Tag Archives: portraiture

Live-drawing The Velvet Creepers at Crack Bellmer!

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Dunja as Black Widow at Velvet Creepers by Suzanne Forbes Feb 22 2020I finally made it to a wonderful Velvet Creepers show at gorgeous Friedrichshain club Crack Bellmer!

I had had to cancel on these terrific performers TWICE before for health reasons, and I was so ready to document their Dark Cabaret beauty!! I mean, look at Dunja von K in latex and a black organza spiderweb bustle as a Black Widow – it doesn’t get any more insectalicious!

Lilly Mortis sings at Velvet Creepers by Suzanne Forbes Feb 22 2020And so exquisitely Gothic!

Above, ethereal Lilly Mortis sings. I love the style of The Velvet Creepers!

It was the first test under field conditions of my new live-drawing technique combining watercolor brush pen with my usual pencil, markers, Faber Castell PITT artist’s pen and Tombow Dual brush pen. I sketched with the black watercolor brush pen quite a bit and I really liked it.

The drawing below of fabulous Creeper Fifi Fantôme dancing to “Just a Gigolo” was done almost entirely with watercolor brush pen. I’ve drawn Fifi before, as you can see here, and that drawing is quite different.

Fifi Fantome Gigolo dance at Velvet Creepers by Suzanne Forbes Feb 22 2020I like the way the watercolor pen moves and feels!

I feel very free and easy using it. It’s especially great for hair and ellipses, as in the drawing of Dunja hooping below!

Dunja hooping at Velvet Creepers by Suzanne Forbes Feb 22 2020I have drawn master hooper Dunja several times before.

You can see drawings of her from last year here and here.

Scotty the Blue Bunny at Velvet Creepers by Suzanne Forbes Feb 22 2020And of course there was the delightful MC, the one and only Scotty the Blue Bunny!

I have finally got a method of using color in my drawings that actually captures just how much Blue Bunny he is! Without Scotty the Blue Bunny Berlin’s burlesque scene would actually literally just fall apart and collapse! See his art, read his origin story in Playful Magazine!

I have another drawing in process, of two stylish hoopers who were in the audience, but as it has a good bit of background it will take a little longer to finish and I’ll get it up next month prolly.

I really, really loved the venue, Crack Bellmer, even though it is in Friedrichshain and even worse, in the legendary arts compound RAW, which is like Burning Man with (somewhat) more infrastructure and drug dealers, plus muddy cobbles. But Crack Bellmer is charming and cozy and reminds me of so many much-loved San Francisco and Oakland spaces of the Oughts. I would honestly go back there any time, even though it means hauling all the way across town.

Thanks so much to the Velvet Creepers for having me as a guest and making sure I had a comfortable space, drink tix and good light!

And thanks, always, to my Patrons on Patreon, who make it possible for me to document Berlin’s queer intersectional performance scene and release the artwork free to all.

 

 

Portrait of the artist’s mother in West Berlin.

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Portrait of Pat Ketchum by Suzanne Forbes work in Process Oct 11 2019Got a chance to paint my precious mama on this visit, which was her longest so far.

I did a drawing on each of her previous visits – here and here– and this time I wanted to try a painting even though I have very little strength these days.

Painting takes a lot out of me physically, and with the endless upper respiratory infections I’ve had on top of my Hashimotos this year, I am always at zero physically.

I was willing to go into spoon-debt and suck up the recovery time for this though!

We did the sitting on the last night of her visit, so I could collapse after taking her to the airport the next day.

Here she is sitting in our salon, reading her Kindle.

Books are such a huge part of my mom and me’s life together, from the beginning. We shared books when I was a teen – Ed McBain, Dean Koontz, Elmore Leonard, Robert B. Parker, and most of all Dick Francis. In the 80s, we read every single thing every one of those writers had written.

And every Christmas there were stacks of paperbacks under the tree for me, all the Anne McCaffery and Isaac Asimov and Larry Niven and Heinlein. (Problematic as hell, but geek teens took what they could get!)

My mom still reads voraciously and lightning-fast, though I no longer do – I am too tired most of the time.

She discovers new writers, or new to her old writers, and burns through their work. The Kindle is great for her, as it is for another power-reader loved one, my Friend-Muse-Patron Barbara North.

My mom wore this pink striped sweater earlier in the week, and I asked her to wear it again for the sitting, I thought it would be nice against the pink model chair and the purple of her Kindle.

I need to do some finishing work on her sweater and paint in her hands properly, but I’m well satisfied with the likeness and how much I got done in the two-hour sitting. I took some photos of her jewelry and sweater for reference – as you all know, I never take reference photos for faces.

Even if I didn’t have a principle against it, I got enough of that on Star Trek!
Portrait of Pat Ketchum by Suzanne Forbes work in Process Oct 11 2019 detail
I did some work on the backgrounds of two other paintings in progress the next day, even though I was dazed with tiredness – the portraits of Shakrah and Cadbury are now much closer to done. Having a palette with fresh paint on it was too much to resist!

I’m so grateful to my Patrons (including my mama and mom-in-law!) for supporting my work and making paintings like this possible.