Bang a Drum

"Penguin with Drum" Pencil Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

Finally, the last in the Delacorte Clock series. I'm glad they're over, especially as we might be moving away from the vicinity of the clock itself. They are so handsome as a set.  The penguin house at the Central Park Children's Zoo is awesome. You can push your nose against the glass and watch as a penguin comes face-to-face with you.  They are buoyant and happy as they bob in the water or shoot by under the surface.  Up above, they hop and preen and push their wings back in the funniest way that makes it look like they are Italian and are ready for a fight.

"The Delacorte Animals" Pencil Copyright 2010-2011 Jessica Boehman

Rosin Up Your Bow

"Hippo with Violin" Pencil Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

Finally another installment in the Dancing Animal series inspired by NYC's Delacorte Clock (still my favorite place in this town and what I'll miss most when we move out of the neighborhood).


The Hippo was a bit daunting to me, but actually, I love the way he turned out.  I started real work on this one on the Staten Island Ferry and it is my first finished drawing since ending the semester grading. It feels good to be back after such a long delay.  It's hard not to think of the Fantasia Hippos dancing in tutus. Maybe this guy plays the music for them...One more to go: the Penguin with Drum.  Happy Summer Break!

Gruff

"Goat with Horns" Pencil. Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

The goat is the fourth in the series of the Delacorte clock animals.  He's the one animal with cultural references.  Playing a double-horned aulos, he refers back to Greece.  Though all goat, he reminds me of the half-man half-goat satyr, the mischievous woodland creature of Greek myth.  Though artists in the Renaissance and points forward have made the goat a devilish or witchly character, the bearded, dancing Delacorte goat is playful, making music in a joyous menagerie.

The Kangaroo and the Elephant

The next two images for the Delacorte series were the Kangaroo with her kid playing the horns and the Elephant with Accordion.  When I was a child, I had a powerful desire to ride in a kangaroo pouch. This was, undoubtedly, spurred by the movie "Dot and the Kangaroo", where one of the songs is called "Riding in the Pouch of a Red Kangaroo".  This little kid seems so contented to be carried by his mother and joins in the music-making. 

"Kangaroo and Kid with Horns" Pencil. Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

The Elephant drawing immediately followed the "Walking the Dog" drawing seen below, so it was at once familiar and unusual.  Having just realized a very elephantine elephant, it seemed a bit strange to make one more human, playing the accordion.  Both the animal and his instrument remind me of moving to northern Germany.  My memories of this time are childlike, as we moved there five days after my tenth birthday, and are generally colored grey in my mind, likely due to the cool, cloudy weather that predominated there.  Our first house was in a German neighborhood, not within the large American complexes where many of my friends lived.  We lived a short walk away from a beautiful, sprawling forest park where we spent hours upon hours riding our bikes and pretending to be Robin Hood.  We also were a short walk from the cobblestoned downtown area with its tiny shops.  Of particular interest to a ten year-old child were the bakery that served these delicious, swirled meringue-type cookies, and the toystore.  German toystores were a thing of wonder (even if we weren't very welcome there as part of the army of Americans in town). Filled with puzzles and detailed plastic figures and trains and stuffed animals, we spent many hours gazing, wishing and making Christmas lists.  Since we arrived near Thanksgiving, I knew I had a good chance of getting my favorite toy in the shop for Christmas.  It was a blue baby elephant stuffed toy, whose fur was so soft and cuddly. I fell in love with him and couldn't bear the thought of a month of waiting to see if he would be mine.  On Christmas morning, when I found him waiting for me under the tree, I was the happiest a child could have been on that day.  It's still one of my all-time favorite gifts.  The accordion also reminds me of Germany, and not for stereotypical reasons.    After we had moved to our second house, there was this old German man who would come door-to-door with his accordion.  He would play without ringing the bell until we answered the door.  When offered money, he would always decline, asking instead for a Coke.  I always wanted to write to the Coca-Cola company with this idea for a commercial.  So as it is, that elephant with accordion must have been made just for me.  That's how I see him, in any case.

