COMING not SOON enough

 

 

 

A frosty mid-January at VanDusen Garden, and there's Dr. Menzies, my favourite of the celebrated botanists, looking out on the dormant rose garden.  No doubt he's dreaming of that August afternoon when, to indulge some visiting art students, he agreed to hold his pose.

 

Right now:  Could the rain please stop?  And could the days please get longer SOONER?  Well, what choice do we have but to put up with it and maybe try to remember there are charms, if sometimes eerie, to what the French call "l'heure entre chien et loup" – "the hour between dog and wolf."  Dusk.  Twilight.  When it's hard to distinguish what's there and what's not.

 

It was about this time last year when I'd started an all-day Monday art workshop on Granville Island.  Just reaching the bus stop at the end of the day, I was astonished at this woman's pose in the window of a darkening Starbucks.  The bus was rolling up and with my little-used phone camera, I quickly grabbed this shot:

 

The scene came back to me early this year as I began to extend the Zodiac Café series with still lifes, surroundings and interiors.  Of course, the Zodiac Café is a much cozier place than Starbucks, any of time of day, and it exists in a parallel universe where people socially distance only by choice.   I did a quick study, giving it some cedar siding, and an off-the-beaten track setting among shrubbery and trees.

 

I also made some early choices about the windows, not as regimented as the faux-industrial looking ones at the entry to Granville Island.  Of course, the woman's figure was the focus, and I did a quick study of the face, thinking that it might present a challenge.

 

 

 Then I did a  more complete study, ¾ -size with markings I'd be using to scale it up.  Oh, dear – what was I thinking, with all these straight horizontals and verticals?   Well, there was nothing for it but to press onward.

  

 In the quick layout on the full-size canvas, I quite liked the couple in the background.  Sometimes these early stages and even the studies are better than the final outcome (spoiler alert!).

 

 

And now I was under way…

  

 

…and becoming more and more uncertain as I tried to recapture the impact of the original photographed scene.

 

This was not what had struck me at the bus stop – nor was I trying to duplicate the scene.  But the reflections were confusing, and the actual lighting was paradoxical.  That is, it seemed that the inside of the coffee shop was darker than the outside – and with exceptions, it wasn't clear at all what was being reflected.   So….?  What the heck.  I decided to plug in some of the light reflections of the background buildings and call it a day. Here, for better or worse, is "Winter Evening at the Zodiac Café," (copyright 2021)

 

 I signed off on my notes and records and went upstairs, still thinking about the paradoxical reflections.  This brought to mind other nighttime scenes that have enticed artists – successfully!

 

There's VanGogh's familiar "Café Terrace at Night". Check towards the bottom of this link, and you'll see a photo of his café as it still exists.

 

And of course, there's the magnetic "Nighthawks" by 20^th century American artist Edward Hopper.   I gleaned through my art books to check some good reproductions, half wondering if there were any reflections to offer guidance.

 

Then I went to my computer and the morning's email brought one of my art newsletters.  There, by remarkable coincidence, was 2021's version of fame:-- Bernie Sanders among the Nighthawks!! 

 

 Should I go back and plug him into "Winter Evening"?   Oh, I couldn't resist – but this took me an hour to figure out – and meanwhile, somewhere in the depths of my new computer sits an image of Bernie in solitary splendour, with just his chair and his mittens, unencumbered by the white border.

 

Kinda-sorta-maybe

 

 

 

 

If you weren't too overwhelmed by world events, you might have dipped into my final 2020 post and viewed my first experiments in a challenging little workshop I devised for myself.  Inspired -- or let's say, invited -- by the gift of a beautiful book on the 20^th century artist Nicolas de Staël, I set aside about two weeks of the holiday season to study and play in the sometimes rowdy schoolyard of  abstract art. 

 

The second half of my workshop took me to semi-abstract art.  The current definition of "semi" exactly suited my purposes: 

"semi-. a combining form meaning "half" (semiannual), "partially," "somewhat" (semiautomatic; semidetached; semiformal)." 

