Art Eye
Works on paper and digital prints by Ellen Honigstock
Exhibit at BCL Gallery
Brooklyn Creative League, located at 275 Park Avenue, Brooklyn NY
February 16th, 2023 through March 24, 2024
How you do anything is how you do everything, or how I learned to draw in 1000 days.
A couple months before the pandemic, I decided to learn how to draw better. I dabbled in a couple of online classes and bought a few art supplies. So when the Lockdown hit on March 13, 2020, I was perfectly positioned to a begin a daily drawing practice.
3 weeks right? That’s how long we thought we’d be locked down - and some say 3 weeks is all it takes to start forming a habit. I really wanted to illustrate my life and all the stuff going on in my head. I grabbed a sketchbook so tiny that it looks like a matchbook to me now. I even wrote my goals on the first page: Capture the essence of people, places, and things through painting and drawing.
That first little sketchbook has familiar drawings in it: studies to capture specific colors, sketches of people's feet on the subway, and random other items I find interesting. There are also things I would never subject my sketchbooks to now: blank pages, or tracking the progress of a knitting project.
The best thing about a daily practice is that if you don't like how something turns out, you just turn the page and do something different.
When I started my first 30 Faces in 30 Days challenge, I never expected to finish 30 drawings. Not only did I finish all of them (a day or two late, but still...), I ended up taking the monthly challenge 9 more times.
It wasn't until mid-October, 2020, during the "Inktober" challenge, that things started to click. On Day 214, I experimented with some ink to paint the Golden Ice Skater. This magical fluid somehow spanned the entire value spectrum from a light yellow to a deep, rich brown, with some greens thrown in for unexpected delight.
The next day, I painted That Smile in the same way, mostly because I thought Day 214 was a fluke. I love how the wet-on-wet technique has a mind of its own, and if you collaborate with it, it will let you build an image layer by layer, slow enough to give space to think, and fast enough to stay focused.
All but one of the pieces you’ll see in this exhibit were made after those lightbulb revelations. After that, it was just a matter of following my curiosity, trying out new media and putting pen to paper every day.
It’s been a joy to create these pieces. I hope you enjoy them.
-Ellen
How to Purchase:
Mostly everything displayed is for sale - some as original works on paper, and some as art prints on heavyweight watercolor paper (there are samples of prints in a clear envelope at the front desk.)
To purchase, visit the pages listing works for sale:
Original pieces: Note that the exhibit will be on display for about 3 months so original pieces purchased will be delivered after the close of the show.
Prints: Digital prints can usually be delivered within a few days. See framing options here.
Abes and Jackies
Even though I have been drawing portraits for three years, I still have a hard time capturing likeness. So, turning a bug into a feature, I used a scribble grid of text behind the images to correctly place the features (it’s the same technique muralists use to turn small drawings into huge ones.)
For the portraits of Abe, I wrote out the Second Inaugural Address. It’s supposed to be short, right? It turned out to take exactly double the area of paper I laid out so the single portrait became a diptych.
For Jackie, her writings about children became the underlayer for her portraits.
I like to hang these portraits as pairs so the younger version looks innocently in the direction toward all that they will achieve in the future. While the wiser version peers out of the drawings, observing the world with a clear-eyed focus.
Originals are ink on watercolor paper.
Prints available: 11” x 14” to match the originals, in singles or in pairs.
Subway Series
Sunshine on the trestle at the aboveground Smith and 9th Street subway stop creates no end to beautiful shadows any time of day.
I experimented with a gouache palette to replicate the color of rust mixed with subway-green and found that I could take my time and rework the paintings in small bursts, rather than long painting sessions. These paintings were definitely the most time consuming - I can’t wait to do more of them!
Prints available: 11” x 14” to match the originals.
Subway Fractal
Bright Day at Smith & 9th
Good Morning F Train
Urban Landscapes
Throughout my childhood, I helped my father develop film and photographs in our basement. Assuming I’d never have that experience again, I desperately wanted to experiment with cyanotypes. I bought the chemicals, prepared the papers and, since none of the rooms in my apartment are completely darkened, I turned all the lights off and hid them in closets to dry overnight.
