Should this wait till Halloween?

 

The tale I’ll spin today, inspired jointly by this innocuous backyard arachnid and Henri Matisse, could be left for the end of the month – but I’d rather get on with, tie up the loose ends, and finally launch into a new painting season.

 

A couple weeks ago, my Budapest artist friend Y happened to share a Matisse-like line drawing by her father, a 20^th c. professional artist and graphic designer.  Matisse himself is one of my great heroes and what he could do with a line is – beyond words, as shown in these “simple” self-portraits.

 

 Now, in a wonderful coincidence, as I searched to see if he might have made a spider drawing, I found this in a Tate UK article: 

“Writing to his friend Louis Aragon, he compared himself to a spider who "throws out … its thread to some convenient protuberance and thence to another that it perceives, and from one point to another weaves its web." 

What I’d initially recalled from Y’s reference was something quite different:-- Somewhere I’d read that Matisse was maddening in his inability to consider a work finished.  In fact, he was known for sneaking back into dealers’ display rooms and touching up work that had already been accepted for sale.

 

Would he dress like this, and then slip out from his vest pocket – a loaded paintbrush?  Hmmm….charcoal, more likely.

 

My own approach is to – call it a day.  Do the best I can and then sign off, even if I know the finished piece is one that before very long will be painted over.  Disappointingly, I’ve done a lot of these lately – like the lovely young Fern Gatherer. 

 

I just couldn’t get her face right – the tilt of the head, the shape of the eyes.  So in the spirit of Monsieur Second Chance Matisse, I went back weeks later and re-did her face.

 

Still not right.  Well, there was no dealer looking over my shoulder so I tried a couple more times and again blotted out the whole face.

 

And again.  And again.  

And finally called it “done but still not right.”

 

Anything else I wanted to mess around with?  Sure – I’d known that the silhouetted branches in that island sunset were too thick.  A few quick swipes with the vibrant background colours showed that it could take months to modify the excessive black with lighter colours.

 

Enough of all this!  Meanwhile, I’d brought upstairs the final Summer Camp painting – a riff on the artists of Mount Kisco.  There were definite flaws but I was done. 

 

That is, I was done until my neighbour’s bright-eyed 9-year-old grandnephew stopped in for a visit.  He checked the whole place out, as usual, and then stopped at the artists in the woodland.  “May I say something?” he asked.  “Of course,” I replied.

 

“Most of this is okay, but her neck is too long.”   “Yes,” I sighed.

 

“She looks like a brontosaurus.”   Oh, he had put his finger on it, hadn’t he?  But I can play at that game, and the following week, I had this version waiting for him:

 

He prefers the dinosaur neck to stay in place, but for now (before it’s totally recycled), I’ve made a more conventional revision – wrapping her with a long scarf.

Why was the spider so inspirational in the first place?  Because I saw it first at the centre of a large web, about 3 by 4 feet near my back door.  I tried to respect its turf but one day accidentally brought it down with the end of my rake.  All that work!!! – but the next day, the spider and the web were back in place, carrying on.  Undeterred.  Unstoppable.

 

Soon it will be time to get out the Halloween costumes – brontosaurus anyone?