"Elephant with Accordion" Pencil. Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

The Delacorte Clock

My absolute favorite part of NYC is Central Park. It's where my husband and I first got to know each other, where we spent beautiful fall days, and where we got engaged.  Now, we live within a 10 minute walk to the park and to my favorite spot there, the Children's Zoo and Delacorte Clock. The area around this part of the park is all for children. There is a petting zoo and a larger zoo with pandas and penguins and monkeys.  There are statues of Alice in Wonderland and Hans Christian Andersen reading to children.  There's that famous lake with remote-controlled boats.  My favorite animals in the zoo are the sea lions, which you can see without entering the zoo.  They always make the kids laugh with their belching noises.  As you stand watching the sea lions (which I've named Edgar, Oscar and Lucy), you can also listen to the nursery book rhyme music coming from the Delacorte Clock.

The Delacorte Clock, Central Park, New York City

Its dancing animals making music are a wonder to behold. It makes me feel like a kid again, standing in Germany, watching those old clocks turn in the squares of medieval towns.  I've dedicated a series of drawings to these animals; in fact, they were much of the inspiration for my shop's theme (a whimsical menagerie).  I'll be sharing them one by one. My favorite is the bear.  If you look closely, you can see him; he's the right-most figure. He is joyous, lighthearted and delightful, and he makes me smile.

"Dancing Bear" Pencil. Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

An ode to Schongauer

Martin Schongauer's  The Temptation of St. Anthony is a riotous explosion of the imagination.  Schongauer renders his saint in the moment of ecstatic levitation, when devils and demons join him in the air (generally the element of angels) and plague him with physical and mental tortures. The print was a major hit in Renaissance Europe, inspiring Michelangelo and Dürer, among others. Leonardo later wrote that fantastic creatures are born in the artist's mind as a mix of the many animals he had ever seen. Schongauer's demons are believable in much the same way, merging fish, fowl and beast into a fantastic new whole.

Martin Schongauer, The Temptation of St. Anthony.  Copperplate engraving. Germany, 1470s.

The left-most demon with the club has always been one of my favorites. I always saw him with a flute for a nose, though Schongauer does not render him so.  Earlier this summer I re-imagined the demon as a musician.  Demons and the playing of music have been joined since the dawn of the Christian age, so it seems appropriate to me that Schongauer's demon may have played his nose as a flute from time to time, singing his own words in accompaniment. 

"Piping Demon" Pen and ink. Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

Self

A while back I decided to experiment in pen and marker to make some minimalist self portraits.  My natural tendency is to do lots of shading, and these are essentially reduced to line and color.

One was inspired by some printed paper I had on hand from a gorgeous paper shop in Rome.  I only had a red marker and a pen--not so much to work with--so I wanted to keep it simple. Though I've always been a brunette, in these two pictures I experimented with color, first red, and then black.  The last one does away with hair altogether.

"Self Portrait with Spade" Pen, red marker, and printed paper. Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

For this image I juxtaposed two patterns of the paper to produce the desired result.  There's something Baroque or Rococo in feel to this one that I really enjoy.  The paper records part of the opera "Pagliacci" by Ruggero Leoncavallo.

"Self Portrait, White as Snow" Pencil, red marker, pen. Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

This one was a challenge in pattern.  I wanted to do a play on the idea of a sleeping Snow White, with black hair, white skin, and red lips.  The skin of the face is composed of a snowflake.  The background I made into a pattern of apples and vines. I especially like how they mirror under the neck, creating a sort of collared shirt that also becomes the background.   I continued the idea of flat patterning in this next self-portrait.

I've always had pretty much a hate-hate relationship with my large Italian hair. It obeys some of the time, if weather conditions are perfect. Most of the time it feels out of control. I imagine that Medusa felt much the same way.  The snakes in the hair are repeated in the flat pattern motif of the fore- and background.

"Self Portrait with Green Eyes" Ink and green marker. Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman