I found my favourite photographer in the universe - Irving Penn

*In case the way I put it might be slightly confusing: No this is not Irving Penn lol*

I have a habit of googling images whenever I have time. I love drawing portraits of interesting people, but great pictures are really difficult to find. 

As someone who has been drawing (for 3 months ..lol), I can tell you no photograph beats the real thing. Be it still life or portraits, drawing at the actual environment with a natural light source allows the artists to make their own interpretation of the reality. You may hear people saying portraits are artistic representations of the painter, not the sitter. This is very true. The same object painted by 2 different painters must be different. 

Therefore, if someone draws photographs of people taken by someone else, you are actually reproducing the photographer's perspective, instead of creating your own.

This is exactly why art teacher hates his students drawing photographs. (despite I secretly make 2 sketches from photographs per week....lol )

I am very much aware of the shortcomings of drawing photographs, still I think it's a great way to train my skills especially when I have limited resources. But if you have to borrow someone's artistic eyes, make sure you borrow from someone great.

And I am glad I have finally found him.

Irving Penn

If you google Irving Penn what you can find out about him is extremely limited [ Ask Wiki =) ]. I have come across the name when I was looking for pictures of Yves Saint Laurent. And I was completely blown away. His photos were elegant, classic, extraordinary, lively, full of personality, with beautiful light against very simple background. They have everything I love, and everything that I am looking for. It's very difficult to explain why I love them sooooo so so so much. But I find all of his works are extremely captivating. 

As I glanced through his portfolio there were already quite a few photos that I can't wait to draw. And they will be coming really soon :)

Just don't tell my teacher

Duchess of Windsor by Irving Penn

What have I been drawing during Christmas

This is my latest Dali. Might look a little scary but this is exactly how I like it :-P

eyes, eyes, HUGE EYES...

I drew a few of my friends too :)

Dear Mr. Robin Williams

Watched "A night in the museum" on Christmas Eve and couldn't take my eyes off Robin Williams. He had the most beautiful blue eyes and the most amazing smile. 

There is no reason not to capture him in my sketchbook, now full of interesting people :)

Thank you so much for the great movies, dear Mr. Robin Williams

How do I understand art

Art is all about experiments and adventures, no rules, no guidelines. 

Art creates illusion that looks real, or reality that looks surreal.

The best art is always beautiful and ridiculous.  :)

And more Yves Saint Laurent :-P

Good news! Finally found time to draw in my busy December. I have been travelling, studying, reading, exercising...

Bad news, it's yet another Yves Saint Laurent.

I promised myself to move on to draw someone else. There are still a lot of interesting people around but apparently I can't take my eyes off YSL.

It looks like I am hopelessly in love with someone who's dead, and hopelessly gay. He was Prince Charming by definition.

Now read this paragraph from a book that I am reading:

From: The Beautiful Fall: Fashion, Genius, and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris

....And yes, Yves was famous for his beautiful, elegant, long and slender fingers.

More Yves Saint Laurent

 In 1971 YSL lanuched their first perfume for men. Yves Saint Laurent, the founder, designer and the owner of his brand YSL, posed nude for the advertisement. 

What shocked the public, was not only the controversial male nudity, but also his strikingly beautiful body.

At 35, Yves was young, successful, rich and beautiful. He had everything people wished for. But he was also one of the most depressed designers, indulging in drugs and alcohol, slowly killing himself (despite countless rumours about his death since his thirties, Yves passed away at 71, which was....errr..quite impressive)

Yves was known for appearing quiet, timid and nervous when he was younger (despite the fact that he was very good-looking). But he was in fact extremely daring. He made women wearing man's clothes and completely rocked it. He was also proudly gay. 

The human community generally punish people who are different. But Yves was fearless, and being fiercely different is beautiful. 

Apart from Yves, many other top designers like Christian Dior, Coco Chanel also have fascinating life stories that inspire people. It's sad that when people speak of their names nowadays they only refer to the luxury brands. What's truly luxurious, however, is the geniuses' brain. 

***[Updated 7 Dec 2014]***

OK I am addicted. No wonder they call their famous perfume opium. 

I have to stay up till 2:00 a.m. to finish this sketch :p

Yves was just beautiful.

A 50 years snapshot of Yves Saint Laurent

I watched Saint Laurent the movie this weekend with a dear friend of mine. If you're interested and want to watch it as well, make sure you pick someone that is equally interested and shares the same value in life with you. The couple right next to us, fell sound asleep 5 mins into the movie and wasted 3 hours of their lives, literally.

