The value of vintage

 

 

 

I've always had a great liking for old photographs and old things (even before I was one myself).  Maybe it came from family artifacts like my great-grandmother's handiwork shown here and maybe from the daguerreotypes that were specially shown me on my one childhood visit to the ancestral home.  Since the images were first captured in the late 1800s, the glass plates were always stored safely away from light, which would destroy the image if displayed in the open.

 

Old photographs of people have a particularly intriguing quality for me – who were these individuals?  What brought them to this moment in time?  What were they thinking?  What became of them?  Sometimes their identity is known, as in this poster in the history corridor at Capilano Suspension Bridge.

 

Sometimes they are unknowns lost in the mist.

 

I keep a computer image file of vintage photos, and I delved deeper there as I celebrated a rather special marker of my own vintage, turning 77 in May.  An always-informed friend had told me that age 77 was designated "a time to be in earnest" by the famous English writer Samuel Johnson.

 

In a magic moment of Samuel Johnson meets Hashim Akib – in the realm of black and white – I earnestly resolved to work with some of my vintage images in a looser work method suggested by Hash.  My overall purpose was to immerse myself in the art concept called "Value."  You might be familiar with this term -- it means the range of tone from black to white, or for colour works, "from dark as black to light as white."  Monet is one artist who considered value to be the key factor -- if value differentiations were off, the painting was off.  Scroll down here for illustrative examples.  To develop this in a calibrated "gray scale" -- as I did in one art class -- is darned difficult.

 

Ready to go?  Let's get a poetic start with Edna St. Vincent Millay.

 

Here's my black-and-white painting – no, not as exuberant as Hash would be, but working more loosely with paint on the palette was a very different method of work for me.

 

Next, this compelling face from Dalhousie University's Class of 1922 -- one hundred years ago!! 

 

Who was this sensitive young woman?  What became of her?  Well, it happened she was traceable on-line to some extent.  She was among the first generation of women to earn a medical degree from Dal – and her professional work took her to India!  And there are still people who share her surname in her hometown of Newcastle, New Brunswick.   (Are you soooo glad I didn't take up genealogical research?) 

 

Here's an in-progress image (in this and the following effort, I painted over old canvases, not worried if some colour showed through) –

 

Hats off to you, Elizabeth Hope Thurrott – here's my vintage value version.

 

Finally – and most ambitiously – I chose a multi-figure image from the History Society website of the little papermill town where I spent most of my first eight years.  (Not Constableville – or "C-ville" as it was locally abbreviated -- but in that vicinity).

 

I immediately planned to omit the stern-faced schoolmarm and the recently added Photoshop label – but I was mesmerized by these young faces:

 

 

I cut out the mid-section to achieve this first lay-in:

 

 

Then, oh so painstakingly, I was able to reach an intermediate stage.  DARN, this was hard – getting the shades of grey that were sometimes right and sometimes wrong.  You can see that this is very different from my usual careful layouts and scalings-up.

 

  

At last, after much to-ing and fro-ing, I've signed off on the final version, "C-ville School, Class of 1902":-

 

There's a distant echo of the refrain:-- Who were these young women?  What went through their minds at this moment in time with their, oh, such different expressions?! What became of them – and their astonishing dresses?

 

Very coincidentally in my vintage birthday week, a small Vancouver paper came up with a similar puzzle.  If you know the answers, please get in touch.

 

 

"Splash" rhymes with "Hash"

 

 

 

Almost two decades back when I was just settling into my painting venture, I called my experiments "Splashes."  For example, here's a 2003 Splash featuring an anthurium painted quickly in iridescent paints on collaged paper.

 

As I finished the last two of the Il Giardino Italiano series, I couldn't get out of my mind the prospect of splashing around in the manner of UK painter Hashim Akib who I've recently discovered.  I even played a little bit with the paint left on my palette after each morning's session.

  

 

At last the time arrived as I finished "Sound of Silence" and as the real garden was coming to life under the sun (Local readers:  Please refrain from exclaiming, "What sun?!?!?").   I set two parameters for these Splashes:  (1) I would try to work in the manner of hero Hash; and (2) I would aim to finish each piece in one hour – an exercise posed by another artist-teacher, Craig Nelson.   I've had this book for 15 years and had never yet risen to the challenge!

 

 

So away we go!  It's certainly a different way of working – mixing faster and looser on the palette and trying for distinct blocky brush strokes.

 

My models are from print advertising – cultural events and retail catalogs.  Here's my first session.

 

It felt good to have anything to show after an hour.  But after the second session, I saw how easy it was to revert to standard practice.

 

This shows some of my typical failings – head too long, ears and eyes not quite right.  By the third session, I was losing confidence.

 

Oh, god….his head…the cap…  When the hour struck, I could see about four things that needed correcting, but I stuck with the limit.

 

Here's the last in this series of Hash-Splashes.

 

 

Do you love her toothy smile?  She's ecstatic about LL Bean's latest selection of sweater colours!

 

Summing up:  I didn't quite make a hash of it… (couldn't resist that).  I stuck to my plan.  I "actualized" the very different way of working – without painstaking layout, without scaling up, and without careful mixing of paint before dipping the brush.  However, I slipped into old habits of blending paint on the canvas rather than using distinct blocky strokes.  Maybe this would have been easier if I'd worked at Hash's scale? 

  

  

Coincidentally, about the time I began these Splashes, I spotted a yellow magnolia tree in a nearby park.  I'd actually forgotten that there is such a thing and that one had been planted there just a couple years ago.  I broke off a short, low branch with one bud and brought it home to a vase of water.

 

Just as the petals were beginning to open, I placed something on the table, slightly brushing the vase --- and petals, stamens and pollen came tumbling down.

 

Ah, well.  It's a cycle, isn't it?  And here's a seed thought:  My splashy experiments have suggested how it might help me to work somewhat differently with paints.  Who knows what might burst into bloom next?