Factory at Sunset - Watercolor Painting

 

Street Scenery - Oil pastel and black pen

 

Man Smoking a Pipe - Oil Pastel drawing

 

Road to the Sea - Pen Drawing

 

When doing line drawings (pen and ink drawings), cross hatching must be used. Cross hatching is a widely-used artistic technique used to add shadow and dimension to drawn objects. It involves filling a space with at least two sets of lines, with the second set crossing over the first to create a darker effect. Its a bit complicating and time consuming (and therefore boring to do), so I used a kind of crude technique for the following line drawing.

Joseph Conrad

 

A few years ago I read “Heart of Darkness” (1899), by Joseph Conrad. It is about Charles Marlow’s journey down the Congo River in Central Africa as an Ivory transporter. Overall I really liked this story, although like most stories of its time, it sometimes, suffered from xenophobia. So I wanted to find out who wrote this story and this is what I found out.

Joseph Conrad was a British Novelist of Polish Birth. His experiences as a sailor enabled him to picture the beauty and mystery of the sea and also write convincingly of romantic adventures in strange lands. Man’s struggle against nature was one of Conrad’s favorite themes. “Typhoon” is a short story giving an unforgettable description of a storm at sea. “The Heart of Darkness” is a longer story set in the steamy jungles of the Congo, while “The Secret Sharer” is a short tale of shipboard life in the Far East. “Lord Jim” (1900) which deals with a young Englishman’s years of atonement for one moment of cowardice, proves Conrad’s ability as a psychological novelist.

Conrad used English only after he was 20, and did no literary work in it until he was nearly 40. He was an accomplished stylist, but his work often has a flavor suggesting that he continued to think in polish. His real name was Teodor Josef Konrad Korzeniowski. He was born in the Polish Ukraine. His father was exiled for several years after joining in an unsuccessful revolution. Later the family settled in Cracow. The elder Korzeniowski was a cultured man and gave his son the essentials of a sound education. Joseph was a restless boy, and at the age of 17 enrolled in the French merchant marine.

His first sea voyages were to the West Indies. He later sailed on British ships to most of the Mediterranean and pacific ports and to Africa and South America. He was given a master mariner’s certificate in the British merchant marine in 1886, and in the same year became a British Subject. While recovering from an attack of jungle fever in 1889, Conrad began to write a novel published as “Almayer’s Folly “ (1895). He left the sea in 1894, was married, and settled down in rural Kent, England. Conrad’s first books were praised by critics but did not sell well. In his discouragement, he had just decided to go to sea when he was granted a small government pension. Success came with ”Chance” (1913). Like “Victory” (1915), this is a novel about a man’s struggle against a tragic flaw of character. A Personal Record (1912) is Conrad’s autobiography.

Man and Tree - Oil Pastel drawing

 

Expressionism is an artistic style in which the artist seeks to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse within a person. The artist accomplishes this aim through distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy and through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements. In a broader sense Expressionism is one of the main currents of art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and its qualities of highly subjective, personal, spontaneous self-expression are typical of a wide range of modern artists and art movements. 

Bottles and fruits - Still Life - Oil Pastel

 

Cartoon 2

 

The dialog is as follows: This is the coolest Planet I've been to so far........Where else have you been to idiot Mars?.....No but I've been to Sri Lanka

SINCLAIR LEWIS

Sinclair Lewis was an American author. In 1930 Lewis was the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in literature. He had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1926 for "Arrowsmith", but declined it because he believed the standard for Pulitzer novel awards was too restrictive. 

Lewis' novels often satirize stupidity, mediocrity, commercialism or bigotry in some phase of American life. "Main Street" (1920), his fourth novel but his first success, is about the intellectual and cultural poverty in a small midwestern town. The principle character in "Babbitt" (1922) is a businessman who is a typical "go-getter." The preacher in "Elmer Gantry" (1927) is more interested in building a successful career than in saving souls. Lewis was born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, the son of a country doctor. While at Yale University he edited the college literary magazine. He interrupted his studies to work as a janitor in Upton Sinclair's socialist colony in Englewood, New Jersey. Later Lewis made a trip to Panama to look for work on the canal then being dug. In 1907 he returned to Yale to be graduated with a A.B. degree. 

Lewis worked in a newspaper in Waterloo, Iowa, for a time. He spent six months in Carmel, California, with William Rose Bennet, trying free-lance writing but with little success. In 1910 he again went East. In Washington, he was editor of a magazine for teachers of the deaf, and in New York he became editor of a publishing house. He was married to Grace Hegger in 1914. While commuting to and from his Long Island home, Lewis wrote the greater part of "Our Mr. Wrenn (1914) and "The Trail of the Hawk (1915). Neither novel was successful, but in the meantime, Lewis was selling short stories to magazines. In 1916 he quit the publishing house to devote full time to writing. 

In 1930 Lewis won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first writer in the United States to receive the award. In his Nobel Lecture, Lewis praised Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway and other contemporaries, but also lamented that "in America most of us - not readers alone, but even writers  - are still afraid of any literature which is not a glorification of everything American, a glorification of faults as well as virtues," and that America is "the most contradictory, the most depressing, the most stirring, of any land in the world today. He also offered a profound criticism of the American literary establishment: "Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead."

Lewis died in Rome from advanced alcoholism on January 10, 1951, aged 65. William Shirer, a friend and admirer of Lewis, disputes accounts that Lewis died of alcoholism. He reported that Lewis had a heart attack and that his doctors advised him to stop drinking if he wanted to live. Lewis did not stop, and perhaps could not; he died when his heart stopped.

In summarizing Lewis's career, Shirer concludes:

It has become rather commonplace for so-called literary critics to write off Sinclair Lewis as a novelist. Compared to...Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dos Passos and Faulkner...Lewis lacked style. Yet his impact on modern American life...was greater than all the other four writers together.

Frans Hals

Frans Hals (1580-1666) was a Dutch Painter. One of the masters of the 17th century, he is known for his brilliant single and group portraits. Hals excelled in portraying people in a happy mood. His paintings reflect the robust vitality of the prosperous Dutch middle class.

“The Laughing Cavalier” and “Balthasar Coymans” show his use of broad quick brush strokes to catch a momentary gesture and a fleeting expression. The naturalness and gaiety of “Banquets of the officers of Cloveniers-Doelen in Haarlem” are characteristic of much of his work. Hals used bright and vigorous colors in his early works. As he grew older he used more subdued and silvery tones. Many critics consider “Regents of the Old Men’s Home”, painted a few years before he died, to be his greatest work. Hals was born in Antwerp, but moved with his parents to Haarlem when still a child. Although Hals was a popular painter, he often had difficulty making a living. In his later years he was given a small pension by the City of Haarlem.

Water Colour Painting