Don't get me wrong it was not a boring movie at all. And I love it more than any movie I've watched in 2014, including the very popular Interstellar (tho I love it very much too). The movie, as the name suggested, was all about Yves Saint Laurent. And I am not going to tell you anything more about it...puahaha.

Instead, my movie review will be done in a form of drawing. This is Yves Saint Laurent in his twenties and seventies.

A genius's 50 years. How precious.
What had changed, what stayed the same?

The hourglass of Dali

After my Duchamp sketch below, I immediately made another Dali Sketch. The earlier drawings of Dali was actually the VERY FIRST portrait I drew in my entire life. And it's now quite embarrassing to look at... (See Dali [1] and Dali [2], although Dali 2 was more a cartoon than a drawing.)

So I started searching for photos of Dali again. The reason why I am so obsessed with him is that there are a lot of interesting photos available, from being young and handsome, to becoming more mature (with his mustache growing ever longer). 

My friends (the very few who bother to know who Dali is)
disagreed that he was handsome. Now look at this.

And This.

(It could possibly make a good Calvin Klein Commercial)

And he got crazier....

.....crazier

.....and yet, crazier....

As I keep searching, I found some rare photos of Dali during his last years. They touched my heart, so deeply that I couldn't help but made another sketch of Dali after midnight...

If you think of Dali, you think of his signature mustache and his huge eyes, full of life, full of energy, full of confidence. It made him a very unique person, very Dali. However the Dali here looked almost vulnerable. He was probably in his seventies. And the intense power in his eyes, that once made him the most fascinating person to look at, has left him.

However rich, however beautiful, however invincible you are,

you will have to face the eventual decline of life. 

Time is cruel, and it's just as cruel to me as to you.

Everybody is equally helpless.

Dali's most famous painting, "The persistence of memory" was about time. If it's the first time you look at this painting, I resist the urge to tell you the academic interpretations of his work. Surrealism is to be felt, not to be explained anyways.

Salvador Dali, 1931
The persistence of memory, oil on canvas

This is probably one of the last pictures of Dali I can find online. His mustache now grew all white. His fierce stare was nowhere to be seen. Dali , for the first time, looked calm and relaxed in a photo.

To balance out the unusual seriousness of this post, I decided to make a cartoon of this picture. XD

Everybody will eventually be memories of the others, 

but every breath you take is a miracle of yourself.

So make it count.

THE VERY CREEPY MARCEL DUCHAMP

Drew Marcel Duchamp last night, left it on the table when finished and freaked me out before I went to bed....hahaha (I guess it means I did a pretty decent job? lol)

There were so many interesting things about Mr. Duchamp I don't really know where to begin.

First of all, He could look very creepy in pictures...

*VERY VERY VERY CREEPY*

He was famous for making a very mean parody of Mona Lisa. He gave the classic beauty a mustache and wrote L.H.O.O.Q. underneath.

In French, L.H.O.O.Q reads "L-(L)ASH-(SH)O-O-KU", which sounds very much like "Elle a chaud au cul", meaning......

"She has a hot ass"

I guess you can imagine why the academics were not very happy....lol

He dressed himself like a woman, and called her Rrose Selavy. In French it sounds like "Eros, c'est la vie" (Eros, this is life)............

Let's meet Ms. Selavy........

No matter what do you think about Mr. Duchamp, you have to thank god for creating interesting people like him, so that the world can be full of surprises :)

 

Pablo Picasso, the eternal kidult

Survived past 91 years old, Picasso was undeniably the most famous, most successful, and probably the richest artist of all time. He started to get famous when he was still in his twenties. People at his time were already crazy about his works.

You can find a lot of photos of Picasso online. And if you study them one by one, it's not difficult to realize the consistent playfulness in his eyes, no matter how old he got, and how seriously he posed. The picture I chose to draw was very likely taken under bright sunlight, that forced Mr. Picasso to frown. Despite all seriousness, you do not see a hint of sadness. (He was probably just putting his game face on :p )

If you look at his less serious photos, do you see the kid inside of him? 

"It takes a long time to grow young." 

"Youth has no age."

-Pablo Picasso

My sketchbook's VIP, Dear Mr. Vincent Willem Van Gogh

Whatever list that I am making cannot be complete without him.

Everyone who knows me understands how much I love him, so much that I traveled 10,000 km to where he lived and died in France.

He's also the reason why I love sunflower, and making it the header of my blog.

"Seek the sun", as in keep looking on the bright side of life, like a sunflower.

