“Nocturnes” at SAM

 

12/12/25 Seattle Art Museum

The Seattle Art Museum’s current featured show is Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism. It’s an interesting collection of mostly paintings with the theme of everything to do with food – how it’s grown, harvested, hunted, caught, prepared, served and consumed, and how all of that affected people in the late 19^th century. (A couple of favorite paintings at end of post.)

Bust of Jean-Baptiste Boussingalt by Aimé-Jules Dalou

Although Mary Jean, Roy and I had interesting discussions about the works, since most of them were paintings, I didn’t try to sketch any of them. Instead, I sketched one of few sculptures in the show – a bronze bust of Jean-Baptiste Boussingalt by Aimé-Jules Dalou (at left).

The most fun, though, was sketching a sculpture that was not part of the show: a huge wolf made of cedar called Companion Species (Underbelly), by contemporary artist Marie Watt (top of post). In the exhibit area outside the main featured gallery, the wolf has an imposing presence. I put Mary Jean in the sketch for scale, but I’m not sure I got it right – the wolf may have been even bigger than I made it appear.

Material notes: Unless I’m making a focused copy of a master, I generally don’t enjoy making graphite sketches in museums. It’s not very satisfying unless I can take the time to fully shade the way I want to with graphite, and it’s frustrating not to be able to go in with a bold brush marker. With white pencil on black paper, however, I can make quick sketches that are still satisfying in an unexpected way. Maybe it’s just the surprising appearance of light instead of shadows that makes the sketches seem more interesting. In any case, white colored pencil has certainly liberated me at art museums! It’s like making nocturnes wherever I go.

This huge painting, "The Shepherd and His Flock," by Charles-Emile Jackque, was my favorite in the show. MJ and I discussed at length the stunning light the painter captured, the composition, even the expressions of some of the sheep.

It doesn't show well in this photo, but I loved this painting by Claude Monet (from his haystack series) as a supreme example of optical color mixing. Of course, this was oil, but I wanted to emulate it with colore pencils -- all those subtle tones and hues made of tiny "pixels" of color.

Here's a different view of the cedar wolf sculpture I sketched.