This morning was my last intermediate drawing class with Diane Olivier and this is my final drawing: A "Memory" piece. Last year when I did this project (this being the second time I have taken this class) I did an elaborate folding screen of 8 8x10 drawing, taken from photographs in Italy, and presented in a box I made. Good presentation but short on product. This year I decided to work in a larger format. This being an 30x20 piece of binders board which I then prepped with white gesso stained with tea with marble powder added to give the board tooth.
At the beginning of this term after I had drawn my first project (3 of the drawing I posted at the beginning of February) Diane suggested I continue delving into my past by drawing some of the objects in my home. I didn't do that at that time but when this final "Memory/Dream Project" came up as the final project I went back to her idea.
What I wanted to produce was another drawing similar to the drawing I did mid February (2-17 posting) which was a raw self portrait. This time I wanted to bring some of that rawness to a drawing of someone I was once very close to without drawing a portrait of him from a photograph or memory. I wanted to make a drawing of objects he had given me. The intention and hope being of capturing his personality, and my feeling for him, into this drawing.
As most of my friends know for three years, back in the 70', I worked on cruise ships. On one HollandAmerica ship I met Roland who also worked for HollandAmerica. Being a very small ship we developed a close friendship. During our year together on this ship we sailed six months of the year around Indonesia which Roland continued for many years after I gave up my seafaring days. In the years after I returned to live in London Roland would visit as I would him; in The Hague where he lived. Each time we met he always had a gift for me: something he'd picked up in Indonesia.
This portrait is of four of those gifts. A batik cloth from Sulawesi, a hand carved row of peppercorns from Bali, an antique house end from an island in Lake Toba, Sumatra, and a hand craved Buddha he had commissioned from a stone carver on Bali.
Wanting to do an emotional drawing and not a technical drawing I ignored the difference in the dimensions of the objects. I did want to use many drawing mediums to capture the difference in textures. There is the background as I described with a wash of sepia ink with drawing using sepia ink, sepia ink mixed with dark brown and red pastels, charcoaland pastels, even rubbing back in places with dampened qtips. Though not the drawing I had envisioned at the beginning - the gold leaf and inlaid other drawing had to go - I'm really pleased with the end result. The drawing, for me, shows the Roland I knew, the tender, caring thorny person he was yet also the many other shades that made up his personality.
Roland died in 1981. He was in his early 40'.

Roland Van de Leewe
Febuary 1978