Charcoal Painting Quotes

What she needs are stories. Stories are a way to preserve one's self. To be remembered. And to forget. Stories come in so many forms: in charcoal, and in song, in paintings, poems, films. And books. Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.

Why not spend that time on art: painting, sculpting, charcoal, pastel, oils? Are words or numbers more important than images? Who decides this? Does algebra move you to tears? Can plural possessives express the feelings in your heart? If you don't learn art now, you will never learn to breathe!

A story isn't a charcoal sketch, where every stroke lies on the surface to be seen. It's an oil painting, filled with layers that the author must uncover so carefully to show its beauty.

Magnus? Magnus Bane?” “That would be me.” The man blocking the doorway was as tall and thin as a rail, his hair a crown of dense back spikes. Clary guessed from the curse of his sleepy eyes and the gold tone of his evenly tanned skin that he was part Asian. He wore jeans and a black shirt covered with dozens of metal buckles. His eyes were crusted with a raccoon mask of charcoal glitter, his lips painted a dark shade of blue. He raked a ring-laden hand through his spiked hair and regarded them thoughtfully. “Children of the Nephilim,” he said. “Well, well. I don’t recall inviting you. I must have been drunk.

Stories come in so many forms: in charcoal, and in song, in paintings, poems, films. And books.

She’d never held much of an interest in art, but looking at him now, her fingers itched for some paint, for some charcoal, for anything that could capture his near-perfect angles.

I was reading about animals a while back and there was this motherfucking scientist in France back in the thirties or forties or whenever the motherfuck it was and he was trying to get apes to draw these pictures, to make art pictures like the kinds of pictures in serious motherfucking paintings that you see in museums and shit. So the scientist keeps showing the apes these paintings and giving them charcoal pencils to draw with and then one day one of the apes finally draws something but it’s not the art pictures that it draws. What it draws is the bars of its own motherfucking cage. Its own motherfucking cage! Man, that's the truth, ain't it?

Now I contradict myself. Picasso he do too. He say pull out your brain, yes, he also say, 'Painting is a blind man's profession' and 'To draw you must close your eyes and sing'. And Michelangelo, he say he sculpts with his brains, not his eyes. Yes. Everything is true at once. Life is contradiction, we take in every lesson we find what works. Okay, now pick up the charcoal and draw.

Anyone could buy a green Jaguar, find beauty in a Japanese screen two thousand years old. I would rather be a connoisseur of neglected rivers and flowering mustard and the flush of iridescent pink on an intersection pigeon's charcoal neck. I thought of the vet, warming dinner over a can, and the old woman feeding her pigeons in the intersection behind the Kentucky Fried Chicken. And what about the ladybug man, the blue of his eyes over gray threaded black? There were me and Yvonne, Niki and Paul Trout, maybe even Sergei or Susan D. Valeris, why not? What were any of us but a handful of weeds. Who was to say what our value was? What was the value of four Vietnam vets playing poker every afternoon in front of the Spanish market on Glendale Boulevard, making their moves with a greasy deck missing a queen and a five? Maybe the world depended on them, maybe they were the Fates, or the Graces. Cezanne would have drawn them in charcoal. Van Gogh would have painted himself among them.

Stories come in so many forms: in charcoal, and in song, in paintings, poems, films. And books. Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.

She has no interest in the composition from ten or twenty feet—that will come later. What she wants is topography, the impasto, the furrows where sable hairs were dragged into tiny painted crests to catch the light. Or the stray line of charcoal or chalk, glimpsed beneath a glaze that’s three hundred years old. She’s been known to take a safety pin and test the porosity of the paint and then bring the point to her tongue. Since old-world grounds contain gesso, glue, and something edible—honey, milk, cheese—the Golden Age has a distinctively sweet or curdled taste. She is always careful to avoid the leads and the cobalts. What

An uninterrupted view of the Paris skyline was spread out before her, like a giant landscape painting rendered in shades of blue-grey, charcoal and purple-tinted umber; the dreamy palette of shifting shadows at twilight. The blue hour.

Perhaps we painted on our own skin, with ochre and charcoal, long before we painted on stone.

Writing is like a charcoal painting, a black and white story

No I contradict myself. Picasso he do too. He say pull out your brain, yes, he also say, 'Painting is a blind man's profession' and 'To draw you must close your eyes and sing.' And Michelangelo, he say he sculpts with his brains, not his eyes. Yes. Everything ia true at once. Life is contradiction. We take in every lesson. We find what works. Okay, now pick up the charcoal and draw.

What she needs are stories. Stories are a way to preserve one’s self. To be remembered. And to forget. Stories come in so many forms: in charcoal, and in song, in paintings, poems, films. And books. Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.

