Annals of eccentricity

 

 

 

 

 

 

Happy April 1^st!   

 

Did I once foolishly suggest that I found the very mention of early Dutch or early Flemish painting to be….yawn…boring? Today's Special proves quite the opposite:  "The World Feeds Many Fools" by an unnamed someone of the "Netherlandish School of the 16^th Century."  Far from boring – and it's certainly very eccentric!

 

Actually, when I first learned the word "eccentric," probably at around age 10, I knew it was one of MY words, and eccentrics were among my kind of people.  This affinity for eccentrics was mightily tested in the dark days of the winter just ended.

 

It started innocently enough.  I'd realized that the Vancouver Public Library (VPL) offered music streaming among its digital resources.   I wondered if the offerings might include my favourite cello suites by the renowned long-gone cellist who performs them best – Maurice Gendron.  Our old audiotapes had been retaped at home at least twice over the decades – before they finally gave up the ghost. 

 

Wonderful!  Thank you, VPL.  Gendron and Bach are on tap – and in the catalog search, I'd noted a neighbouring listing of another Gendron:  Adelard A., author of "The Artist and the Line."  Never heard of it.  Never heard of him.  But I was intrigued.  Certainly, line is a key element to be considered in visual art, and I was reminded of the great 20^th century artist Paul Klee....

 

who wittily wrote:-- "Drawing is taking a line for a walk."

 

Before long, Gendron's somewhat yellowed 1954 book was in my hands.

 

In the introductory pages, he describes himself as having been a young art student in 1920.

 

He's not exactly an engaging writer, but after more paragraphs of similar tone, he begins his "lexicon of lineology."  Here's a sample page – "caprizant line" is rather irresistible….but a "carefully drawn line" vs. a "carelessly drawn line"?

 

In total, there are 132 similar pages!  Can you imagine?!?  He's like the unstoppable Sorcerer's Apprentice, bringing line after line after line….many of his own devising.  Beyond eccentric.  Certainly obsessive, to say the least.  And now I really wanted to know:-- Who was this guy??  

 

It was a dark and snowy night in early January when I set to work – quickly discovering that Canada was full of Gendrons – Quebec in particular, where almost every generation and every branch had an "Adelard" of its own.   No wonder "Gendron" is a name as common for the French as "Smith" is for the English – since it derives from the Old French for "son-in-law."  And with all the kids in these families, there must eventually have been plenty of those.

 

My internet searches led me to pages like this:

 

I could barely believe one old handwritten record listing 14 siblings, born one year apart -- each with one of the old French-Canadian names like Celestin, Agénard, Evrard, Achille, Bonaventure, Aubin, Rosaire for the boys; and Aglae, Apolline, Hyacinthe, Scholastique, Theoriste, Cephise, Mathurine for the girls.

 

Whew!  Time to take a break and, in the spirit of Old Quebec, watch the snow fall.  There were so many byways, so many false leads.  The author had described himself as an art student in 1920 – yet he had an LLB?  (Canadian designation for a lawyer).  If he'd gone to art school – when and where?  Ditto, law school? And how old would he have been for each?

 

Canadian Census data was if-fy – formal census procedures and timetables didn't even kick in for all provinces in the same year.  And I'd wandered fruitlessly in the byways of early art schools, law schools, history societies large and small, Canadian government data, Quebec government data, French-Canadian equivalent of Ancestry.com, maps and vintage photos of small towns – and on and on.

 

I had found one plausible connection to Aylmer, Quebec – a family listed in the 1911 Census with a 10-year-0ld boy named "Adelard."

 

His birth date and parents' names even connect to a 1975 obituary in Nashua, New Hampshire – Adelard L. Gendron, born in Quebec.  But – oh, no! – the library book shows the author as "Adelard A."  Yet, not to be completely discouraged, I recalled somewhere seeing an Adelard with "Adolphe-Leopold" as a middle name.

 

Is this how people go quietly bonkers when they're isolated in the midst of a blizzard?  I wasn't going to let that happen!  I needed to stop searching, ground myself, and have some fun interacting with this eccentric literary production. 

