different point of view, that of an unseen observer.

We are invited to see textures of cloth and leather, hair and areas of skin as surfaces, materials as well as forms. The details of folds in the clothing, essentially in the lineage of drapery in classical compositions, are presented with the kind of importance usually given to surfaces in still life drawings.

Boulton is based in Vancouver. He studied architectural rendering at the College of New Caledonia, in British Columbia and Film and Art History at Langara College in Vancouver.

The original concept for this series of drawings began in a previous series, “10 Drawings“, completed in 1999. Boulton returned to the subject, and expanded on it, in 2008 and 2009, and in apparently continuing to explore the approach.

While many artists who sketch architectural scenes rely on a suggestion or informal feeling for perspective, Afflerbach has a masterful command of its nuances, at times tackling drawings in three point or even curved perspective.

His sketches of buildings, streets and interiors have a wonderful feeling of place, as well as a tactile sense of weight, solidity and, in the case of larger structures, monumentality.

He often lays out perspective construction lines under his drawings, and they are precise in the sense of being accurate, but still retain an informality and sketch-like quality that gives them visual charm and immediate appeal. This immediacy also shows in his sketches of vintage cars from the 1960’s and 1970’s.

Afflerbach has a web site, but his portfolio must be downloaded as a PDF. As a founding member of Urban Sketchers, you can find a good number of his drawings posted there, along with a brief bio. The drawings are often linked to versions on his Flicker set, but they are unfortunately not much larger.

The Ficker set is extensive, though, and features a wide range of drawings and subjects from his native Stuttgart, Germany along with location sketches from his travels in Italy, France and elsewhere.

Also, drawings, even those by great masters, receive less notice and attention than paintings, and for both reasons are less frequently the subject of mounted exhibitions.

So when collections or parts of collections of master drawings are exhibited, it’s worthy of notice.

The Morgan Library and Museum in New York, which I have written about previously, and mentioned in my recent post on their cuerrent exhibit, The Hours of Catherine of Cleves, is home to a great collection of master drawings.

They have drawn form it, if you’ll excuse the expression, an exhibition focused on a particular place and time. Rome After Raphael displays over 80 drawings, most of them from the Morgan’s own collection, that take Raphael’s work as a watershed moment (not an uncommon thought, see my posts on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of 19th Century), and follow developments in drawing in the 100 years following.

Tough nothing quite compares with seeing master drawings in person (I think drawings suffer even more in reproduction than paintings), the Morgan has provided an extensive selection of drawings from the show. These are zoomable, and the zooming feature is supplemented with a terrific “Full Screen” option that allows you to view them without the constraining frame of many zooming features (look for it at the bottom right of the zooming controls).

There is also an online feature that walks through a discussion of several of the drawings and goes into more detail on some of the artists, their relationship to each other and their place in time.

Raphael was one of history’s greatest draftsmen, and is, of course, represented, along with another, Michelangelo (see my post on Michelangelo’s drawings).

Many well known and lesser known artists working in Rome during that period are also represented by drawings of a variety of subjects — allegorical, architectural and religious, like Parmigianino’s drawing after Michelangelo’s Pieta (above top); and even landscape studies, like Annibale Carracci’s wonderful pen and brown ink sketch of a riverside tree (above, bottom).

Rome After Raphael is on display through May 9, 2010.

Agnolo Bronzino was born Agnolo di Cosimo di Mariano Tori, and known as Il Bronzino for reasons that are unclear but may have had to do with his complexion, or that of his subjects. He had the good fortune to become a pupil of another great Florentine artist, Jacopo Pontormo, who was only nine years older then his pupil. Their styles are similar in may ways; they maintained a collaborative relationship for most of their careers, and attributions of works sometimes flop back and forth.

Bronzino’s drawings show that similarity at times, and a similar level of command of draftsmanship, line and tone; which is to say, very high indeed. (I also see similarities to the chalk drawings of Raphael in his isolated figures.)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has mounted an exhibit, the first ever devoted to Bronzino, The Drawings of Bronzino, that contains 60 drawings drawn from sources in the U.S. and Europe. There is a selection of drawings from the exhibit here.

There is a book accompanying the exhibit, also titled The Drawings of Bronzino. The exhibit runs until April 18. 2010.

Few practices are as challenging or rewarding for an artist as drawing the human form. The great traditions of Western art are founded on it and it is still one of the most fundamental aspects of artistic endeavor.

If you’re not a full time art student, finding a session for drawing from life is somewhat easier in large or medium size cities than in more rural areas, but it can be a bit of a challenge even there unless you know where to look. Often there are classes or workshops offered by art schools, museums and artists’ organizations, but you have to search them out.

It would be nice if there ware a central reference for them, and as it happens, I stumbled across a very good listing of over 500 such sessions across the U.S. and Canada. (If someone knows of similar listings in Europe and elsewhere, let me know and I’ll post the links.)

Figure Drawing Open Studios, Workshops, and Continuing Education Classes is a list assembled as part of the web site supporting The Art Model’s Handbook, a book aimed at those who work as artist’s models (a more demanding practice than most people realize).

Presumably intended as a service to models, they have provided an excellent list of classes and venues, organized by state or province.

I checked on the several classes and workshops in Delaware and Philadelphia that I have attended or am familiar with, including The Delaware College of Art and Design (where I teach an unrelated class), The Delaware Art Museum, The Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial, The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Sketch Club and the Plastic Club. The listings for all of them seem accurate and reasonably up to date, so I might assume that their listing for other venues in North America are similarly good.

Though I doubt it’s comprehensive, this is a great place to start if you are looking for a life drawing session.

Some are formal classes, but many are individual sessions or open studios that you can attend when you like, without signing up for a specific number of classes. Some of the latter are instructed, many are open studios where you are on your own to work as you like without instruction.

In most cases you bring your own materials, and the venue provides easels, chairs and sometimes even drawing benches. There is a moderator who administers the sessions and usually determines poses. Sessions can vary in length, but many are about three hours, with breaks for the models at intervals.

The listings give some indication of which sessions are devoted to long poses, short poses, or mixtures of short and long (the most common arrangement). Some offer sessions of clothed or costume models and portrait sessions in addition to more traditional life drawing sessions. (For a side take on non-traditional drawing sessions, see my post on Dr. Sktechy’s Anti-Art School.)

If you haven’t attended life drawing sessions before, you’ll find most of the sessions quite beginner friendly, contact the school or organization and see what classes or sessions they recommend.

As opposed to the more formal classes, most of the open studios and workshops are weekly, come and go as you please, and charge only a model fee for the session, usually about $8 – $10.

Most of the listings offer a link to the venue sponsoring the sessions, where you can find more details and contact information (it’s always wise to make sure dates and times are current).

The image above is by Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, one of the finest academic figure artists, certainly one of my favorites, and is meant to be inspirational, not intimidating.

One of the most important things I learned in my continuing practice of drawing from life was to never be intimidated by comparing my level of drawing ability to someone else’s ability. Nothing will hold you back more. We are all simply at different points on the path, and the more you draw, the further you go.

What are you waiting for?