Tag: drawing

José Naranja

José Naranja: Sketchbooks

José Naranja beautifully detailed sketchbooks by collaging elements of photography, writing, stamps, and his own precise drawings of everything from poison mushrooms to a bird’s eye view of his dream studio. The ex-aeronautic engineer began working with sketchbooks after he discovered pocket-size Moleskine notebooks in 2005 and realized they were the perfect vessel to document his daily experiences and develop his wildest ideas. After 13 years of using the same style of notebook, Naranja now crafts his own by hand.

“It creates a special link between my journals and me. Drawings of calligraphy are just useful tools to express ideas They are the visible layer in the whole notebook as a piece, a mandala, and it’s the final artwork. Every detail in the process should be taken into consideration because I give the best effort. At the moment they have given me back only good news.”- José Naranja

The sketchbook artist also sells edited copies of his best work in a compilation called “The Orange Manuscript”, which you can find on his website.

Hendrik Goltzius

Hendrik Goltzius, “Alexander and Bucephalus (Quirinal)”,  1590-1591, Red Chalk on Paper, Teylers Museum, Haarlem, Netherlands

Hendrik Goltzius made a long-awated journey to italy in 1590 when he was in his early thirties and already an established significant Dutch artist. He wanted to create a series of engravings of classical works like his Farnese Hercules. This is one of his original Roman drawings for the engravings that were acquired by Queen Christiana of Sweden and given later to the Teylers Museum in Haarlem.

Bucephalus, (ox-head in Greek), was Alexander the Great’s massive horse, one of the most famous horses in antiquity. The horse died from fatal injuries at the Battle of the Hydaspes in June 326 BCC in which Alexander’s army defeated King Porus of the now Punjab region of India.

Charles Dellschau

The Sketchbook of Charles Dellschau

Charles Dellschau was an American butcher who lived between 1830 and 1923. He was a part of the Sonora Aero Club, a group of men that met to discuss and design flying machines. According to his diaries one of the members of this seceret society had discovered the formula for an anti-gravity fuel he called “NB Gas.” The aim of the group was to design flying machines that would use this anti-gravity fuel.

Dellschau was a draftsman for the club, designing a variety of fantastic flying machines for the group. After his death, all of his art works were discarded, but used furniture dealer rescued the notebooks and drawings and took them to his warehouse, where they sat forgotten for several years under a pile of discarded carpet. A university student asked the furniture dealer if she could use some of Dellschau’s notebooks as part of a display on the history of flight.

The drawings were a hit, inspiring the imagination and creating a sense of wonder in onlookers. Years after his death, Dellschau’s art works received the recognition they so deserved. Now his antique illustrations are celebrated for their inventiveness, artistic appeal and for simply being marvellous.

Antonio Sant’ Elia

Antonio Sant’ Elia, Architectural Drawings and Computer Realizations

On October 10, 1916, Antonio Sant’Elia died fighting Austro-Hungarian forces at the eighth Battle of the Isonzo near Monfalcone on the Adriatic coast. The Italian architect was just 28 years old and left behind only one completed building, his Villa Elisi in Brunate, outside of Como.

Anyone who has seen Fritz Lang’s classic silent film Metropolis (1927) or watched Harrison Ford hunt replicants in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) is already familiar with Sant’Elia’s imaginative vision of the city of the future. His fantastical designs inspired the visual worlds of those two films, and even today, 100 years after his death, the future he envisioned still resonates.

The work Sant’Elia is best known for—Città Nuova or “New City” in Italian—came with machine-like superstructures, stepped skyscrapers interlaced with suspended walkways and highway overpasses. Designed between 1912 and 1914, it was intended to be the architectural remedy to Modernism’s perceived disconnect from lived experience.

Sant’Elia believed that the primary task of a city in the industrial age should be to facilitate movement in the most efficient way possible. For his Città Nuova, he proposed three levels of traffic according to vehicle and speed: pedestrian overpasses, roads for cars, and tracks for tramways. These, along with vertical elevator shafts, were the only traffic arteries in the city. Sant’Elia also proposed that the city exist in a state of continuous construction. “We must invent and rebuild the…city,” he wrote. “It must be like an immense, tumultuous, lively, noble work site, dynamic in all its parts.”

Peter de Francia

Paintings and Drawings by Peter de Francia

Peter Laurent de Francia was a French-born British artist, who served as Professor of Painting at the Royal College of Art (RCA), London, from 1972 to 1986. He was the author of two books on Fernand Leger: Leger: The Great Parade (Painters on Painting) (1969) and Fernand Léger (1983).

Brought up “mostly by servants” in Paris, Peter de Francia was the only child of a wealthy corporate lawyer of Genoese descent and his English wife. He attended the Brussels Academy and, after four years in the army, the Slade.  However, his real education was in Italy, in the reawakening of neo-Realism and in the studio of the Communist artist Renato Guttuso, whose denunciatory drawings ‘Got Mit Uns’ were a lifelong influence. When de Francia arrived in England in 1940, he knew almost no one. He would remain for more than 60 years a Displaced Person, fundamentally opposed to all the British art establishment stood for.

Peter de Francia met both Beckmann and Grosz in New York in 1950. His identification with the late figure compositions of Léger was evident in his impassioned essay on The Great Parade, published in the RCA’s “Painters on Painting” series in 1969. Those three artists all pointed towards linearity; and it was in large-scale complex charcoal drawings, rather than paintings, that de Francia found his mature expression.

James Allen

James Allen, “Old Broad Street, L Street Station”, Drawing, 2013

James Allen studied Fine Art Printmaking at BA and MA Level at Canterbury Christ Church University before completing The Drawing Year at The Prince’s Drawing School (now the Royal Drawing School). Selected Group Exhibitions include the RA Summer Exhibition, ING Discerning Eye and the Jerwood Drawing Prize.

The focus of James’s work is the activity of the human form corresponding with architectural surroundings, with high levels of movement from the figure working in conjunction with the building’s structural solidity. Drawing is the essential language that fuels his creative practice with the need to record and expose time.