Mostly Commuting

4/15/16 colored pencil

Kehinde Wiley has an extraordinary exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum – a highly thought-provoking collection of portraits. Called “A New Republic,” the paintings depict young African American men and women from Harlem portrayed in various styles of traditional portraits. The content of the oil paintings is certainly provocative, but I was also simply stunned by the beauty of these portraits.

Since the vast majority of the works were huge paintings, they weren’t really conducive to sketching, and most of the exhibit spaces were too crowded to sketch anyway. The exhibit included a few bronze sculptures, though (again portraying contemporary youth as classic bronze busts), so I sketched one called “Cameroon Study,” a bust of a man with an athletic shoe on his head. (No interpretive information was on the placard, unfortunately! I would have liked some.)

Most of my sketching fun today was during our light rail ride downtown and then again on our bus ride home. We stopped for lunch at a Japanese restaurant at the Pike Place Market, where I spotted the famous Public Market sign through a window.

Painting by Kehinde Wiley at SAM

Painting by Kehinde Wiley at SAM

4/15/16 all sketches done with
non-hairy brush pens and white gel pen