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  Painting from Taft's Midway studio; eyeballsMar 23, 2013 8:08 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Boy, maybe that art re-think I had a couple days ago—about concentrating more on forming a clear black and white design in the pencil stage, rather than relying on ink effects later—was indeed the right way to go, because I feel pretty good about this page so far—good enough that I even went for drawing two eyeballs in the same head, which normally I've avoided like the plague because I'm so finicky that I drive myself absolutely batty trying to align the two eyeballs so that the person looks like they're focusing on the right thing, but without looking cross-eyed or otherwise misaligned in the eyeball region. I still ended up making late adjustments to both eyes, but I guess I was okay with doing that because I felt good enough about the rest of the thing. And I never get the eyeballs lined up quite perfectly I don't think but do you want to know a secret? Look at the eyeballs in most any realistic-ish comic—I mean really look at 'em hard—and you'll see most of them, even from the top artists, are a bit out of whack! So that discovery a month or two ago made me feel better about the eyeball situation.
 
Anyway I promised you a nice landscape painting in oil from my ol' college days, so here we are, on 11"x14" canvas board:
 
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I guess it's more properly called a cityscape, come to think of it; it was the view, on a wintery afternoon in early 1996 I think, looking west-southwest over the south side of Chicago from the little second-floor painting studio I'd been assigned in a section of the rambling Lorado Taft Midway Studios, which is just about the south-westest part of the University of Chicago campus, separated from most of the rest of the university by the old Chicago Midway, a huge long grassy triple strip used as a vast showplace in the 1893 World Fair. Sculptor Lorado Zadoc Taft,
 
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image published by Bain News Service (source)
 
who led much of the sculptural effort put into the Fair, created the studio for himself from some old barns standing at the edge of the Midway in 1906. Here's a view east-north-east along the Midway, not too far from the site of those old barns:
 
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image by Google Maps (source)
 
I used to play ultimate frisbee there! But back to the barns: the ramshackley assortment of buildings joined together into a sculpting studio by Taft, made a National Historic Landmark in 1965, exists now, much enlarged into an even more ramshackley complex by the addition of later structures of all sizes, including this rather old manor house looking thing in front
 
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image by Google Maps (source)
 
as part of the U of C's Visual Arts area; in fact, when I was there in the mid-90s, it was *all* of the school's art complex. What you see of the linked complex itself in that photo is actually a bit smaller than what was there at the time, though, because several large painting studio rooms along the north-west side (the side of one of them is seen at the center right of my painting) have since been removed in favor of a massive new development of modern buildings for art curriculum that, from the looks of the aerial view on Google Maps, have at least quintupled the school's visual arts square footage since my time, carving their massive footprints out of the old brick apartment buildings and row houses that used to be there, and which still surround the visual arts complex west and south.
 
Anyway, my small painting studio was on the second floor of that big brick house-looking thing in the old complex, which at that time was something of a run-down old firetrap; the third floor was an unused ruin of paint chips. The second floor was a bit better, but still sufficiently decrepit that I could happily pretend I was some old time romantic painter working away in a rickety garret somewhere, with only a lonely sunset view over icy rooftops to cheer me up. Ah, that's the stuff! Anyway that sort of corrugated plastic skylight covered with snow in the painting is still there, I think—you can just see the top/side of it in the aerial view—but the painting studio beyond is gone, and the haunting old apartment building in the distance has been replaced by a big modern "Center for the Arts," from the looks of it. My view from the second floor was approximately along the line of the magenta arrow below:
 
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image modified from Google Maps (source)
 
Ah, those carefree olden days! Anyway there you go, next week we're back to our usual course of non-old-art blogging.
 
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Oh yeah I took a photo of the pencil stage for today's page:
 
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Notice how the eyeballs were a little more out of alignment at that point. ... I think. Actually at that point the eyes were a bit too far apart. Oh 'dem eyeballs! Now matter how you adjust them they'll inevitably look cross- or cock-eyed if you look at 'em too long, gar.
 
 
 
 
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