This is not my monkey

This post is dedicated to my friend L. It's not her monkey either but, with a story that's all her own, she introduced me to this wonderfully useful expression: "This is not my monkey. This is not my circus."  Or in reverse order, in Polish! 

Since L's and my conversation some months back, I seem to see monkeys everywhere. Just today in the grocery store, I saw and envied a young woman wearing a brown cardigan inhabited by monkeys of all colours of the rainbow. One of my spectacular finds was the sidewalk sculpture shown above. As you can see in the link, it sits outside Vancouver's Heffel Gallery, where this week's blockbuster auction of Group of Seven works broke all kinds of records.

Of course, some of my sightings were due to the Year of the Monkey -- our Canadian stamp, for example.

And this funky commemorative bottle, filled with wine that's probably unpalatable.

Coincidentally in this same time period, I'd started a painting of a wonderful thrift store find of two clown acrobats. They're made to hang one above the other in an ingenious trapeze set-up, but I let them take a fall.

I reviewed my old paintings and chose the next in line to be retired, repainted and resurrected into something new -- a 2003 painting called, "Eastern Flavours." It had been a nice experiment in using different shades of red but always had many flaws -- one of them was the lurid "lip" of the Dragon Fruit.

I started with my usual small study that went breezily:

Despite the initial confusion of working over "Eastern Flavours," I was on a roll. Maybe it was the clowns' energy, but it was one of those experiences (rare for me) where you can say, "The painting painted itself."

Now here's the very odd thing -- which YOU might already have noticed.  I was just starting to hone in on the details of these oversized figurines...

...when I realized that the funny blob between the hands of the clown on the right is -- OMG, a monkey! A circus monkey!!

And not a very nice monkey at that.

Does he bear a slight resemblance to the lurid Dragon Fruit? Well, even Picasso's circus monkey looks like an unpleasant customer -- not half as nice as the sweet sidewalk monkey on Vancouver's Gallery Row.

With all the pizzazz of these acrobats, I finished "Taking a Tumble" in record time. Here's the finished performance, and you can view its progress here.

I guess I now have to admit that...........this IS my monkey.

People I used to know

Where is she now, the dignified, fine-boned Hispanic teenager who was my first model for my first painting in my first art class? I was taking an evening course at  the YWCA in London, Ontario -- oh, it must have been about 1976: Forty years ago!!!

My title-less painting is not quite in the category of Keats' Grecian urn, but I couldn't help but recall his thought about the lovers portrayed on the ancient vase he contemplated:

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal -- yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
( - Ode on a Grecian Urn, John Keats)

My young lady at the YWCA is probably a grandmother by now!

My life moved on, too. It wasn't till ten years after that, across the country in Vancouver, that I again turned to painting after several semesters of life drawing. My greatly revered teacher has become loquacious in old age -- he says more in this linked video than he said in three years of classes. Mostly, he would walk quietly around the classroom, occasionally pointing to something in a student's drawing, and say, "This." -- which meant, "You're starting to get it." Another time, he might point and say, "This." And in a different context it meant, "Try paying more attention here."

But one thing he said, in answer to another student's question, was: "The way to learn to paint is to paint." (Sounding like my original "virtual" teacher, Kimon Nicolaides!)

And so at home, on my own, I started to paint.

JT cradled some panels for me -- "Cradling" is reinforcing the back of a thin panel like a masonite sheet with narrow glued boards that will keep it flat.

I was greatly enamoured of Picasso's early work at that time -- well, I still am. And if acrobats and the characters of the classic Italian commedia dell'arte were good enough for Picasso, they were good enough for me.

My first creation was "Columbina and Arlecchina" -- the female equivalents of the commedia's Columbine and Arlecchino, more familiar to us as "Harlequin"

As shown here, I collaged some lace across their two dresses to hide some flaws in the masonite panel.

I wanted next to try an "all-white painting" -- not so much to equate Rauschenberg's really really truly truly White Paintings but more in the spirit of Monet's.

The natural choice from the cast of the commedia was Pedrolino, more familiarly "Pierrot."

He peeks out from a collaged curtain, which again was a device to hide a flawed panel. And I was particularly proud of "stealing" the ribboned shoes from Watteau's Pierrot:
 

(If I've awakened or reawakened in you a fascination with these characters, try to see Marcel Carné's astonishing 1945 film "Les Enfants du Paradis". Perhaps your public library, like ours in Vancouver, might offer it among its on-line resources.)

