Exploring The World Down The Street

Update 1 XI 2023: This painting found a new home with a dear old friend of mine from way back in the nineties in Prague. Thank you for supporting me and my art 🙂

Thanks to COVID-19 (which I thankfully don’t have, yet) and a few other serious health problems (which I am currently wrestling with), I’m unable to go outside to sketch these days. That doesn’t make the visual feast of Prague any less alluring to embrace through sketching. This is from a photo that my wife snapped the other day down the street.

Dominican Court

Dominican Court, Prague (Braník)

Since being rebuilt in 1689, after having been destroyed in the Thirty Years’ War, this structure has been used as a chapel, a brewery (several times), a walled farm, a police station, and as a cinema complex. It became abandoned shortly after the most recent brewery there failed in 1907 and is now boarded up and dilapidated with only three of its four walls still standing. Now it serves as a dangerous and spooky abandoned structure for preteens (and older) to illegally investigate Indiana Jones style and as a canvas for budding graffiti artists.

Recently there has been talk of renovating the structure yet again and repurposing it as a Waldorf school. 🙂

Demolition (which had first been proposed in the 1950’s) is also on the table. 🙁

Dominikánský Dvůr

The Persistence of Cat Clouds Cloud the Elision of the Clouds of All That Other Stuff

Unsuccessfully Trying to Ignore Our Cats in graphite.
This was supposed to be just a warm up with focusing solely on S curves and gradients.

No cats.
Apparently, I lost on multiple fronts here.

That “other stuff” being eluded is still there blossoming and insists on being dealt with. God knows, I’m wrestling with figuring out how they might be embraced and expressed to the extent that I find myself not able to post anything while futzing over them.

So .., for now, the cats win. Yay 😀.

I’m going back to futzing.