'Boo times two - Hokusai meets Renoir

 

Here's the scene on August 1^st, the official starting point for the Great Deracination of Summer 2022.  I'd been trying to hold the spirit of Hokusai and Aoi Yamaguchi as described last time – "to draw bamboo, become bamboo," and thus, the idea came to me to do a painting titled, "Becoming Bamboo."

 

I started by making a couple reference drawings – "en plein air" as they say, with the actual models before me at 8 am one cool morning.

 

Then I made a start on a figure in a bamboo thicket, on the verge of morphing into the surroundings.

 

Meanwhile, The Dig was under way.

 

The physical labour took place in the shade of early mornings.  The studio work took place in the afternoon in my coolish basement.

 

My figure was striving up as my trusty trowel was striving down.  Photos really cannot capture the impressive convolutions of bamboo roots – over, under, around and through various obstacles, sometimes twinned side-by-side, sometimes overladen at different depths.

 

But I was happier with the root progress than with the painting progress – until Renoir offered a fresh approach. Long ago, I read and have tried to observe Renoir's counsel on drawing from nature, "Do not draw a leaf.  Draw the leaf."   I went to my art notebooks and found a fuller explication as quoted in "My Life and My Films", the autobiography of his famed filmmaker son Jean Renoir:-- 

"If you paint the leaf on a tree without using a model, you risk becoming stereotyped because your imagination will only supply you with a few leaves – whereas Nature offers millions, all on the same tree.  No two leaves are exactly the same.  The artist who paints only what is in his mind must very soon repeat himself."

I decided to make a very deliberate drawing, leaf by leaf, and then use this as the basis for a stencil of leaves that would further envelop the becoming figure in the painting.

 

It was fun to begin cutting out the shapes for the stencil – especially as colours from the cutting board showed through and offered something entirely different.

 

It was fun to bring the painting to its pre-stencil stage.

 

 And it was fun to apply intense lime-green paint through the spaces of the stencil.

 

 

But, it was absolutely not fun to view the result.

 

Rather than becoming bamboo, this figure is becoming fodder for the recycle collection…another of those bright ideas that wasn't so bright after all.  Still, my feelings were salvaged by the work of a master who showed how it's to be done.

 

Coincidentally, I'd just snagged this book from the "Staff Picks" shelf at the local branch library. 

 

William Morris is an enduring hero of mine for, among other things, his gorgeous fabric designs which are usually based on botanical themes. Was it just possible that he might once have tackled bamboo?  YES!!!!!!

 

Maybe there's a doctoral thesis in arguing Morris' repeated stencil designs against Renoir's counsel – but why argue, when we can just savour it all? 

 

Renoir himself was as enthusiastic a gardener as Monet.  In a favourite story of mine, Renoir scolded his gardeners who were, they told him, busily pulling up weeds.  "There is no such thing as a weed," he said.  And as someone else added, "They're just plants in the wrong places."  As further testament to Renoir's wisdom, I'll add, "No two roots are exactly the same… Nature offers millions of variations, all along the same underground stem."

 

Here's my progress report on Day 15, after about 26 hours of digging and clipping.  Whew!