Travel Ink Drawings

For almost 20 years I’ve traveled to Europe. Some of these trips were led by my wife thru the community college where we both taught. Other trips were with our good friends the Chaves. My favorite trips were with the Chaves. We would plot out a route, rent a car and be off. We would stop at a small village and Nancy and Diana would search out the best restaurant in the village. Meanwhile, Bob and I would find a place to have a drink. Bob would circle the table searching for the best scene to draw. I always let him select the “best view”. That meant I had to take whatever was left and make something great. We would settle in, order our drinks and out would come the drawing equipment. “Dueling sketchbooks”. Who would come up with the best drawing before our wives came back from their search for the best restaurant in town.

I was always inspired by the drawings of Rembrandt and Tiepolo among others. To me their drawings were like two musical instruments playing off of each other. The visual elements of line and tone play off of each other and support each other. In addition they were translating an image to the page using just a pen, a brush and ink. I was never interested in doing coloring book drawings. Complete the outline and then fill it in, I always like to create a 2-D maze on the page to let the viewer wander in and out of the image.