A gesso of frost
buries summer; memory
coaxes red from white.
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Charcoal Study: Lily
This is the first charcoal drawing in a long time. For years, I avoided charcoal in favor of graphite due to what I believed was the overall messiness and difficulty of the medium. Turns out, I just didn’t realize that charcoal has amazing versatility if you take advantage of all the forms it comes in. I always assumed that you had to tend with a solitary, single-toned charcoal “stick” to render an image, but last weekend, I saw a set of five charcoal pencils with a spectrum of hardnesses at my local art supply store and decided to give the medium another try.
After a few days of experimenting, I think charcoal will replace graphite as my go-to medium for black-and-white drawing. It occurs to me I might have previously been trying to make graphite respond like charcoal by aggressively smudging and blending to create mid-tones. Harder charcoal is similar to graphite in terms of control, but it’s far easier to blend in a way that keeps the initial pencil strokes invisible. That said, it certainly doesn’t make graphite obsolete, but it does change what I see as graphite’s strengths. Since graphite is naturally more unyielding, it creates a tight, “noisy” texture when laid on paper without blending. This allows for very interesting styles of drawing, though difficult to achieve without messing up.
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A Monk Commences His Vow
Having pledged his voice
to the monastery, he attendsthe growling sky; clouds muscled
with pure element brace duskily,
crafting thunder in their bowels.This, he knows, is something steeper
than any cliff of manhood; it is the last
ascent into solvent beauty.Within his robe–a gift
of the friary and fitted to repair
the iniquities of flesh–he angles every nerve
toward the orchestra
of Autumn’s grand departure.A blinding root cleaves the soil
of night, and the drum
of the heavens is started.Soon, winter will mute the land
with its slow, white plague, asking of it
the same vow.And with the land, his mortal sense
diminished, he will learn the key
with which one harmonizesthe silence without and the silence within.