The next morning (Halloween), I took them to Green-Wood Cemetery, hoping to get images of dappled light from the sun through the trees. Instead, the images reflect the branches I scavenged to prevent them from blowing away. The final results were not what I had intended but instead, perfectly reflect the windy, slightly chaotic afternoon art experiment.
Cyanotype #1
Cyanotype #2
Rooftops on Dahill Road
Campsite
If by now, you are detecting a “tree” theme, you are not mistaken. From the very beginning of the pandemic, I worked hard to learn to draw trees.
The gates to Green-Wood Cemetery, previously open only on weekends and holidays, remained open daily when everything else shut down. Drawing in the Cemetery was my salvation.
Four Trees (Day 918) started out as a color study to test out the wide variety of greens I could make with a few blue and yellow gouache paints. It was a beautiful Fall day and four little tree portraits emerged.
Campsite was one of the first treescapes I was happy with (Day 477) . It was part of a 30 Places in 30 Days class, taught by Charlotte Hamilton (@blueshineart), a fantastic teacher.
And as we all now know, when you are stuck home for months, streetscapes becomes a source of fascination. The two page spread below from one of my sketchbooks captures the vast range of changes in light and color over the course of a day, a month, or a season. Once, I recorded the color change over the span of only 13 minutes. Sometimes one of these 5-minute sketches satisfied my daily drawing habit, and sometimes a painting like Rooftops on Dahill Road took an entire afternoon.
Tallis Tree (Day 894) records one of my favorite spots in Prospect Park. It’s where Kolot holds services during the summer and our happy little knitting circle freezes under there, even on the hottest summer day.
Foggy Trees is the oldest drawing on display. It dates from Day 53 BP (Before Pandemic). I love to see that my interests remain consistent even as my skill improves.
Four Trees in the Cemetery
Weather
These parking lots are among my latest paintings. They were so much fun to make - I had no idea that asphalt contained so many colors depending on how the sun hits.
In Diner Parking Lot (Day 943), Sarah sent me this a photo from a trip to see Jonah. I loved it and was immediately inspired by the visual contrast between the trees and the shadows cast by the cars, not to mention the offset angles of the guardrail, the handrail and the striping, even if the drivers ignored it.
I know it’s litter, but I felt for this Little Cup, in a parking lot, just waiting to be run over or blown away (Day 1052).
Diner Parking Lot
Little Cup
Tallis Tree
Foggy Trees
Limited Palette Portraits
These portraits are among my favorites. They are definitely the ones I learned the most from.
The Red Portrait (Day 247) and Blue Portrait (Day 793) were created a year and a half apart. Each was the result of many prior attempts, in a lot of different media. In each case, what worked best were layered drawings with sheening inks with similar properties to the concentrated watercolor that prompted this whole experiment in the first place.
All the red lines and shading in Braid were made with non-water-resistant ink in a refillable pen, then shaded later with just water and a brush. Being able to move the ink around on the paper at just the right speed gave me the much-needed ability to process what I was doing and make corrections as I went along.
Douwe Beckman was made using just black gouache at varying levels of dilution. Gouache is also “reworkable” so easy to come back and make adjustments and corrections.
Curly was a different story. She is made from watercolor, which is much less forgiving. Her secret is that she is made from a simple palette of Burnt Sienna, Alizarin Crimson, and Prussian Blue that can create such a wide variety of skin tones and hair colors so I can safely ignore the color and treat her as if she is monochromatic.
Red Portrait
Blue Portrait
Braid
Curly
Douwe Beckman
Bright Portraits
The 30 Faces @sktchy classes made many a pandemic month fly by. Mostly I practiced drawing and rendering techniques and discovered that I loved techniques I expected to hate and vice versa… so better to keep an open mind.
More importantly, I learned from the creative and inspiring teachers that it’s consistency and curiosity that matters, not talent.
Unrelated Ginger
Gentle Smile
Blue Sky
Awhirl
Peer Out
Sunglasses
Gaze
All the Colors
Botanicals
I developed a collection of bright and beautiful images based on Brooklyn street flowers. Inspired by walks through my neighborhood, my goal was to accentuate the sunlight so I could hold onto it.
Shaping the natural forms of potted plants and urban weeds into artistic botanical images became a sort of meditation. Overlaying electric colors created unexpected images that surprised and delighted me. I hope you like them too.