(tho our dear Vincent seemed nowhere near being "cheerful" :p )

Sketch of my new hero - Mr. Oscar Wilde

It's not the first time my friends said I might have "met" more dead people than living ones in Paris. No it was not (completely lol) true.

I did make some effort to get to the tombs of some awesome people that I like a lot. But my collection was not complete because I missed Pere Lachaise, where rested the soul of Oscar Wilde, among many other brilliant minds.

I can still remember it was a gloomy late afternoon in early October. The wind was chill, the sky was dark with layers of gray roiling clouds. The cemetery was just closed when I got there. Disappointed, I decided to linger a little longer. The neighborhood was so quiet that I felt slightly uneasy being the only person standing in front of the firmly closed iron gate. And suddenly, a vast throng of crows rose out of nowhere... 

OUTSIDE Pere Lachaise, Paris

OK. Enough of ghost story setting :p 

Now back to Oscar Wilde. I have to confess the first time I have come across the name was when I watched "Paris Je t'aime", 24 hours before I was on the plane flying to Europe this Sep. The witty quotes definitely caught my attention:

"How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being"  

*I really really love this quote

"This wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. Either it goes or I do."
*Can you imagine someone cracked this joke when he was on his dying bed..?!

This was widely believed to be Mr. Wilde's last words, when he was dying painfully in a tiny cheap hotel room in France. 

Oscar Wilde vs Alexander Payne playing him in Paris Je t'aime

Before I googled his picture I actually expected Mr. Wilde to look a lot crazier because he said "life is too important to be taken seriously". To my surprise, he looked perfectly like an intelligent English Irish gentleman (I later read that he disliked being identified as an English). 

So here is my sketch of my new hero :)

I guess I now have every reason to visit Paris again in the near future.

Profile of an old man

Everything about this old man is so beautiful that I have to make him one of my sketchbook collections (among the interesting artists). The wrinkles, the bridge of the nose, the eyes and how the light hit the face are all so perfect. It seems to me he jumped directly out from the canvas of a classical painting (if you're interested, keep reading). The white beard is beautiful too but I decided to omit the details in my drawing. I will let your imagination fill in the blanks.

Errrr.....No I am not lazy, I'd call it artistic exclusion of the unnecessary....*ahem* :p

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There seems to be something magical about old men with white beard. Artists love them. This is a painting by Rembrandt in 1630. I know it's going to make my drawing look extremely stupid when it's shown right next to the work of a Dutch master best known for portraits. But I am just going to show you how beautiful an old man can be.

This is an interesting painting because Rembrandt did not sign his work (he normally did!). The painter remained anonymous until X-ray revealed a self-portrait of the young Rembrandt hidden underneath the paint... tricky artist :p [Read here]

You can never have too much Andy Warhol

(Supposed to be) Andy Warhol

He's supposed to be another mad artist but he doesn't look quite mad down here LOL.

But I always love his eyes, so intelligent they look almost cruel.

Young and handsome Dali

I feel slightly sorry for depicting our Dali as a mad uncle in the previous entry. The fact is, when Dali was younger and decided to look a little more like the rest of us. He was, indeed, a handsome Spanish.

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I started learning drawing not long ago and I am sure at some point in the future I am going to be embarrassed by the works I posted publicly today lol.

But well, if it happens it will only mean I am making progress right? Right?? :p

Are you sure Mr. Dali???

"The only difference between 

me and a madman is that..."

The insanity in his eyes, is timelessly beautiful....LOL
 

If you have no idea who Dali is READ HERE. Simply speaking he was a prominent modern artist who was extremely creative with superb classical painting skills.  But if you google Salvador Dali you'd probably find more cross-eyed photos of him looking like my sketch above than his artworks. And yes his moustache was real. 

I love both his personality and his talents...well actually his personality more. I love drawing people who showed intense emotions: kindness, sadness, happiness and especially madness. I have a collection of mad people in my sketchbook and Mr. Dali is definitely one of my favourites. 

Oops did I just say he is mad...? :p

We are making history

No I am not going to talk about politics and what exactly is happening in Hong Kong. You'd probably know more than I do: we're making international headlines everyday ever since when I was still in Europe in late Sept. Some people call the incidence "occupy Central". But it is not exactly Central that is occupied so others call it "occupy Hong Kong". More commonly, however, it's referred to as "Umbrella Revolution Movement". (Why umbrella? read here)

As someone who lives and works right next to the occupied sites, I have to tell you it's very difficult to classify what kind of movement it is. The pictures were taken first hand at the sites and I will let them do the talking :-$