Danse macabre

Happy Halloween! In another amazing convergence, I happened on an old drawing exercise just at cucurbit season. The drawing exercise, I'm sure, was originally inspired by the Japanese artist Hokusai (October 31, 1760 - May 10, 1839) who did some fascinating drawings of skeletons in action.

The exercise proposed in my drawing book is this: Cut out a newspaper photo of a figure (dancers, athletes and rock groups work beautifully) and, with reference to anatomy charts, draw the bones that underlie the figure's position. Here are the reference photos for the two dancing skeletons shown above:

It's not easy, even in this casual playful mode. The pelvis, which someone described as "an elegant bowl" and the rib cage present particular challenges. As Dylan Thomas said in another context, "Oh, easy for little Leonardos!"  Whether or not it was easy for him, Leonardo permanently set the bar high:--

We saw his actual drawings in a travelling show of Leonardo's works from the Windsor Castle collection. It was the year after JT came home from the hospital, and we took a break from his busy rehab schedule for a special trip to the Vancouver Art Gallery. Along with the rest of the throng, we oohed and aahed until at a certain point JT said, "Maybe we've had enough now. This is starting to remind me of the Physio Department."

But back to Cucurbits and Friends! Here are this year's carefully chosen few -- with two small bitefuls (?) from the unidentifiable volunteer vine that sprung up in our garden in July.

Now here's my prototype plan for "Dancing with Cucurbits", showing the source photos with yellow paper stand-ins for the gourds:--

And here's the final version...definitely non-archival and intended Just for Fun:--

Projecting ahead to Cucurbits 2014, things can only get more exciting. We have a wonderful bond with our new Chinese neighbours (okay, we're the new ones; they're the established ones) based on my enthusiasm for their front yard trellis and its output:-- the same fascinating squash that was grown by the elderly Chinese man in our old neighbourhood.

This friendly couple has twice presented us with two of these intriguing vegetables. I was advised to wear gloves or use a paper towel when peeling them although theirs were not as spiny as those I saw on our old street. Delicately stir-fried with garlic, they taste something like a cross between honeydew melon and zucchini.

Searching for more information via Google Images, I learned that what I thought were "Chinese vegetables" are actually chayotes, native to Mexico and Central America.

Nonetheless, we've come to call them "Anita's squash" -- and Anita has promised to give me a whole plant next year! If all goes according to plan, our tiny front yard might actually sprout a Chinese-style trellis, and I'll be able to document the entire unfolding of what was once The Great Cucurbit Mystery.

"A Question of Scale"

About this time last year, I was just getting established in my new basement studio after all the months and angst of moving from our old house. Placing some of my cherished artifacts on studio shelves, I became fascinated again with their shadows cast against the studio wall/ceiling -- a similar fascination to the one that led to my 2008 painting "The Artist's Hand, the Artist's Eye." 

As I continued unpacking -- congratulating myself on saving treasures ranging from my mother's antiques to my own hoards of clam shells -- I couldn't help but note how much I enjoy unique labels on bottles and boxes, preferably anthropo- or zoo-morphic. (Maybe I should have gone into package design?) Then I suddenly remembered a coffee break conversation from an early drawing class.

The topic had shifted to our instructor's painting experience and he casually said, "Do you know what has always intrigued me about paintings?" "Colour!!" we answered in chorus. "Well, sure," he said, "but I'm talking about scale." Scale? We looked blank. "You know -- you'll have a canvas, maybe 2x3 feet, and on it are all these little people in a crowd scene -- or maybe a bowl of fruit with lemons larger than could ever be possible." Scale.

Suddenly, it became irresistible to play with this idea within a painting. I rearranged some objects to illustrate the point:

Then I decided, in keeping with the theme, that I'd need to do a carefully planned layout, to scale -- a decision that would cost me about 45 hours of work before I even set paint to paper, as described in a previous post. 

I started with a 10" x 13" drawing, which took me a mere 20 hours:

-- and eventually scaled this up to 20" x 26", the size of my painting paper -- to which I then transferred the outlines.

To accomplish the transfer of the same-size layout to my painting paper, I cut away sections of the large drawing, bit by bit -- more painstaking work, which much later yielded some amusing moments when I could place the pencilled figures against their painted counterparts.

And now...ta tum...five months in the making, here's the final painting: "A Question of Scale" (copyright 2013).

So what do we have here, contained within a space of about 520 square inches? Three human figures of different sizes, each larger than a mountain (see the blue mug) and smaller than a brandy bottle (Metaxa -- a delicious treat in days gone by; white wine does nicely nowadays); a wren-type bird larger than a seagull and a leopard's head (see the Metaxa box); two mugs of different sizes and two similar bottles of different sizes which, if stacked, would be twice the size of the mannikin human figure.

The evolution of this painting can be seen here  -- and it's not a process that I'm ever likely to get involved in again.

Holding this up against my general goal to make each painting "my best yet".... well, it's not. In fact, there are so many mistakes (about which the artist's lips are sealed), it could be a nice example of "What's wrong with this picture?" Still: I learned a lot and worked the idea out of my system -- but one has to wonder if the outcome was proportionate to the effort.