And what about Harlequin?  Well, he didn't quite come across in my final attempt in this series to do an "all-black" painting:--

Would this have been a terrific success if I'd followed my original inclination to place a masked Siamese cat (after our own firstborn "Shiva") in his arms? Only the shadow knows……

Greetings

After the euphoria of my early March life drawing sessions, I found myself wanting to again be making a painting. The days were still long and dark, and I selected some dark objects against a dark fabric -- with some glowing colours beginning to emerge like the promise of spring.

Long-stemmed dried roses had been waiting in my studio for their time to shine -- keepsakes from a beautiful retirement bouquet I was given in 2010. As I went out to buy a brilliant fresh primrose to put in my little thrift shop flower pot, a title suggested itself: "Past and Present." The dark winter; the coming spring. Perhaps a symbol for this stage of my personal life.

Working on my last half-sheet of wonderful artist's paper, I laid in the basics of what I expected to be a rather serious painting.

In early stages, I began to develop the darks:

Trying not to bog down in my usual (and unfortunate) propensity to dwell on details, I continued along until I reached this point:

Here, about a week into my Very Serious Painting, I was coming to find it Very Seriously Boring. Shapes and colours just weren't bouncing off each other, and I faced the panel each morning with grim resolution.

There are several things one might do at this point. I chose the most exuberant: Wipe it out! I washed the whole thing over with a combination of its brightest colours.

-- and then I began again. I freed myself from the idea that this would be a serious important painting called "Past and Present" and just flung into it.

After another week, there was not much more I could do. Self-evaluation? Not a great painting, but those colours would draw my eye and I'd probably buy it -- if I found it on a greeting card rack. So here it is, with its final light-hearted title, "Greetings."

Sometimes it's best to just accept what life churns out.  As the sage Lao Tzu said, 

"Let life ripen and then fall. Force is not the way at all."

What goes around...

Have you been holding your breath? Treading water? ...as you've waited to learn the next developments with my Aquatic Sketchbooks and the old/young Czech guy who sketched dancers in movement?

Get ready! It's a dramatic episode.

A brochure for this year's International Dance Festival caught my eye at the library. I always watch for these, not because I'm an aficionado of dance, but because they always have terrific photographs of dancers. Flipping through the program, looking for useful poses to study for anatomy drawings, I happened to spot something that was there Just For Me!! -- A notice that during the Festival, there would be a modest art exhibit and -- thrillingly -- ten days of free noon-hour Life Drawing Sessions at the Festival's home base, the Roundhouse Community Centre. (For old building and train enthusiasts, the original Roundhouse was the western terminus of the Canadian Pacific Railway where ...the trains that went around, came around....)

I was just in time -- the sessions started in two days, and I saw that I could squeeze at least three sessions into my calendar. No treading water for me -- I was floating on air as I surfed into the Roundhouse that Friday and settled my big sketchpad and materials at a table, after catching a glimpse of the art exhibit's showpiece.

I'd been away from life drawing for 20+ years and was so excited, I could barely calm myself. But then I channelled my revered teacher Kimon Nicolaides and his counsels: "It is more important that your studies capture this comprehension of movement, of gesture, than that they contain any other single thing."

And lately, as I re-read a chapter of his famous book, I found the following marvellous invocation. (This paragraph is the kind of thing that makes the eyes of contemporary art students glaze over -- or so I conclude from on-line Comments such as those posted here. The only intelligent comment-maker is the one from Kelowna, BC!)

Try for the present to think of the gesture as a thing in its own
right, distinct from the form which your eye sees...This thing we call
gesture is as separate from the substance through which it acts as the
wind is from the tree that it bends. Do not study at first the shape
of an arm or even the direction of it...Become aware of the gesture,
which is a thing in itself without substance.

- Kimon Nicolaides, THE NATURAL WAY TO DRAW

And now: On with the show! The set-up was terrific, and the first day's model was great -- a woman of about 60 who I later learned has worked professionally as a clown. I gradually found a working rhythm and managed some of the great poses she did in her stripy tights and scarf, tank top and loose jacket.

She even stood on her head and also held a rather long pose with her tongue stuck out! I wondered if she'd travelled to Tibet where I understand this is how one says "Hello."

At the session's end, I left one of my sketches for the "Interactive Wall" (bottom of the centre column) and floated out ...

