Harold's Sketchbook

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Visit Harold’s Sketchbook at www.haroldgraves.com

Happy Holidays everyone!  Here are some photos I made of the snow in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn; click on each photo to see a larger image:

28°F Friday December 18, 2009
S’posed to snow maybe tomorrow–need to water my plants–Wes Montgomery on the radio

Here are some photographs that I made during a recent visit to a beautiful area of western Massachusetts known as Khandroling:

New York City has received a great deal of rainy, cool weather this spring and summer so far.  Here are some views of the yard that I’ve been cultivating for the past 10 years:

Garden Tools and Drawing Tools: “how we go on”

Above:  two oil sketches on sized paper.

Below:  three watercolors.

I can’t imagine not having plants sitting around the studio.  An artist friend of mine named Moses Hoskins gave me a tip on growing avocados a few years ago, and I started this one in a coffee can.  I’m going to have to transplant it again soon.  It’s sitting on my rolling palette-table, which is just a ready-made tabouret fashioned from an old crate I’d found on the street in Manhattan some 15 years ago.  I screwed some caster-wheels onto the bottom and store my oil mediums in it.  It’s dimensions are identical to the size of my 12″ x 15″ Enigromatic Paintings, one of which is mounted to the side in this photo.

A few years ago I saw an exhibit of Picasso paintings at a gallery on 57th street that included an old palette that the artist had sitting in his studio when he died.  I was surprised to see how similar it was to this little crate that I’d found, with an old ceramic plate on top with black paint dried onto it, a brush still stuck to the paint.  It was one of the most moving things I’d seen from Picasso:  it reminded me of some of his guitar constructions somehow.

During my regular visits to Prospect Park, I usually bring my sketchbook and inks in my bicycle bag.  Here are a few brush drawings I made of the trees there: