Denizens of the deep -- and elsewhere

I thought I'd have to explain the word "denizens"  but the Collins on-line dictionary says it's among the top 30% of popular English words.  Can this really be?!  Well, maybe it's one of those 21^st century words that climbed out of 20^th century semi-obscurity -- like "ubiquitous," "decry," "egregious" -- and is now used "fulsomely" (ack!! - check this and know that I'm on the side of traditional usage) all over the airwaves.

The title "Denizens of the Deep" has been on my mind as, I thought, a vintage science-fiction movie.  But I guess I was confusing it with "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" and that humungous submarine-swallowing squid.

In fact, it's a perfectly respectable natural history publication (1907) by one of those cool guys you've never heard of:--  F. Martin Duncan aka Francis Duncan Smith, a natural historian and a pioneer in micro-photography and filmmaking.  Wikipedia describes his 1903 films:

 "Among the films shown were Circulation of Blood in a Frog's Foot, Red Sludge Worms and the notorious The Cheese Mites, the views of which were preceded by a scene of a man (played by Duncan himself) horrified by what he sees when he views a piece of Stilton through a magnifying glass."

Well, we're neither in a Stilton cheese nor 20,000 leagues under the sea -- but here in the studio, where "Denizens" is the title for a series I've begun.  I want to become  more adept at capturing faces and features, working from sketches and remembered glimpses of "denizens" in my community.

Starting point:-- a quick cardboard study for the first in the series, "Ringlets."

Sometimes, as in this one, the face and the outfit are not necessarily from the same person I've surreptitiously studied on bus trips or in coffee shops.  Here's the final version of "Denizens Series - Ringlets" (copyright 2019).  Can you count the rings?  -- include her hair in the head-count, too.

My next subject was a strongly featured older man, who I watched using his laptop in a coffee shop.  He seemed so like a veteran European filmmaker, but my first quick cardboard sketch took a few years off his age.

If truth be told from the snippets of conversation I heard when an earnest young woman joined him, I think the guy was actually a real estate agent -- maybe in a European film?  Here he is in "Denizens Series  - Filmmaker." (copyright 2019)

Something else I'm working on with this series is learning to paint on canvas -- a quite different support from the fine arts paper I usually paint on.   I'll still work on paper for my larger pieces. (Art students, are you listening?)

Now, inspired by the Denizens just off the dock of my Pender Island friends' home, I'm diving deeper to meet my goal of 10 denizens in this new series.