"This Train'll Stop at Tucumcari..."

This quickie called for a little Lee Van Cleef. His hat's way too tall on his head (I even cropped some of it in the scan, and it still wasn't enough), but that's why it's a quickie and not a finely finished work. Still and all, Lee makes for a mighty striking figure. He was quoted as saying that he told his mother that being born with beady eyes was the best thing that ever happened to him.

This is Agua Caliente...

This was merely a digression from my embarkation into the world of marble. It was a new paper. It was a new time. I was going for something else. This quickie was taken from a still of Indio (the late great Gian Maria Volonté) from Sergio Leone's For A Few Dollars More. Anyone who manages to share the screen with Klaus Kinski, and somehow out crazy him deserved the recognition of my pen.

I Didn't Get a 'Harumph' Out of That Guy!

Give the governor a 'harumph'!

In Light of Our Theme...Let's Call Her 'Statuesque'...

This was the day I took a break from all that cold marble...hubba hubba...

The Fruit of These First Herculean Efforts...

For birthdays, it's now become something of a tradition amongst one group of friends to do drawings of them for their birthdays. I had previously painted Marciel (you can see that HERE...), and my thoughts on this caricature of sorts had nothing pertaining to his personality or interests exactly. (Who wants to draw a guy collecting turn of the century Bulgarian postage stamps amongst his collection of 1960's biergarten steins from Cleveland anyway?) So thanks to all that statuary I'd been drawing...he got thrown into the mix...

Oh, the Romanity...

This is perhaps my favorite in the series up to this point. I'm afraid I can't remember the title or artist for the piece I adapted this chunk of magnificence from (and I'm in a bit of a rush, so can't do the usual research). I can, however, tell you that I believe he's a part of the famous palazzo of statues in Naples (some of you know what I'm talking about...). I really like this quality of line. It's almost the ridiculous thinness of a Rapidograph, but with just the right flexibility to not have as technical a look. Problem is, I can never remember which quill I did it with.

You Killed My Snake....

Ever since first seeing it in an Art History course way back when, I've always been fascinated by the statue of Laocoön and His Sons. The Trojan priest's grisly fate is a powerful image of contortion and horror. I know I'm not the only one, as several artists sought to redo the statue with the broken bits repaired. Some came pretty close, but no one captured the agony quite like the sculptors who crafted the original.

Breaking News...

We interrupt the Marble-thon for this image that's somewhere between Klaus Kinski and Ludwig Van....More Marble later...

Hide Your Wife...

Centaurs...always running off with people's wives. Nessus ran off with Deianeira. To those of you who only know Hercules from Steve Reeves or...ahem...Lou Ferigno, Deianeira was Herc's main squeeze. Naturally, Herc shot Nessus with an arrow as he ran off with her across a river. While dying, Nessus told Deianeira to take some of his blood, and to give it to Herc if she ever thought he was being unfaithful. Well, bright girl that she was, she later smeared it all over one of Herc's robes...and only after sending him off did she notice that the blood caught fire when hit by the sun. Herc, of course, not one to go down without a fight, tried to put out the flames, jumped in the water (which only made it worse), and tried to rip it off...taking his skin and organs with it. Before dying, he tossed the servant that gave him the robe into the sea.

The Moral of the Story: Don't use centaur's blood as sunscreen unless you want your husband anything above medium rare.

A Well Deserved Nap...

The next greco-roman quickie was from a reference photo of Canova's Theseus and the Minotaur. If you'd been running through a maze all day and then had to fight a manimal, you'd be a touched tuckered out as well, I'd imagine.