Ethanol is a volatile, flammable, colourless liquid with a slight chemical odour. It is used as an antiseptic, a solvent, in medical wipes and antibacterial formulas because it kills organisms by denaturing their proteins. Ethanol is an important industrial ingredient. Ethanol is a good general purpose solvent and is found in paints, tinctures, markers and personal care products such as perfumes and deodorants. The largest single use of ethanol is as an engine fuel and fuel additive. In other words, we drink, for fun, the same thing we use to make rocket fuel, house paint, anti-septics, solvents, perfumes, and deodorants and to denature, i.e. to take away the natural properties of, or kill, living organisms. Which might make sense on some level if we weren’t a generation of green minded, organic, health-conscious, truth seeking individuals. But we are. We read labels, we shun gluten, dairy, processed foods, and refined sugars. We buy organic, we use natural sunscreen and beauty products. We worry about fluoride in our water, smog in our air, hydrogenated oils in our food, and we debate whether plastic bottles are safe to drink from. We replace toxic cleaning products with Mrs. Myers and homemade vinegar concoctions. We do yoga, we run, we SoulCycle and Fitbit, we go paleo and keto, we juice, we cleanse. We do coffee enemas and steam our yonis, and drink clay and charcoal, and shoot up vitamins, and sit in infrared foil boxes, and hire naturopaths, and shamans, and functional doctors, and we take nootropics and we stress about our telomeres. These are all real words. We are hyper-vigilant about everything we put into our body, everything we do to our body, and we are proud of this. We Instagram how proud we are of this, and we follow Goop and Well+Good, and we drop 40 bucks on an exercise class because there are healing crystals in the floor. The global wellness economy is estimated to be worth $4 trillion. $4 TRILLION DOLLARS. We are on an endless and expensive quest for wellness and vitality and youth. And we drink fucking rocket fuel.

I loved so many things about him: that his fingers were always stained with paint or charcoal; his casual sense of humor and that he was loyal, to the end—even when I had lied so many times. He pursed his lips, highlighting his high and prominent cheekbones.

Stories are a way to presave one's self. To be remembered. And to ferget. Stories come in so many forms: in charcoal, and in song, in paintings, films. And books. Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives - or to find strength in a very long one.

What she needs are stories. Stories are a way to preserve one's self. To be remembered. And to forget. Stories come in so many forms: in charcoal, and in song, in paintings, poems, films. And books. Books, she has found are a way to live a thousand lives - or to find strength in a very long one.

Stories come in so many forms: in charcoal, and in song, in paintings, poems, films. And books. Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives.

Stories are a way to preserve one’s self. To be remembered. And to forget. Stories come in so many forms: in charcoal, and in song, in paintings, poems, films. And books.

What she needs are stories. Stories are a way to preserve one’s self. To be remembered. And to forget. Stories come in so many forms: in charcoal, and in song, in paintings, poems, films. And books.

On Himmel Street, he was considered a little crazy. This was on account of an event that was rarely spoken about but widely regarded as “The Jesse Owens Incident,” in which he painted himself charcoal black and ran the 100 meters at the local playing field one night.

Stories are a way to preserve one’s self. To be remembered. And to forget. Stories come in so many forms: in charcoal, and in song, in paintings, poems, films. And books. Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.

Stories are a way to preserve one’s self. To be remembered. And to forget. Stories come in so many forms: in charcoal, and in song, in paintings, poems, films. And books. Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives – or to find strength in a very long one.

Perhaps we painted on our own skin, with ochre and charcoal, long before we painted on stone. In any case, forty thousand years ago, we left painted handprints on the cave walls of Lascaux, Ardennes, Chauvet. The black pigment used to paint the animals at Lascaux was made of manganese dioxide and ground quartz; and almost half the mixture was calcium phosphate. Calcium phosphate is produced by heating bone four hundred degrees Celsius, then grinding it. We made our paints from bones of the animals we painted. No image forgets this origin.

What she needs are stories. Stories are a way to preserve one's self. To be remembered. And to forget. Stories come in so many forms: in charcoal, and in song, in paintings, poems, films. And books. Books, she was found, are a way to live a thousand lives - or to find strength in a very long one.

eyes were heavily rimmed and ringed with charcoal, reminding me of a program I’d watched recently about lemurs. My lips were painted the color of Earl Haig poppies. “Well,” she said, “what do you think?” “I look like a small Madagascan primate, or perhaps a North American raccoon,” I said. “It’s charming!

Why do you choose to write about such gruesome subjects? I usually answer this with another question: Why do you assume that I have a choice? Writing is a catch-as-catch-can sort of occupation. All of us seem to come equipped with filters on the floors of our minds, and all the filters have differing sizes and meshes. What catches in my filter may run right through yours. What catches in yours may pass through mine, no sweat. All of us seem to have a built-in obligation to sift through the sludge that gets caught in our respective mind-filters, and what we find there usually develops into some sort of sideline. The accountant may also be a photographer. The astronomer may collect coins. The school-teacher may do gravestone rubbings in charcoal. The sludge caught in the mind's filter, the stuff that refuses to go through, frequently becomes each person's private obsession. In civilized society we have an unspoken agreement to call our obsessions “hobbies.” Sometimes the hobby can become a full-time job. The accountant may discover that he can make enough money to support his family taking pictures; the schoolteacher may become enough of an expert on grave rubbings to go on the lecture circuit. And there are some professions which begin as hobbies and remain hobbies even after the practitioner is able to earn his living by pursuing his hobby; but because “hobby” is such a bumpy, common-sounding little word, we also have an unspoken agreement that we will call our professional hobbies “the arts.” Painting. Sculpture. Composing. Singing. Acting. The playing of a musical instrument. Writing. Enough books have been written on these seven subjects alone to sink a fleet of luxury liners. And the only thing we seem to be able to agree upon about them is this: that those who practice these arts honestly would continue to practice them even if they were not paid for their efforts; even if their efforts were criticized or even reviled; even on pain of imprisonment or death. To me, that seems to be a pretty fair definition of obsessional behavior. It applies to the plain hobbies as well as the fancy ones we call “the arts”; gun collectors sport bumper stickers reading YOU WILL TAKE MY GUN ONLY WHEN YOU PRY MY COLD DEAD FINGERS FROM IT, and in the suburbs of Boston, housewives who discovered political activism during the busing furor often sported similar stickers reading YOU'LL TAKE ME TO PRISON BEFORE YOU TAKE MY CHILDREN OUT OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD on the back bumpers of their station wagons. Similarly, if coin collecting were outlawed tomorrow, the astronomer very likely wouldn't turn in his steel pennies and buffalo nickels; he'd wrap them carefully in plastic, sink them to the bottom of his toilet tank, and gloat over them after midnight.