 

Here's the man who would help:

 

Handsome dude, eh?  I found him among photos of McGill University law grads and borrowed him as an Adelard Wannabee.  I drew a simple outline of his profile and also drew deeply on Adelard A. Gendron's counsel:

 

"An unartistic line is an inartistic line."

 

And then I began to fill in the blanks, starting with a line related to my own blepharoptosis  (about which I have no cause to worry):

 

I looked for other possibilities to match the line to a context – a CONVEX one in this case.

 

And I just plain enjoyed some JOYSOME lines.

 

It was a memorable weekend, after all – the drain pipe thawed, the snow was deep enough for fun with a shovel, and I still had a gift of delectable holiday fruitcake to nibble.  I even invented some lines of my own:

The wistful line is one that traces the entanglement of wisteria and suggests the emotion of wistfulness that Adelard A-L Gendron could not himself be definitively traced.

As for Adelard, was he an eccentric?  Why, it's written all over his face!

 

 

One more tug at those braids

 

 

 

I couldn't move on from the previous post.  I had to make one more try at that model's beautiful little face and her multi-coloured braids – this time, her head and hair only.  A twist of fate, or the weather, gave me a hand.

 

Coincidentally, in a seemingly endless February interval when snow alternated with sleet, one of my art newsletters posted a painting by Zinaida Serebriakova.  I'd never heard of her but was immediately taken with her style.  It seems that this early 20^th century Ukrainian artist made her name with a self-portrait she painted when she was snowed in one weekend!

 

Look how contemporary this is.  I checked further on-line and found another of her self-portraits that presented possibilities for me.  (And with a little delving, I also learned that her surname has its base in the word for "silversmith.")

 

Why not give that scarf a try?  Here we go –

 

I painted over an old canvas, created a new face, added an exuberant head-dress and loose braids and…….seriously:  What was I thinking?!?!

 

 

 

This bore no resemblance to Zinaida, and the next day I painted over that wild head-gear.  Maybe I could salvage things if I called in my old pal Hashim Akid with his verve and slashing brush strokes?    Well….it happened that my canvas panel was getting more than a little textured from all the paint-overs.  The face that I'd hoped to resemble an Akid called out instead for a dermatology consultation.

 

 Still – I decided to see it through.

 

Right.  It's another in the WWIT Series.  (What was I thinking?)   At this point, I resolved to start all over with a new canvas and a new theme.  But then I happened to notice this famous image among the reproduction prints on my bookshelf. 

 

 Did I dare?  Why not?

 

NO!!  We've all seen better Vermeer spin-offs than this. One of my favourites shows a cat with a pearl earring, and the paint-by-numbers might not be a bad idea either.

 

Spending so much time with these braids reminded me of a story my father once told.  He was born in 1900, eventually the eldest of six siblings in an Irish-American immigrant family.  He might almost have been one of the kids in this early 20^th century schoolroom.  Note the way the desks march closely in lines.

 

He'd been amused to see these old-style desks still in use in my own first schoolroom in our little paper mill town in northern New York state.

 

"What are the holes for?" I asked.  Those were for inkwells, he explained, because in his day, children learned to write with a nibbed pen, dipped directly into the ink container.  Then, trusting that I would always be the responsible good citizen that he was, even from his prenatal months, he  confessed:  A girl with long braids had sat in the seat in front of him – and no, he did not grab the braids and call out, "Carrots!"  

 

Day after day, as she moved her head one way or another, he was so tempted to dip the end of her braid in his inkwell!  But no, he resisted – by that time, he had a couple of little sisters of his own and no doubt realized what a disaster the ink stains would be for another child's mother faced with the wreck of a threadbare school dress.   A touching memory for me, thanks to those multi-coloured braids.

 

 

Shining some light on the tangle

 

 

Enough of the wheel-spinning.  Enough feeling at loose ends.  Very soon, as Pablo Neruda would say, "Enough now of the wet eyes of winter -- not another single tear!"  With today's daylight hours clocking in at 10h 57 minutes, it's time to get crackin' again.

