Artemis Draws

Just the other week I managed to catch the Modigliani exhibition at the Tate Modern before it closed on Easter Sunday. It was inspirational, far better than the Picasso exhibition that featured the work he did in 1932. The Picasso exhibition made me come away feeling vaguely unsettled particularly by his depictions of his mistress. Genius he might have been but it was difficult for me to feel sympatico with Picasso.

So I came home and many days later, sat down and made an ink drawing, a rendition of one of my favourite Modigliani paintings, a portrait of an unknown girl in deep reds and browns.

My version of the Modigliani painting

My India ink has dried up, it has become a gloopy thick jelly stuck inside the bottle but I managed to pick up enough ink with my wet brush to use it for this drawing. Thankfully the Liquitex ink still worked so I used that for the fine hatching work with my Deleter pen. The brush had lost many of its bristles so it was hard to make a decent line. Still, it was all done within half an hour and it felt satisfying to be drawing something again, as if I was working out an elegant solution to some mathematical problem.

I don’t yet know if I have the stamina to start planning another story. Perhaps I will have to wait for inspiration to strike a second time.