[Louis] knew on some level that fame is not the story we tell; it is the story the world tells us. And the world was telling Louis it wanted to see itself reflected in gouache and charcoal of painted calico; that the human eye longed to trust the illusion of likeness. Render perfectly a meadow at dusk, a horizon at dawn, and people will love you for it. For giving them something they didn't know they already had.

The woman laughed again. She was the loudest person in the cave. Eena wondered if perhaps she was talking to a female Ghengat. Curiosity got the best of her and she turned around to look, surprised to find neither a Ghengat nor a Harrowbethian woman, but a Mishmorat. A striking, cheetah-spotted Mishmorat with straight lengths of charcoal hair and the most alluring dark eyes in existence. This bronzed female was the same size as Eena but observably more muscular. She appeared to be a mix of cheetah, Arabian princess, and gladiator in tight-fitting pants. Eena paused, dropping the stone in her hands. “Kira?” she breathed. “Hmmm,” the woman grumbled. Her painted eyes scrunched with displeasure. The look was still stunning. “I see my reputation precedes me.” Eena gawked as if a legendary ghost had been resurrected. “You’re alive?

Magnus? Magnus Bane?” “That would be me.” The young man blocking the doorway was as tall and thin as a rail, his hair a crown of dense black spikes. He was Asian, with an elegantly high-cheekboned, handsome face, broad-shouldered despite his slim frame. He was certainly dressed for a party, in tight jeans and a black shirt covered with dozens of metal buckles. His eyes were crusted with a raccoon mask of charcoal glitter, his lips painted a dark shade of blue.

He says we will graduate knowing how to read and write because we'll spend a million hours learning how to read and write. "Why not spend that time on art: painting, sculpting, charcoal, pastel, oils? Are words or numbers more important than images? Who decided this? Does algebra move you to tears?" (Hands raise, thinking he wants answers.) "Can the plural possessive express the feelings in your heart? If you don't learn art now, you will never learn to breathe!!!

and this is what she’s settled on: she can go without food (she will not wither). she can go without heat (the cold will not kill her). but a life without art, without wonder, without beautiful things—she would go mad. she has gone mad. what she needs are stories. stories are a way to preserve one’s self. to be remembered. and to forget. stories come in so many forms: in charcoal, and in song, in paintings, poems, films. and books. books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.

The deer in procession resemble charcoal cave paintings rendered manifest. Art's magic working backwards. The chalk behind them, bone. And not the hare runs, too. The hare runs in the opposite direction to the deer. The animals runs, and the landscape seems then to be parting in front of me. Deer one way, hare the other. And now they are quite gone: the hare to the fieldmargin at the top of the hill to my left, the deer into the wood at the top of the hill to my right. There is nothing before me now but wind and chalk and wheat.

It was Day Three, Freshman Year, and I was a little bit lost in the school library,looking for a bathroom that wasn't full of blindingly shiny sophomores checking their lip gloss. Day Three.Already pretty clear on the fact that I would be using secondary bathrooms for at least the next three years,until being a senior could pass for confidence.For the moment, I knew no one,and was too shy to talk to anyone. So that first sight of Edward: pale hair that looked like he'd just run his hands through it, paint-smeared white shirt,a half smile that was half wicked,and I was hooked. Since, "Hi,I'm Ella.You look like someone I'd like to spend the rest of my life with," would have been totally insane, I opted for sitting quietly and staring.Until the bell rang and I had to rush to French class,completely forgetting to pee. Edward Willing.Once I knew his name, the rest was easy.After all,we're living in the age of information. Wikipedia, iPhones, 4G ntworks, social networking that you can do from a thousand miles away.The upshot being that at any given time over the next two years, I could sit twenty feet from him in the library, not saying a word, and learn a lot about him.ENough, anyway, for me to become completely convinced that the Love at First Sight hadn't been a fluke. It's pretty simple.Edward matched four and a half of my If My Prince Does, In Fact, Come Someday,It Would Be Great If He Could Meet These Five Criteria. 1. Interested in art. For me, it's charcoal. For Edward, oil paint and bronze. That's almost enough right there. Nice lips + artist= Ella's prince. 2. Not afraid of love. He wrote, "Love is one of two things worth dying for.I have yet to decide on the second." 3.Or of telling the truth. "How can I believe that other people say if I lie to them?" 4.Hot. Why not?I can dream. 5.Daring. Mountain climbing, cliff dying, defying the parents. Him, not me. I'm terrified of an embarrassing number of things, including heights, convertibles, moths, and those comedians everyone loves who stand onstage and yell insults at the audience. 5, subsection a. Daring enough to take a chance on me.Of course, in the end, that No. 5a is the biggie. And the problem. No matter how muuch I worshipped him,no matter how good a pair we might have been,it was never, ever going to happen. To be fair to Edward,it's not like he was given an opportunity to get to know me. I'm not stupid.I know there are a few basic truths when it comes to boys and me. Truth: You have to talk to a boy-really talk,if you want him to see past the fact that you're not beautiful. Truth: I'm not beautiful. Or much of a conversationalist. Truth: I'm not entirely sure that the stuff behind the not-beautiful is going to be all that alluring, either. And one written-in-stone, heartbreaking truth about this guy. Truth:Edward Willing died in 1916.