 

Along with demos and tutorials, an on-line "art academy" I subscribe to offers high-quality life-drawing sessions – next best thing to real life!  Most recently for me, the model has been a fine-featured young woman with – get this:  Opulent multi-coloured braids!!!  How could I resist trying to paint her?  I think this photo of my set-up will give you an idea without violating copyright.

 

Here's my first lay-in, in which I've reeeeally tried to get the proportions right.

 

I wasn't quite on track, but kept getting closer.

 

 

At last, the final version of "Tying Up the Loose Ends" (copyright 2023).

 

 

It has its flaws, but at least it passed the High Altitude Test.  That's when I bring a finished painting upstairs from the basement studio to hang out for a while as I consider what I might have done differently.

 

The real masterworks in loose ends and tangles are those that happen naturally – as in the title photo above – or those that get just a little help from a simpatico gardener,as below.  I saw both instances on my walk last week at Deer Lake Park in nearby Burnaby – and I've just found a glimpse to share with you here, showing the park in autumn.  The lake becomes most visible starting at Minute 0.58.

 

What goes around comes around

 

 

 

If you're been reading between the lines here lately, you might have detected a little wistfulness.  That's what's been behind all the wheel-spinning, I guess.  Through the dark winter, I've been again reviewing and gleaning "stuff" – including decades of old drawings, paintings and sketchbooks – cheerfully dispensing with some, but unable to part with others.  These Steller Jays in sunflowers are one of those, a colour study piece with torn paper from our cabin days that brings back a whole era.

 

In the process, old aspirations have come to the fore.  I've wished I could reclaim my art mindset from the 1980s and 90s – to dream, to work, to do, to learn, and to keep moving forward, whatever the outcome.  Other old aspirations have surfaced, too, like getting better at reading French!  Of course, the two go together for me, all the French artists, my many beautiful art books in French, and our few but thrilling travels.  Since our 1989 trip to France, I've always kept on my studio bulletin board a photo of an exuberant painting by French artist Lydie Arickx.

 

 

A little sketchbook from that trip reminded me of a plan I'd once had – to do figure paintings loosely suggesting the verbs in "The House of Etre."  If you've studied French, you'll know that "the House" is a mnemonic device for remembering the few but important verbs that form their past tense with the verb "to be" (être) rather than with the verb "to have" (avoir). 

 

 

Well, why not reclaim this idea?!  I decided to start – quite inevitably – with the verb "naître" – to be born.  With spring almost in the air these days, I conceived (!!) that as a vision of emerging. I started by painting over an old assignment piece – coincidentally, with a split sunflower motif.

 

My idea was to show parts of figures which would wrap and grow against a misty background.

 

The more I fiddled around with this, trying to make something of the fully emerged disc, the more it all began to look quite obstetrical….which was not the point!  Then, as I came into the studio one morning, trying not to grit my teeth, my eye caught an old sketchbook cover that I'd salvaged.  There, in the mid-1990s at a time of intense introspection, I'd painted a small version of a little sculpture I'd made – of something new emerging – I didn't yet know what.  This became my model.

 

This went along pretty quickly, and I called it a wrap at this point:  "House of Etre Series –Naître" (copyright 2023). 

 

It's a funny thing that almost universally, the concept of birth leads to myths and tales about rebirth.   And halfway through this painting, I'd realized that I was re-creating something I'd done long ago, back in those days of excited aspiration – two somethings, in fact, from a series I called "Lifeforces."  Here's "Sprouting Onion and Shallot" (1991):

 

And here's one of my enduring favourites, "Coltsfoot" (1991), painted as I imagined its underground growth, pushing up into our spring garden – "galloping coltsfoot" as we named its rampant growth habit.

 

Yikes!  All that was 32 years ago.  Meanwhile – what became of Lydie Arickx, who I'd never heard of and never again saw mentioned?  These days, she's a white-haired force to be reckoned with.  When I took that 1989 photo, she'd just had a major exhibit in Paris.  And in 1991, she'd moved to southwestern France, where she began to do huge sculptures.