There's not a precise recipe for semi-abstraction, no hard and fast "one-half tablespoon of super-bubbly yeast," so my title image above qualifies.  It's a kinda-sort-maybe view of my new front steps through the windowscreen on a day when Niagara Falls rained down.

 

My starting point in the second half of the workshop was a de Staël spin-off, emulating his characteristic repeated rectangles.

 

I modelled this on one of his pieces that, with a few more adroit horizontals, resembles an urban landscape.  At this point, I should give a nod to two eminent Canadian artists, particularly acknowledged in Vancouver as two home-town boys made good:  Gordon Smith and Jack Shadbolt.  Take a quick scroll down throught these links, and you'll see many examples of recognizable subjects with a semi-abstract twist.

 

One motivation for my workshop was to revisit the possibilities of abstraction that I'd wrestled with after a visit to Jasper National Park in 2019. 

  

 

 

Photos like this can't begin to capture the power and vastness of those mountains, the great forests, the changing convergence of the river's sands and waters.  I came home from that trip thinking that only abstraction could begin to capture it all.  I wasn't satisfied with what I did in late 2019 -- nor as it turned out in this workshop, despite my earnest efforts.

 

Nope, no good -- and so once more, with feeling, I developed a heavily textured version:

 

Still, not there.  What about this one, "Storm over the Rockies"?

 

 

You caught me, didn't you?  It's another swatch from my palette, showing accidents can sometimes outperform effort.  Well, Jasper is beyond my capabilities, but the palette splash led me to try "Autumn Roadside."

 

With that, I moved on to my preferred theme of human faces and figures.  When something I've done gives me a  hearty laugh, I know I'm on my game, for better or worse.  I *love* this one (also painted over a Jasper art-fail of 2019) -- "Hand/Eye Coordination."

 

Remember:  You need to play "Let's Pretend" along with me and imagine that all of these are wall-sized displays.   There's another fantasy element you've probably seen in cartoons -- the question of whether it matters if an abstract piece is hung upside-down.  Well....sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't.  Here's "Squeeze, Spatter, Pour" from the early half of my workshop:

 

When I turned it upside-down, I began to see possibilities for a figure in the background spatters above the textured coil.   Here's the result -- called  "Puppetmaster."

 

In signing off on these reflections into abstract and semi-abstract art, I did a somewhat straight piece called, "I am the mirror - I reflect."

 

So what's this abstraction business all about, anyway?  As the text for my workshop, I dipped into a library edition of "Cubism and Abstract Art" by the eminent 20^th century art historian Alfred H. Barr, Jr. , the founding director of MOMA (NYC's Museum of Modern Art).  He's justifiably credited with having lit the posthumous fame of Van Gogh with a blockbuster 1935 exhibit  -- followed a year later by another blockbuster, the 1936 "Cubism and Abstract Art" exhibit to which this book  is a companion piece.   Wow and double wow.  Check out the links and scroll to "Installation Images" where MOMA makes available photos of the original exhibits, as well as their catalogs -- Barr's incredible publications.

 

Pointing out that awareness of abstraction is by no means new, Barr quotes from Plato's "Philebus."

"Socrates:  What I am saying is not indeed directly obvious.  I must therefore try to make it clear.  I will try to speak of the beauty of shapes, and I do not mean, as most people would think, the shapes of living figures, or their imitations in paintings, but I mean straight lines and curves and the shapes made from them, flat or solid, by the lathe, ruler and square, if you see what I mean.  These are not beautiful for any particular reason or purpose, as other things are, but are always by their very nature beautiful, and give pleasure of their own quite free from the itch of desire; and colors of this kind are beautiful, too, and give a similar pleasure."

Well, that's one way to look at.  But I kinda-sorta-maybe prefer this quote I recently found by the mid-20th century American writer Dorothy Parker:

"Creativity is a wild mind, and a disciplined eye."