For years, he devoted the whole of his energy, twelve hours a day, seven days a week, to mathematics. He did not read newspapers, watch television or go to the cinema. He liked ugly women, squalid apartments, dilapidated rooms. He worked cloistered in a cold office with flaking paint falling from the walls, his back turned to the only window, with pen and paper on his desk and only four objects as decoration: his mother’s death mask, a small wire sculpture of a goat, a jar of Spanish olives, and a charcoal portrait of his father, drawn in Le Vernet concentration camp.

Ye examined Feng. The kerosene lamp was a wonderful artist and created a classical painting with dignified colors and bright strokes: Feng had her coat draped over her shoulders, exposing her red belly-band, and a strong, graceful arm. The glow from the kerosene lamp painted her figure with vivid, warm colors, while the rest of the room dissolved into a gentle darkness. Close attention revealed a dim red glow, which didn't come from the kerosene lamp, but the heating charcoal on the ground. The cold air outside sculpted beautiful ice patterns on the windowpanes with the room's warm, humid air.

You are like me, you will die too, but not today: you, incommensurate, therefore the hours shine: if I say to you “To you I say,” you have not been set to music, or broadcast live on the ghost radio, may never be an oil painting or Old Master’s charcoal sketch: you are a concordance of person, number, voice, and place, strawberries spread through your name as if it were budding shrubs, how you remind me of some spring, the waters as cool and clear (late rain clings to your leaves, shaken by light wind), which is where you occur in grassy moonlight: and you are a lily, an aster, white trillium or viburnum, by all rights mine, white star in the meadow sky, the snow still arriving from its earthwards journeys, here where there is no snow (I dreamed the snow was you, when there was snow), you are my right, have come to be my night (your body takes on the dimensions of sleep, the shape of sleep becomes you): and you fall from the sky with several flowers, words spill from your mouth in waves, your lips taste like the sea, salt-sweet (trees and seas have flown away, I call it loving you): home is nowhere, therefore you, a kind of dwell and welcome, song after all, and free of any eden we can name.

She took out a charcoal stick and began to sketch-- on the workbench itself. Of course the moon wouldn't come to her in songs or poems or crystals or whatever... she felt the most centered, the most tranquil, when she was painting or drawing. Lost in her own world or in new ones she imagined. She shouldn't have made a chart; she should have drawn a circle, with the moons going from waxing to waning all the way around... She hummed to herself a little, the way she always did when she painted. Her hair began to glow. A little shading here, a few light strokes in the middle of the full moon for the face that Rapunzel saw there... Circles and shadows and crosshatching... She worked extra hard on the profile of the fatter waxing crescent, where the moon would be now. She knew what it looked like as she felt her hand shape it. Her power surged; her hair began to sparkle. She looked around frantically for something to release her magic on. The first thing she saw was her tea, so she grabbed the red clay cup and wrapped the end of a braid around it. Just like with Pascal, sparks sprayed off her hair and over the object. When they faded they revealed... ... a heavy, crude clay cup. Rapunzel started to slump in disappointment-- and then noticed something. Where the hair had touched the sides, the cup was now shiny black, like onyx or obsidian.

Switching on the ground-floor lights, she checked the gas jet and the main gas plug and poured water over the smoldering, half-buried charcoal in the brazier. She stood before the upright mirror in the four-and-a-half-mat room and held up her skirts. The bloodstains made it seem as if a bold, vivid pattern was printed across the lower half of her white kimono. When she sat down before the mirror, she was conscious of the dampness and coldness of her husband’s blood in the region of her thighs, and she shivered. Then, for a long while, she lingered over her toilet preparations. She applied the rouge generously to her cheeks, and her lips too she painted heavily. This was no longer make-up to please her husband. It was make-up for the world which she would leave behind, and there was a touch of the magnificent and the spectacular in her brushwork. When she rose, the mat before the mirror was wet with blood. Reiko was not concerned about this. (...) The lieutenant was lying on his face in a sea of blood. The point protruding from his neck seemed to have grown even more prominent than before. Reiko walked heedlessly across the blood. Sitting beside the lieutenant’s corpse, she stared intently at the face, which lay on one cheek on the mat. The eyes were opened wide, as if the lieutenant’s attention had been attracted by something. She raised the head, folding it in her sleeve, wiped the blood from the lips, and bestowed a last kiss. (...) Reiko sat herself on a spot about one foot distant from the lieutenant’s body. Drawing the dagger from her sash, she examined its dully gleaming blade intently, and held it to her tongue. The taste of the polished steel was slightly sweet. Reiko did not linger. When she thought how the pain which had previously opened such a gulf between herself and her dying husband was now to become a part of her own experience, she saw before her only the joy of herself entering a realm her husband had already made his own. In her husband’s agonized face there had been something inexplicable which she was seeing for the first time. Now she would solve that riddle. Reiko sensed that at last she too would be able to taste the true bitterness and sweetness of that great moral principle in which her husband believed. What had until now been tasted only faintly through her husband’s example she was about to savor directly with her own tongue. Reiko rested the point of the blade against the base of her throat. She thrust hard. The wound was only shallow. Her head blazed, and her hands shook uncontrollably. She gave the blade a strong pull sideways. A warm substance flooded into her mouth, and everything before her eyes reddened, in a vision of spouting blood. She gathered her strength and plunged the point of the blade deep into her throat.