-- rather pleased to have been considered a Tribal Elder by a young Chinese engineering student who asked me what medium I was using "that is not so dirty as charcoal." (Answer: Conté crayon)

The next week I was back, equally excited but not as in synch as I'd felt the first time. The young model's boxy shirt was obstructive.

Not to blame the model, I remembered that sometimes you're in the flow and sometimes you aren't. Once I'd warmed up, I caught a couple of her interesting poses.
 

My third and last session was both thrilling and challenging. The male model did terrific poses in the familiar art class sequence of several 1-minute poses, then 2-minute poses, then 5-minute poses, and a final 10-minute pose. You need to have your wits about you -- and I didn't always.

Are you ready? Here are the five 1-minute poses:

Here, on two sheets, are the five 2-minute poses:

Now, on two sheets, the five 5-minute poses:

And...ta tum...the final 10-minute pose. I *really* wanted to finish with my best -- and I did:

Back home, I sat at the sun-splashed table in the front window and caught an amazing reflection of golden hearts from my cherished cat mug (that holds coloured markers!) onto the program announcement. Call it "The Way to My Heart."

Making a splash

By now, my faithful readers know of my great interest in the human figure -- an interest that goes back decades (yikes!) to my days of taking life drawing classes in the early 1980s. By then, I'd already discovered my bible -- a book titled THE NATURAL WAY TO DRAW by Kimon Nicolaides, an instructor at New York City's revered Art Students' League through the late 1920s and 30s.

Nicolaides "invented" many of the drawing exercises that are still taught and practiced -- "gesture drawing," "contour drawing" and so on, but it is his whole approach that is amazing and demanding. He doesn't teach "techniques" and he certainly doesn't believe in "the right way" to do something. He counsels again and again....to look....to see...to feel....and, most of all, to work attentively every day.

He describes his exercises quite concisely and then assigns repeated practice sessions that take 15-20 hours. Over the years, I've returned to him again and again. And always, over the decades, I've tried to consistently practice "The Daily Composition." This is a small quick gestural study from memory of a place/people/activity seen during the day. His assignment: "Do not be concerned about 'doing it right.' There is no right or wrong. Just do it. Do it every day for a year. The serious student will do it every day for the rest of his or her life."

This Winter-Spring (that's a season, right?) some serendipitous events came along to jumpstart my interest again. First, a reprinted painting by Vancouver artist Thomas Anfield caught my eye, and as I pinned it to my bulletin board next to a Cezanne landscape I was blown away.

Then, a book I'd looked at several years ago became available again from the library.

As I flipped through it, I was struck by the resemblance of his frequent beach scenes...

...to my own old "Aquatic Sketchbooks." For almost 20 years, we swam three times a week -- summers at the outdoor Kits Pool; cool weather at the indoor Aquatic Centre. I'd take along a small sketchbook, and I filled dozens of these with quick gesture drawings of swimmers and beach loungers.

Already determined to weed out my old sketchbooks, I decided to weed and paint at the same time -- with a series of small studies a la "The Soma Suite".  Combining small sketches from different pages, I produced six small painted panels. Here's the outcome:--

A sketch contributing to "Wait and See":

The painted study:

One of the sketches for "Too Cold to Swim":

The painted study:

The preliminary to "Sunspot":--

The painted study:

Sketch preliminary to "Low Tide."

The painted study:

...and where are my preliminary sketches for "Warm-Up"? I don't know, but here's the paint job:--

Finally, a contributing sketch to "Poolside with the Strata Council."

And the painted version. (Strata, get it?)

When I sketched long ago at the Aquatic Centre, an older guy (now I would call him a younger guy!) who worked at the pool came over and asked to see what I was doing. When I showed him my sketchbook he said, "Ahh...I thought so." He explained that years before, in his native Czechoslovakia, he had worked for a ballet company. Cameras and film were not readily available then, and he was employed to sketch the dancers in movement as they developed their program.

I remembered this as I read about artist Thomas Anfield, who also creates dance performances. And circling around this concept of dance and visual arts is a remarkable synchronicity that recently unfolded for me. Stay tuned for more on that next time.

Meanwhile, if you find gesture drawings intriguing, you can view more of them here.  And who knows? You might even get a postcard in the mail with a swimmer, a lounger, a stretcher, a sketcher...or even a dog!