The Sketchbooks of Tula Lotay

 

A sketch is the artist’s first attempt at capturing an idea — drawing a thought the moment it happens. A sketch is the blur of sudden remembering. A flash of the image and then you draw the curve and sway, contrast and color of a moment that is gone before the pencil is done rushing across the page, but it has been made real. Tangible.

The sketchbooks of Tula Lotay are all of this and more — she delivers a dream state visualized, ideas conveyed in the minimum. Sharp pencil strokes, deliberate, softened by the blush of flesh rendered in graphite. Lotay has a realist’s grasp of the human form — her likenesses arrive with ease, the fat follows the bone. Lotay’s figures are sensual, full of blood and body heat.

In her series of sketchbooks available in her shop, the term sketch is merely a place holder. Even the quickest of Lotay’s drawings are fully realized and are never overworked, but delivered with the perfect mix of detail and her all to human atmospheric textures. With each smudge of ink and pencil, there is a crisp line of shoulder, subtle haze of crescent eyes, all of equal importance. Lotay’s drawings are perfect retellings of what makes us human, and what us beautiful.