To paint after nature is to transfer three-dimensional corporeality to a two-dimensional surface. This you can do if you are in good health and not colorblind. Oil paint, canvas, and brush are material and tools. It is possible by expedient distribution of oil paint on canvas to copy natural impressions; under favorable conditions you can do it so accurately that the picture cannot be distinguished from the model. You start, let us say, with a white canvas primed for oil painting and sketch in with charcoal the most discernible lines of the natural form you have chosen. Only the first line may be drawn more or less arbitrarily, all the others must form with the first the angle prescribed by the natural model. By constant comparison of the sketch with the model, the lines can be so adjusted that the lines of the sketch will correspond to those of the model. Lines are now drawn by feeling, the accuracy of the feeling is checked and measured by comparison of the estimated angle of the line with the perpendicular in nature and in the sketch. Then, according to the apparent proportions between the parts of the model, you sketch in the proportions between parts on the canvas, preferably by means of broken lines delimiting these parts. The size of the first part is arbitrary, unless your plan is to represent a part, such as the head, in 'life size.' In that case you measure with a compass an imaginary line running parallel to a plane on the natural object conceived as a plane on the picture, and use this measurement in representing the first part. You adjust all the remaining parts to the first through feeling, according to the corresponding parts of the model, and check your feeling by measurement; to do this, you place the picture so far away form you that the first part appears as large in the painting as the model, and then you compare. In order to check a given proportion, you hold out the handle of your paintbrush at arm's length towards this proportion in such a way that the end of the thumbnail on the handle coincides with the other end of the proportion. If then you hold the paintbrush out towards the picture, again at arm's length, you can, by the measurement thus obtained, determine with photographic accuracy whether your feeling has deceived you. If the sketch is correct, you fill in the parts of the picture with color, according to nature. The most expedient method is to begin with a clearly recognizable color of large area, perhaps with a somewhat broken blue. You estimate the degree of matness and break the luminosity with a complimentary color, ultramarine, for example, with light ochre. By addition of white you can make the color light, by addition of black dark. All this can be learned. The best way of checking for accuracy is to place the picture directly beside the projected picture surface in nature, return to your old place and compare the color in your picture with the natural color. By breaking those tones that are too bright and adding those that are still lacking, you will achieve a color tonality as close as possible to that in nature. If one tone is correct, you can put the picture back in its place and adjust the other colors to the first by feeling. You can check your feeling by comparing every tone directly with nature, after setting the picture back beside the model. If you have patience and adjust all large and small lines, all forms and color tones according to nature, you will have an exact reproduction of nature. This can be learned. This can be taught. And in addition, you can avoid making too many mistakes in 'feeling' by studying nature itself through anatomy and perspective and your medium through color theory. That is academy.

You brought many trunks.” She tasted her chowder and dabbed her lush mouth with the napkin. “One contains my paints, charcoals, canvases, and sculpting clay. Two hold my paintings. Another, my books.” “And the rest?” He stirred his soup, wishing he could eat more than a miniscule amount. “Well, one contains my fishing rods and tackle, and the last holds my gun collection.” An impish smile teased the corners of her lips. “Gun collection?” Vincent was thankful he did not have a mouthful of soup, or else he would have sprayed the table. “So, one is not enough?” Miss Hobson’s face turned an alarming crimson as she choked on her dinner roll. Lydia gave her a hearty thump on the back. “Most were my father’s, but three are mine. He enjoyed taking me shooting.” Vincent grinned. “It appears you are a lady of many talents.” Miss

The Indians painted their faces and bodies for several different reasons—sometimes for protection against the sun, wind, and insects. Some of the markings indicated memberships in various political or religious societies; others represented brave deeds done by the wearer. Many times the designs were merely personal decoration without any particular meaning. The dry coloring matter was carried in small buckskin bags and was mixed with bear or buffalo fat before being rubbed on the skin. Clays containing oxide or iron were used for red; kaolin clay was used for white; black was made from wood charcoal; and green from powdered copper ore. Colors did not represent the same things in every tribe, but generally most tribes used black to represent death, red for human life, blue for sadness or trouble, white for peace or purity, and yellow for joy.

But for me, there's nothing better than feeling the firm surface of a sketchpad under my hand, hearing the scrape of a pencil or the rasp of charcoal moving across the page. Drawing on paper and painting on canvas is so ingrained in me that I can't imagine ever relying solely on technology. I'm sure eventually museums will display only digital screens instead of canvases, and maybe it makes me a dinosaur, but that notion is a real bummer to me.