 

You don't need to know French to skim this video to see her huge paintings (scroll down on the gallery's website).  Or how about this one, showing her exhibit at Cinderella's castle of Chambord?  (For a nice Valentine's touch, note her grey-haired beau – and her artist-son).

 

Oh my gosh!  I haven't churned it out as Lydie has, but check that second video at 0.45 minutes – is that ME in the admiring crowd?!?

 

 

Getting acquainted with Lydie and registering today for a 2-day art workshop in March have almost "re-birthed" my youthful aspirations.  There's sure to be good stuff whirling its way in my direction.  What goes around, comes around.

 

Consider the possibilities

 

What a start to the new year!  -- a special delivery from friends L and B.  They brought even more vintage bricks than I'd asked for from their house renewal project, which involved dismantling an old chimney.  Pure gold!!  And no doubt as heavy.  L and I simply cheered and applauded while B modestly showed his prowess, carrying all 14 bricks in a sturdy box.  When I shot this photo yesterday, everything was frozen in place and I couldn't even reposition them for a closeup of their new-to-me trademark:  "MAINLAND."  Oh, it's going to be a verrrrry good year!

 

Of course I've been thinking about where my paintings might take me, and I continue to brood on developing more depth, more dimensionality, more facility.  In an email holiday message, along came another "blank slate," as it were – in the photograph of an old friend's beautiful grown-up daughter.  Because I haven't sought permission and, in any case, always refrain from posting identifiable people pictures, I'll share it here in authentic blank slate mode:

 

 

With this, I decided to experiment with some favoured artists' start-up procedures.  I've admired contemporary American artist Lea Colie Wight for years and last year bought her book, even though oil painting is quite different in many respects from acrylics.

 

 

Still, her start-up method was potentially useful, I thought.

 

And so I began "Daughter" with a Wight-style loose lay-in.

 

Eventually I reached the About-As-Good-As-It-Will-Get stage:

 

 

At this point, there was only one thing to do.  Well, actually three things:- Paint it over, turn it upside-down, and begin again.

 

 

This time, I chose again one of my heroes.  You've met him before – contemporary UK artist Hashim Akib.

 

His start-up method is quite different, more linear…

 

 

…and rather resembles that of my enduring hero, Mary Beth McKenzie.  So here's my second beginning for "Daughter":

 

 

This progressed to something of a not-bad finale (particularly after I'd decided to stow the glasses):

 

I can't say that this greatly resembles the real daughter but getting a close likeness hadn't been my goal – rather, I wanted to get back in touch with painting faces which still endlessly fascinate me.

 

I needed some grounding, too, in a chaotic week of being without my laptop (and all its related systems) and meanwhile worrying about extreme low temperatures and potentially frozen water pipes.  What to do?  Keep at it and aim for a couple more Daughter-ish images in the manner of one artist or another.  Paint over.  Turn sideways.  Begin again.

 

This time, I tried to emulate Alex Katz  – still going strong at age 95, with a blockbuster exhibit under way right now at New York's Guggenheim Museum.  Here's Katz's "Black and Brown Blouse":

 

I positioned Daughter in slight profile, aiming for those Katz cheekbones – but her lovely features were just too gently rounded to make it as a Katz.

 

Meanwhile, another friend sent me this link to a recent CBS special asking, "Have you ever heard of this artist Modigliani?"  Why yes, indeed.  While I was confident he'd never painted a rounded face, I looked for a prototype with shortish brown hair, and he came through on that count.  Like Alex Katz, he apparently painted his wife again and again.

 

And here's my very slimmed down "Daughter" spin-off:

 

One thing is for sure.  If these two images found themselves shoulder to shoulder at an art exhibit, they'd have no quarrel about which artist knew what he was doing.  They both do – magnificently, in so many perfect structural details that I couldn't begin to capture in small scale.

 

So where is all this going?  Places we've never been before, I hope.  In that vein, I can't resist sharing the amaryllis buds as they've emerged through all the recent cold dark days -- and my favourite saying for this season, from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke:--

 

"Come let us welcome the new year,

Full of things that never have been."