Public Art by Dale Rogers, Belleville, IL

“Public Art, Belleville, IL, 05/08/2015;” watercolor on Canson 140lb cold press sketch book, Michael Anderson.

“Flight,” a temporary public art installation by sculptor Dale Rogers landed on the campus of Southwestern Illinois College last month.  Nine stainless steel birds with 12 foot wing spans supported in 16’ high steel frames were arranged in a serpentine line along both sides of the street leading to the campus quad. Although it was a cloudy day when I visited the exhibit the polished steel birds still reflected the sky and their surrounding environment making them visually active and interesting. “Flight” debuted as an installation at ArtPrize 2012 in Grand Rapids, MI, winning a “Best Use of Urban Space” award. In his artist’s statement Rogers says “Art is a catalyst for thought, conversation and connection...” I think that is a perfect description of urban sketching as well.

Here is a link to a gallery of photos of Flight from the sculptor's website  http://dalerogersstudio.com/exhibits/flight/

Digital Sketching Demo, Art On the Square, Belleville, IL

 Art On the Square, one of the first art fairs of the year in the St. Louis area takes place the weekend after Mothers Day in Belleville, IL, my hometown. In previous years I have been an exhibitor and in 2011 created a watercolor for the fair's official poster. Each year our local artists' guild has a tented booth in which members provide live demonstrations of their work throughout all three days of the festival. This year my demonstration was live urban sketching on an iPad mounted to a tripod. I connected it to a monitor which visitors could watch as I sketched. The sketch at the top was made using an app called Paper 53 and the app's blue tooth powered stylus called Pencil. Paper and Pencil are very natural sketching tools in that your work is made in virtual sketchbooks in which the pages turn. It does not utilize other digital painting devices like layers, filters, hue & saturation settings, etc. The metaphor is an elegant one.

This image was made with an app called Brushes. Brushes does have layers, brush dynamics and many other digital painting capabilities much like Photoshop. In fact for this piece I stepped out into the street and snapped a photo with the iPad camera and loaded the image into Brushes as the bottom layer of my sketch. After painting over the reference image for a start I turned the photo off and finished the sketch with brighter colors, lost and found edges, simpler shapes & other painterly tricks. I ordinarily prefer not to work that way but this was a demo. My purpose was to show the differences in the apps, capabilities of the device and the fun of urban sketching, showing the world one drawing at a time.

Mike sketching on iPad at Art On the Square, 2015. Photo by Roger Popwell.