Sister, why do you think the stars in the sky don’t fall down?” Ye examined Feng. The kerosene lamp was a wonderful artist and created a classical painting with dignified colors and bright strokes: Feng had her coat draped over her shoulders, exposing her red belly-band, and a strong, graceful arm. The glow from the kerosene lamp painted her figure with vivid, warm colors, while the rest of the room dissolved into a gentle darkness. Close attention revealed a dim red glow, which didn’t come from the kerosene lamp, but the heating charcoal on the ground. The cold air outside sculpted beautiful ice patterns on the windowpanes with the room’s warm, humid air. “You’re afraid of the stars falling down?” Ye asked softly. Feng laughed and shook her head. “What’s there to be afraid of? They’re so tiny.” Ye did not give her the answer of an astrophysicist. She only said, “They’re very, very far away. They can’t fall.” Feng was satisfied with this answer, and went back to her needlework. But Ye could no longer be at peace. She put down her book and lay down on the warm surface of the kang, closing her eyes. In her imagination, the rest of the universe around their tiny cottage disappeared, just the way the kerosene lamp hid most of the room in darkness. Then she substituted the universe in Feng’s heart for the real one. The night sky was a black dome that was just large enough to cover the entirety of the world. The surface of the dome was inlaid with countless stars shining with a crystalline silver light, none of which was bigger than the mirror on the old wooden table next to the bed. The world was flat and extended very far in each direction, but ultimately there was an edge where it met the sky. The flat surface was covered with mountain ranges like the Greater Khingan Mountains, and with forests dotted with tiny villages, just like Qijiatun.… This toy-box-like universe comforted Ye, and gradually it shifted from her imagination into her dreams. In this tiny mountain hamlet deep in the Greater Khingan Mountains, something finally thawed in Ye Wenjie’s heart. In the frozen tundra of her soul, a tiny, clear lake of meltwater appeared.

Mulan found it easier to face the morning by pretending that her clothes were armor. The stiff coronation robe Ting was smoothing down over her shoulders? She imagined it woven with threads of spun gold, the embroidered phoenixes stitched with blazing-red iron. Her sash, hanging loose down her back, was a shoulder guard of blue iron, and the phoenixes on her shoes were spikes and spurs. “Please keep your head forward, Empress.” A handmaiden gripped a handful of hair, pulling it taut enough to make Mulan’s eyes water. The hair, at least, was easy to imagine as a helmet. By the time the maid finished wrapping it around multiple combs and adorning the layered buns with everything from flowers to jade to tiny golden bells, Mulan’s coiffure would stop arrows far better than anything the imperial blacksmiths could craft. The maid inserted one last pin and stepped back. “All done.” She pulled the train of Mulan’s robe out as Mulan stepped in front of a full-length mirror. Mulan’s reflection was warped and metallic on the coppery finish, but she could see that she was made up as intricately as the finest ladies of court, her face powdered white, her eyes lined with charcoal, and her lips painted red as her sash. Her eyebrows had been shaved and drawn back in with blue-black pigment. Tiny silver beads adorned her yellow-tinted forehead, and three flowers had been painted on her right cheek. “Armor,” Mulan said under her breath. “Your Majesty?” “Nothing, just talking to myself.

Mulan found it easier to face the morning by pretending that her clothes were armor. The stiff coronation robe Ting was smoothing down over her shoulders. She imagined it woven with threads of spun gold, the embroidered phoenixes stitched with blazing-red iron. Her sash, hanging loose down her back, was a shoulder guard of blue iron, and the phoenixes on her shoes were spikes and spurs. “Please keep your head forward, Empress.” A handmaiden gripped a handful of hair, pulling it taut enough to make Mulan’s eyes water. The hair, at least, was easy to imagine as a helmet. By the time the maid finished wrapping it around multiple combs and adorning the layered buns with everything from flowers to jade to tiny golden bells, Mulan’s coiffure would stop arrows far better than anything the imperial blacksmiths could craft. The maid inserted one last pin and stepped back. “All done.” She pulled the train of Mulan’s robe out as Mulan stepped in front of a full-length mirror. Mulan’s reflection was warped and metallic on the coppery finish, but she could see that she was made up as intricately as the finest ladies of court, her face powdered white, her eyes lined with charcoal, and her lips painted red as her sash. Her eyebrows had been shaved and drawn back in with blue-black pigment. Tiny silver beads adorned her yellow-tinted forehead, and three flowers had been painted on her right cheek. “Armor,” Mulan said under her breath. “Your Majesty?” “Nothing, just talking to myself.

Look here, he says, what's the matter with you fellows? let's get cracking with this dump. Your road is bad; pave it. Better yet, build a paved road to every corner of the park; better yet, pave the whole damned place so any damn fool can drive anything anywhere is this a democracy or ain't it? Next, charge a good stiff admission fee; you can't let people in free; that leads socialism and regimentation. Next, get rid of all these homely rangers in their Smokey the Bear suits. Hire a crew of pretty girls, call them rangerettes, let them sell the tickets and give the campfire talks. And advertise, for godsake, advertise! How do you expect to get people in here if you don't advertise? Next, these here Arches light them up. Floodlight them, turn on colored, revolving lights -jazz it up, man, it's dead. Light up the whole place, all night long, get on a 24-hour shift, keep them coming, keep them moving, you got two hundred million people out there waiting to see your product-is this a free country or what the hell is it? Next your campgrounds, you gotta do something about your camp grounds, they're a mess. People can't tell where to park their cars or which spot is whose-you gotta paint lines, numbers, mark out the campsites nice and neat. And they're still building fires on the ground, with wood! Very messy, filthy, wasteful. Set up little grills on stilts, sell charcoal briquettes, better yet hook up with the gas line, install jets and burners. Better yet do away with the camp. grounds altogether, they only cause delay and congestion and administrative problems-these people want to see America, they're not going to see it sitting around a goddamned campfire; take their money, give them the show, send them on their way-that's the way to run a business....

Vick frowned towards the bonfire, the ragged figures warming their hands, the Burners dragging people from the buildings, the Constables emptying out the cellar that had been a bank. “You want to paint this?” “Future generations might never believe that it happened.” She blew some yellow hair out of her face with a smoky breath and went back to sketching, charcoal hissing on paper. “Then it might happen again.

