Local artist sketches with ballpoint pen

Mark Ratzlaff, a waiter at Mother Bear’s Pizza, has another side that can be viewed at the Blueline Gallery until September.

“Our curator, Jim Andrews, actually selected Mark,” owner Chelsea Sanders said. “He had a show a few years ago, so we kind of went to him and asked if he wanted to have a show here.”

The exhibition, titled “Works from Life,” is a collection of figurative drawings and Bloomington landscapes Ratzlaff drew with ink or graphite or painted. His art lines the walls around the studio, as he is the only artist featured at the moment.

“Our main focus is on local artists or artists in surrounding areas,” Sanders said. “What we usually do is we’ll take submissions. When we first started, we were doing, like, kind of callouts, but now we have artists coming in all the time.”

Ratzlaff has his own style and isn’t afraid to make a few sketches with a ballpoint pen.

“The ballpoint pen is a weird development,” Ratzlaff said. “I wait tables for a living, and we always take orders with pens. In down time I started drawing friends from work, and I started getting good at it. I took some pens to a figure drawing session, and I thought it would be a complete failure, but it wasn’t. When I tried to use pencils, I was like, ‘This isn’t working.’”

Every Monday night, Ratzlaff helps monitor the open drawing sessions at the Fine Arts building. While there, he also does some sketching.

“Some of the figures are friends, professional models, stuff like that,” Ratzlaff said. “I try to paint what I see. You can always see the process as well.”

Emma, Claire and Dan are the names of some of the subjects featured in the figurative drawings.

Ratzlaff also worked with landscapes, painting familiar Bloomington scenes, some of which were titled “Indiana and Cottage Grove,” “White Birch, Rosehill,” “Bloomington First Presbyterian” and “Bloomington, Alleyway West.”

He has painted the alleyway four times.

“Once I find a spot I like, I keep going back there over and over again,” Ratzlaff said. “I used to make a mental list of spots, but I don’t make lists anymore, so I keep going back to the same place.”

An oil painting of a Serta sheep holding a dead rose hangs at the end of the row.

“I don’t do still life that often,” Ratzlaff said. “It was just a chance thing. I like him so I enjoy painting him. Some people get it, some people don’t. There’s a woman in Colorado, and she found one of my paintings online and ended up buying five of them. She really likes Serta sheep.”

Sanders was intrigued by Ratzlaff’s style and liked both the figurative and landscape concepts.

“I think it’s great,” Sanders said. “It has a little bit of Bloomington. I think that’s one concept. As far as life drawing, it’s definitely a different technique. It’s a little bit more detailed, and that’s what I like to see for life drawings. It’s interesting. I like it.”