Look closely within the circles and you'll see healthy growth on the small rose bush I acquired in 2018. It flourished nicely on my porch for several summers, and then this past winter's extreme cold seemed to knock it out. A month ago, I clipped off the obvious deadwood and crossed my fingers. Two days ago, those healthy green leaves greeted me one morning. The 19th century author Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote, "The beginning is always today." And she should know – surely her Frankenstein wasn't built in a day!
I was still mulling over the business of cool and warm colours when my friend Y sent a photo of the magnificently garbed European Firebug spotted (ouch!) at her son's property not far from Budapest. Here's a stock photo of His Eminence in all his glory.
That's all I needed! I began working on small studies, playing on various tones of red, including one that showed a museum visitor assessing paintings of beetles!
I'd been recalling the lovely young woman I'd once surreptitiously photographed doing the same thing – with a view to one day painting her.
Then it happened that I picked up on Y's comment that she really didn't like these beetles, and I decided that producing another in the Beetlemania series would be no thanks for all the inspirations she's shared.
I was carried away, though, with the figure of the young woman and splashed onward chaotically. For one thing, I'd decided to paint over and "re-purpose" a 2022 painting called "Chortle."
My friend G has noted the times I've painted over old stuff. Hard to tell if she's serious (with that subtle gleam in her eye), but she's convinced that some day a famous (?!) painting of mine will be scraped back and beneath – voila! – there will be found something even more astonishing. Maybe like the recent find of a small dog in the corner of a Picasso painting?
The fact is that at this point I was deep into chaos. Not even organized chaos. I thought of a new-to-me saying I'd learned from my neighbour pal, something that I might have known from childhood if I, too, had been born and raised in Canada: "Begin as you mean to go on." This intrigues me as a more purposeful statement than, "getting off to a good start" or "putting your best foot forward" – instead, it offers real guidance on the process of planning ahead and moving forward.
Instead, with no preliminary studies, no colour experiments, I was splashing to the beat of the familiar (and perhaps contradictory) artist's observation, "The painting tends to take on a life of its own."
Somewhere along the way, I'd decided that the museum wall would feature, instead of the Firebug, the fabulous self-portrait by 20th century Canadian artist Myfanwy Pavelic. Thanks to a pamphlet shared with me by friend M, I'd met and explored her works late last year.
Initially, I'd assumed my painting would replicate the colours the young viewer was wearing in my photo of her:-- dark skirt and top against light museum wall. But as things began to shape up, I saw that it only made sense to put her in the same grey-white clothing as Myfanwy's -- and to darken the museum wall.
And then -- when I began to work on copying Myfanwy's self-portrait, I found a whole art school education in trying to master the changes in tone from white to multi-greys to near-back. Eventually, aside from this greyscale, there would be little more than a slice of red wall, some yellow in the hair of both subject and viewer, and some grey-blue.
By now, I had a title for this painting -- "In Another Lifetime" – and something of a story line. I imagined the young viewer speculating on whether she might wish to travel back in time to Myfanwy's artists' circle, The Limners -- or whether in today's world, she might want to travel cross-country to hang out with the Toronto teenager who was offered $4.1 million in art scholarships. (For that matter, what if Myfanwy's own time machine took her forward to Now – what would that mean?)
Here's the final version (copyright 2023), which I'll be keeping for a good long while – because I learned so much from working with the range of white-grey-black.
As I wrapped this up, I recalled a line from a poem by Stephen Spender -- "One more new botched beginning". But I can't find the whole poem, so who knows? Meanwhile, my reborn rose has no intention of botching the season. Here's how it looked on May 30, 2018, with buds about to open -- and this year it can only be better!
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