Built into the box were compartments and sleeves and holders, all full of brushes and paints and charcoal and sheets of paper. A travelling painting kit. Red- the red paint inside the glass vial was so bright, the blue as stunning as the eyes of that faerie woman I'd slaughtered- 'I thought you might want it to take around the grounds with you, rather than lug all those bags like you always do.' The brushes were fresh, gleaming- the bristles soft and clean. Looking at the box, at what was inside, felt like examining a crow-picked corpse. I tried to smile. Tried to will some brightness to my eyes. He said. 'You don't like it.' 'No,' I managed to say. 'No- it's wonderful.' And it was. It really was. I thought if you started painting again...' I waited for him to finish. He didn't. My face heated.

Professor followed me out to the studio. Pollack considered coming along then changed her mind and returned to snoozing on the couch. Once in front of the easel, I let loose. I sketched Lark smiling. Painted Lark laughing. Grabbed charcoal and drew her sleeping. My muse inspired me to create one image of her after another. Eventually, I sketched her expression when she had an orgasm. Hands covered in paint and charcoal, I sat down and stared at the pictures I’d created. As Lark looked back at me from all of my creations, I accepted what I had been hiding from all morning. I was in love with Lark. The fantasy of her had transformed into the reality of loving her. She was everything I hoped for all those nights when I wished to know her. Now, I knew her and she was better than the fantasy. Lark knew how to make me feel like a man, strong and protective. She also understood how to keep my head from lodging up my arrogant ass. Her teasing made me laugh and kept me in line. I wanted my tiny fighter to smile at me always.

Methuselah had led the tribe as they grew of age. He patiently taught them the construction skills they needed to build the box. They had honed their talent by building elaborate village homes of wood that provided the added blessing of luxurious living. They found a peculiar tree of very hard wood in the valley they called “gopher wood.” It was a long process to cut down the trees and create long, cured and glued planks. The boards were then sealed with a prime coating of tree pitch. The pitch was made by bleeding the sap from pines, burning the pine wood into charcoal, grinding that to powder, and mixing that powder into large vats of boiling pine resin. They then painted the wood with the tree-made pitch to seal it with an initial coat.

See, I have this theory that humans are just living, breathing, talking forms of art, each crafted with a different technique and carved out of different materials. Each beautiful in their own way. And sure, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and totally subjective, and changes depending on your circumstance, yada-yada-yada… but most of the time, it’s pretty easy to classify people. Like, okay, you know those women who are gorgeous and never know it? Or the men who pass quietly through life, handsome and unnoticed, never begging for attention or crying out for recognition? Those are your watercolors. And the loud, vivacious, gorgeous-and-they-know-it creatures, with bright lipstick and closets full of bold colors and outfits they never wear twice? Acrylics. The graceful, elegant, aging beauties you pick out in the crowd, or across the cafe, the lines on their faces telling a story you just know you’d want to hear, with so many layers and smudges, twists and turns, you’re not even sure where they begin? Charcoals. Then, you’ve got the big-picture-beautiful people, with the collection of interesting features that together make a beautiful face. They’re your oil paintings — best from ten feet away and, at the end of the day, kind of funny looking if you lean closer and analyze all their elements separately. But I’m quickly learning that Chase Croft doesn’t fit any of my categories. He isn’t a brushstroke on canvas, or bumpy layers of paint on a palette, or imperfect lines scratched inside a sketchbook. His features aren’t just gorgeous as a collective — he’s one of those annoyingly attractive people whose every feature is equally stunning. He’s a sculpture.

The English language once had a word for the characteristic impression that a plant or animal offers to the eye. We called it the “jizz,” and the adoption of that term as sexual slang is unfortunate, as it seems unlikely we’ll come up with a replacement. It is the jizz, for example, that allows a skilled birdwatcher to know a bird by its silhouette alone , or by some quality of movement or the way it holds its head. The strangely unsteady flight of the turkey vulture, the flat forehead of the Barrow’s goldeneye, the endless headlong running of sanderlings on a mudflat— each of these is the jizz. It is so pure an essence that, if captured in a few rough lines drawn with charcoal, it can express an animal more authentically than a portrait by a trained artist who has never carefully watched the creatures he paints. It’s the jizz that ancient art so often represents. While looking at Egyptian treasures in a museum, I felt a rush of nostalgia when an engraving of a scarab beetle reminded me that I used to see a related species, the tumblebug, or Canthon simplex, roll balls of dung across my home prairie. I had completely forgotten; it took a 3,500-year-old artifact from another continent to make me remember.

But he wasn’t procrastinating because he didn’t want to work on the friar’s painting. No. A masterpiece did not pop immediately to mind. He had to knead the problems like dough: how could the Virgin’s face fulfill classical expectations of beauty, yet surprise the viewer with the unexpected; how could each of the figures maintain their separate identities, yet intertwine into a single whole; how could he transform a few scratches of lines on paper into a living, breathing, complex organism? Creating new life took time. Now that his first year was almost up, Leonardo needed to convince the friars to let him stay. He had barely made any progress on human flight. Relocating now would interrupt his experiments. He had to prove that he was not only working on the altarpiece, but that a painting by him would be worth the wait. So, for the last two weeks, he had been displaying his design to the public, and now he had invited the friars up to witness the spectacle. As the song came to an end, Leonardo stepped onto a raised platform next to a large panel covered in a piece of black velvet. He raised his hand with a flourish, and Salaì yanked off the cloth. His cartoon, the life-sized preparatory drawing for the altarpiece, was displayed on a gilded pedestal. Candlelight illuminated the charcoal and chalk sketch on thin, tinted paper. The picture was of St. Anne, the Virgin Mary, John the Baptist, and baby Jesus, all interconnected in a surging, pyramidal composition. The four figures were vibrant, their faces the ideal of classical beauty. He’d spent months dreaming up that image before putting it down on paper, so when he’d finally started sketching, the lines seemed to appear in a flash. Like his performance that night, it was all part of his show. Let the people think the design had arrived complete and perfect, as if sent by God himself.

