Things are different this year

 

This time last year, we were enjoying Summer Camp in the Adirondacks.  This handsome dude, drawn with homemade charcoal in my back yard, Roswell Morse Shurtleff, savoured those cool summer mornings as much as I did.

 

This year, Summer Camp is more likely to take place locally – or maybe not.  We'll see.  The only defined curriculum is to play experimentally.  I have boxes of little-used art supplies, long lists of titles to suggest future works, and equally long lists of "study projects" suggested by books I've read.  So…away we go.

 

For instance, I've had a hankering to try the tondo format  – you know: Round, as in "rotund." For a while now, I've collected various "rounds" that could be used as templates.

 

 

Then, at the end of 2023's camp, I thought I had the perfect HUGE disc for a starter project – unearthed in the back of my yard by the fence workman.  Wow!

 

Alas, as I reconstructed the garden last September, I realized this was the base of my compost bin which had become dislodged when moved for fence construction.  But it didn't matter that it needed to be put back where it belonged.   "Tondo" was still rolling along as first up for Summer Camp 2024.

 

I researched some of the famous – and less famous – classical tondo paintings.  Caravaggio's "Medusa" always shows up on the lists. 

 

Here's my quick take on it – sans snakes!!  Just think of curly hair.

 

Remember Sebastiaen Vrancx, one of my "motley crew" of Commedia enablers?

 

What a crazy guy.  Here, in tondo, he's taken on "De kat de bel annbinden" or – "Belling the cat."

 

As Aesop's fable suggests, there would be great risks in trying to bell a cat.  Maybe Pieter Brueghel's version, with the bell-handler in armored PPE, might have been a model for Vrancx?  

 

And here's my simpler Vrancx spin-off:

 

With my studies completed, I turned to a rusty treasure I found in a nearby laneway – a flat part-circle that was waiting to become a tondo, 12 inches in one-time diameter.

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I can't believe I missed taking photos of the earliest stages of my project, but it hadn't taken long to realize that I didn't have a suitable round mount.  Then, weird things happened quickly when I painted the hard-board base with layers of old paints. Belatedly, I realized the pigment was separating from the acrylic medium, and this latter swirled and soaked through the layers in unpredictable ways.

 

Surprise is preferred to perfection though, and here's my final version of "Partial Eclipse (Partial Tondo)" Summer Camp Series, copyright 2024.

 

 

 Yes, things are different this year but the object is the same:-- Splash and have fun.  Take a look.