No church available for any of today’s saints, so I decided to do a portrait of Saint Augustine of Canterbury. Less well-known than his namesake, Augustine of Hippo, Augustine of Canterbury led a delegation of monks to England where he would become the first bishop of Canterbury. Not long after leaving Rome, this group of missionaries, daunted at the prospect of traveling to a strange and distant land, sent Augustine back to Rome to ask permission for them to give up. Pope Gregory, unimpressed at the missionaries’ distress told them to forge on and Augustine was responsible for the spread of Christianity in sixth century Britain.
The picture itself is not too bad, I think. This time around, I decided to work with crayons (I made a stop at Jewel to buy a box of 24 earlier today) and I’m pretty happy with the results. It kind of reminds me of the not too bad portraits I would sketch of friends at restaurants that put out crayons and paper placemats when I was a young man in the 90s. I think the permanence and boldness of the crayon keeps me from being as tentative as I get with pencil or even marker.
Leave a Reply