Tag: women

Flex and the Water Bottle (Sketches of the Week for Week 23 of 2025)

This was another week of sketches more about shading and volume than form. My son slightly preferred this first sketch (the model was wearing crazy long-fingered claw-gloves):

A pencil sketch of a scantily clad woman with long frond-like claw fingers

But he also really liked this water bottle sketch:

A pencil sketch of a steel water bottle, its shadow reaching toward the viewer

I recognize that the top sketch is more compelling (scantily clad women in powerful poses are a crowd-pleaser!) but the bottle was a bigger victory. The “Flex” sketch was from a two-dimensional image on my phone; I sketch that way a lot, and have gotten accustomed to translating two dimensions of pixels into two dimensions of graphite on wood pulp. The water bottle was just sitting on the table IRL. When you are sharing actual real space and time with an object, it’s much harder to fight the brain’s need to tell stories about what the “actual” shapes are, and instead let the eye tell the hand what it sees where.

The girls ain’t all right… (Sketch of the Week for Week 18 of 2025)

My son and I once again were of differing opinions. I thought the best sketch from last week was this one:

A pencil sketch of a woman sitting on the floor, defeated, head hung low and hair obscuring her face, hands planted on knees.

He agreed that it was good technique overall, and he liked the gesture. But nonetheless, he thought this one was the best sketch of the week:

A pencil sketch of a woman on the floor, reaching up toward the viewer as that viewer recedes up and away.

I argued that nailing the foreshortening put this over the top, even if it is overall looser and more dashed off. No doubt, foreshortening is devilishly hard: You sort of have to turn off your brain entirely and just let your eye thoughtlessly control your hand to even get remotely close to getting it right. As such, even if the “technique,” broadly speaking, is better in the top sketch, it’s also true that the top sketch is very much an analytical exercise, one where I spent a lot of time layering up graphite in order to make this posture legible at a glance. As such, I didn’t just think about it; I vastly overthought about it, arguing with myself, breaking down what shapes were where and why. Meanwhile, my “technique” was fundamentally stronger with the bottom sketch, in that it was drawn with almost no intellectual engagement or justification or analysis, just my eye guiding my hand, setting down what it saw. Simple recording, without analysis, is at the heart of the exercise.

I dunno. I still feel “Defeat” is the better sketch—or, at least, it captures the current moment better, and that’s what it’s all about.

Sketch of the Week: A Generic Attractive Woman (Week 5, Jan 27 2025)

My son picked this as the Sketch of the Week, noting that he liked the angle of her head, and that it came out well overall.

A pencil sketch of a generic pretty woman (it was supposed to be Anya Taylor-Joy. *sighs*)

He wasn’t alone. Folks glancing at my journal last week were invariably drawn to that sketch, and thought it “came out well.” I tend to disagree, which makes for sort of an instructive example:

This is a good sketch, but a poor likeness of the model. I was working from this image of Anya Taylor-Joy:

A black and white portrait of Anya Taylor-Joy with her hand on her neck. She is wearing a dark dress.

There’s a slightly broad roundness to ATJ’s face, that coupled with her fine features is vaguely Fae and unnatural. It’s that presence that leads to her being strong in the roles where she’s strong.

I caught something of her gesture and posture in my sketch, and maybe even some of the energy in her hair, but I captured none of that changeling quality that makes Anya Taylor-Joy immediately identifiable as Anya Taylor-Joy (hell, the AI I’ve been monkeying with to try and automate alt text for images—and which more often than not sort faceplants—correctly identified this black-and-white photograph as Anya Taylor-Joy; I think the above alt text for that image is the first time I’ve ever used the AI generated attempt without modification).

I tried for Anya Taylor-Joy, and ended up with a rough approximation of a Nagle Woman—given my background and age, that isn’t surprising. Heck, it isn’t even bad: I sorta like Nagle, and the sketch at the top of this page is leagues ahead of where I started a year or two back.

It’s not bad, but it isn’t Anya Taylor-Joy, either.

Loretta Lynn has passed, but “Fist City” leaves on eternally ♬♫♪

Loretta Lynn, a singer and songwriter whose rise from dire poverty in Kentucky coal country to the pinnacle of country music was chronicled in the best-selling memoir and movie “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” and whose candid songs gave voice to the daily struggles of working-class women, died Oct. 4 at her home in Hurricane Mills, Tenn. She was 90.…

[Lynn] was a teenage bride and mother, a country star and a grandmother by her early 30s.

obituary in the Washington Post

This is, in lyrics and delivery and bear-trap smile, 100% the song of a 30-year-old grammy who is done taking shit. May she watch over all of us, and forever be our guide.

“The most unjustly under-loved jazz great of the 1950s” #WomensHistoryMonth

I take exception to Tom Moon’s characterization of Dorothy Ashbury (quoted as the title): she isn’t just among “the most unjustly under-loved jazz greats of the 1950s”; she is almost certainly the most inexplicably under-appreciate jazz great ever.

Born in 1932 in Detroit, Ashbury broke barriers at every angle: a Black female professional artist in a male dominated industry, Ashby established the harp as an improvising jazz instrument, cracking open both mainstream society’s notion’s of what was and was not appropriate for a Black woman to do (playing classical harp) and cracking up the counterculture’s notion of what could and could not be done (bringing “novelty” background instruments like harp and koto to center stage, bringing global cultural and musical tropes to Euro-American-centric jazz).

“It’s been maybe a triple burden in that not a lot of women are becoming known as jazz players. There is also the connection with black women. The audiences I was trying to reach were not interested in the harp, period—classical or otherwise—and they were certainly not interested in seeing a black woman playing the harp.”

Dorothy Ashbury

But I kinda give zero shits about any of that; just listen to her music:

Don’t you dare click away from that track before you cross the 1min20sec mark! “Joyful Grass and Grape” is, like, 90% of the way to being a Wu Tang banger all by itself, just add some ODB and RZA.

This is why I love Ashbury: the deep, quiet Afro-futurism of this music that came 40 years earlier than it had any right to. She was sampling and mixing and beat juggling in her head, without the benefit of turntables and a sound system. In it’s infancy hiphop constantly justified itself by pointing to jazz—and sadly somehow missed its most obvious Matriarch. I am so delighted to have algorithmically stumbled upon Ashbury that my outrage about her erasure is itself entirely erased.

Here’s the initial track that joyfully blew my goddamned mind:

And there’s much much more out there. Listen. Listen!