What she needs are stories. Stories are a way to preserve one's self. To be remembered. And to forget. Stories come in so many forms: in charcoal, and in song, in paintings, poems, films. And books. Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.

You want to paint this?' 'Future generations might never believe it happened.' She blew some yellow hair out of her face with a smoky breath and went back to sketching, charcoal hissing on paper. 'Then it might happen again.

I drew anything. Everything. Doodles at first. But I had a knack for reproducing what I saw, and soon my paper and pencil — and then later, my paints and charcoals — formed a strong, protective wall around me. They stood between me and everyone else in the world. I liked it that way. I liked being quiet, letting no one know what I thought, or how ferocious those thoughts were.

Over in Europe, at around the same time, people were creating art in very similar ways. Southern France is littered with caves adorned with pictures of astonishing beauty and skill that date from around this time all the way into the near present. Lascaux, near Montignac, is probably the most famous, a Pleistocene art gallery from a much more recent 17,000 years ago, displaying more than 6,000 figures, interpretations of hunts, with horses and bison, felines, the extinct colossal elk Megaloceros giganteus, and abstract symbols whose meaning we can never understand. People painted in charcoal and haematite and dabbed them onto the walls as pigments in suspensions with animal fats and clay. They are breathtaking. To the west, the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave has the oldest wall art in Europe, again with beasts in relief, from hunts, and hunters – cave lions, hyenas, bears and panthers, oh my! The oldest of these were painted 37,000 years ago, according to the most up-to-date studies in 2016.

Leonardo built an ingenious scaffold in the Hall of Five Hundred that could be raised or folded in the manner of an accordion. This painting was to be his largest and most substantial work. Since he had suffered an almost disastrous experience in fresco painting with The Last Supper, he wanted to apply oil colours on the wall. He began also to experiment with a thick undercoat, which after he applied the colours, the paint began to drip. Trying to dry the painting in a hurry and save whatever he could, he hung large charcoal braziers close to the painting. Only the lower part could be saved in an intact state. But the upper part did not dry fast enough and the colours intermingled. Leonardo then abandoned the project. Michelangelo and Leonardo’s unfinished paintings adorned the same room together for almost a decade (1505-1512). The cartoon of Michelangelo’s painting was cut in pieces by Bartolommeo Bandinelli out of jealousy in 1512. The centrepiece of The Battle of Anghiari was greatly admired and numerous copies were made for decades. In the mid-16th century (1555-1572), the hall was enlarged and restructured by Vasari and his helpers, so that Grand Duke Cosimo I could hold his court in the chamber. During this transformation, several famous, but unfinished works were lost, including The Battle of Cascina by Michelangelo and The Battle of Anghiari by Leonardo.

I’ve discovered over the past few weeks that drawing or painting is the only thing in the world that can completely absorb me. It distracts me from any outside worries. When the art studio door closes, when I’m inside with paint or pastels or charcoal and a subject to focus on, I’m vacuum-sealed. The world beyond disappears. I feel beyond lucky to have discovered this. Kendra has it with her physical exercise and sports, I think; Paige doesn’t need it, she never seems to have a care in the world. And Kelly? I don’t know if she’s found hers yet.

By this time (in mid-2012) the country had been without a functioning government for more than twenty years, and the city was a byword for chaos, lawlessness, corruption, and violence. But this wasn’t the Mogadishu we saw. Far from it: on the surface, the city was a picture of prosperity. Many shops and houses were freshly painted, and signs on many street corners advertised auto parts, courses in business and English, banks, money changers and remittance services, cellphones, processed food, powdered milk, cigarettes, drinks, clothes, and shoes. The Bakara market in the center of town had a monetary exchange, where the Somali shilling—a currency that has survived without a state or a central bank for more than twenty years—floated freely on market rates that were set and updated twice daily. There were restaurants, hotels, and a gelato shop, and many intersections had busy produce markets. The coffee shops were crowded with men watching soccer on satellite television and good-naturedly arguing about scores and penalties. Traffic flowed freely, with occasional blue-uniformed, unarmed Somali National Police officers (male and female) controlling intersections. Besides motorcycles, scooters, and cars, there were horse-drawn carts sharing the roads with trucks loaded above the gunwales with bananas, charcoal, or firewood. Offshore, fishing boats and coastal freighters moved about the harbor, and near the docks several flocks of goats and sheep were awaiting export to cities around the Red Sea and farther afield. Power lines festooned telegraph poles along the roads, many with complex nests of telephone wires connecting them to surrounding buildings. Most Somalis on the street seemed to prefer cellphones, though, and many traders kept up a constant chatter on their mobiles. Mogadishu was a fully functioning city.

Stories come in so many forms: in charcoal, and in song, in paintings, poems, films. And books.