FLORIDA PRIMEVAL

Florida Primeval, 10.5 x 13.5 inch ink and watercolor painting by George C. Clark    AVAILABLE

I found this customer at the Everglades Alligator Farm just outside the Everglades National Park.  I saw plenty of wild alligators and even a couple of crocodiles too, but they were all in the water and mostly moving too fast to photograph, let alone draw.

AUDUBON HOUSE, KEY WEST

Audubon House, Key West, 8 x 8.5 inch ink, watercolor and colored pencil by George C. Clark   AVAILABLE

This is called the Audubon House because John James Aududon spent several weeks painting in the garden here in 1832 when he was working on his Birds of North America project.  The house here now was built about 20 years after Audubon's visit and is open to the public as a museum of Key West life in the mid-19th century.

 George C. Clark drawing the Audubon House               photo by Pat Clark

YELLOW HOUSE IN KEY WEST OLD TOWN

Yellow House, Key West, 10 x 8 inch ink, watercolor and colored pencil painting by George C. Clark   AVAILABLE

I sketched this conch house in Key West's Old Town from the balcony of the Eden House hotel a couple of weeks ago.  I hadn't been to the Florida Keys since I was 11.  I enjoyed it then, but I appreciated the experience a lot more this time.

EVERGLADES ALLIGATOR

Everglades Alligator (detail), 8 x 17 inch ink drawing by George C. Clark

I tried to sketch this gator in the Florida Everglades last week, but he wouldn't hold still long enough to be drawn.  I photographed him, and did this drawing from my photographs.  I actually drew the whole gator across a 2-page spread of my 8 x 8.5 inch inch sketchbook.  It is on a single sheet of paper, but the middle of it is folded and stitched into the binding of the sketchbook.  I won't be able to flatten the drawing out to be properly photographed or framed until I cut the sketchbook's binding apart, which I fully intend to do, but just not yet.

BEHIND THE SCUOLA DI SAN ROCCO IN VENICE

Behind the Scuola di San Rocco, Venice, 12 x 9 inch watercolor by George C, Clark    SOLD

I went to the Scuola di San Rocco to see the amazing giant murals by Tintoretto.  Afterward I painted this little watercolor of the canal behind the building.

Flemish Puppet PAGLIACCI

Flemish Puppet "Pagliacci," 15 x 10 inch ink and watercolor by George C. Clark    AVAILABLE

I found this marionette spotlit in a glass display case in the Folk Art Museum in Ghent, Belgium, and recorded him in my sketchbook.  Later, back home, I found a photo in a book of Enrico Caruso wearing the exact same costume and realized the puppet was Canio from the opera Pagliacci.  I redid my sketch in ink and watercolor and added the knife and the fallen body of Canio's faithless wife Nedda to recreate the final scene of the opera.

"La Commedia e' finita!" 

DINOSAUR AT THE BUFFET

Dinosaur at the Buffet, 10 x 6.5 inch ink drawing by George C. Clark

The last three lengthy posts have been about art that I created over thirty years ago.  Let's look at something more recent.  Last Tuesday I was invited by friends to Members' Night at the Field Museum (Chicago's natural history museum).  I had a chance to see the new "Creatures of Light: Nature's Bioluminescence" exhibit and to do some sketching in the collection.  The evening included a very nice catered buffet supper served in the museum's big central Stanley Field Hall.  Coffee was dispensed under Sue the Tyrannosaurus Rex, as I recorded above in my sketchbook.