Found Art: Blame it on Picasso

After settling in Vancouver in the late 1970s, we spent our first five years getting acquainted with the local mountain trails. On our first hike up and behind Mount Seymour, I took along an exercise from a painting book: "Take a walk with your eyes open for interesting things you see underfoot. Bring them home and make a painting of them."

The "interesting things" I collected are pictured above -- a battered packet that once contained Dutch mini-cigars and a classy metal Whatzit. Although I never made a painting with them, I found both objects so intriguing that they survived even the Great Pre-Move Studio Clear-out of 2012.

Packrats rule! And what more exemplary a packrat than that old rogue Picasso? In her book MATISSE AND PICASSO: A Friendship in Art, his one-time lover Françoise Gilot (known as "the one who got away" because she left him before he could leave her -- but also an interesting artist and woman in her own right -- and evidently still going strong!) describes one memorable reaction to packrat-ism. As I recall her story:--

When they both lived in the south of France, Picasso and Matisse occasionally exchanged edgy visits to check out what the other was doing. One time, when Picasso was deep in his experiments with collage and assemblage, he and Gilot took along their 6-year old son Claude. The little boy was noticeably impressed with the grandfatherly Matisse of white hair and beard and kind manners, as well as with his calm studio, quite different from Picasso's cluttered disorder.

Some weeks later back at home, the precocious Claude went out to collect the mail and came dancing back to his mother, hugging to his chest the latest issue of l'Oeil, the prestigious French art journal. "C'est Monsieur Matisse!" he crowed with delight, displaying the cover photo.

"You like Monsieur Matisse, don't you?" Gilot asked. With great solemnity, Claude replied, "Yes. He is a very great artist."

"Your father is also a very great artist," his mother replied. The little boy looked at her sceptically and answered, "Monsieur Matisse paints beautiful things. Papa paints only junk."

So what does this mean for Picasso's famous statement,“”Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up"?

Nonetheless, I still look underfoot as I walk, and I've brought home many spectacular (or not) finds. My best-ever, from a discard pile at a renovation zone in my old workplace, was a 2-foot high wooden spool of the type that electrical wiring is wrapped on. My last/best boss, who I've referred to before, was leaving ...before me!...and I wanted to present her with a gift reminiscent of her love of tea-with-milk, her hyper-productiveness, and the symbol she'd once given the department: "When we're at our best, it all goes like clockwork."

I saw that the spool would make a perfect tea table, and with collage, paint and ingenuity, I created a minor work of art titled "Tea Time." The core of the spool featured inspirational (!) quotes about capital-T Time, and the base of the spool featured symbols of her family time, forever being balanced with work:--

The *best* part was the top of the spool which combined an intricate clockwork (get it?) with a bird's-eye view of a tea setting: the lid of the golden teapot, a small pitcher of milk, and a mug with the cream-coloured tea that revolted almost everyone else except the boss herself.

For several months this past autumn, the very same kind of spool --only bigger!!! better!!?!? -- sat on a laneway trash pile outside a nearby store. I actually went up close and looked at it once or twice, but my Inner Housekeeper said, "Resist! Resist!" and eventually someone else took it away.

That's okay...because from the same laneway, I'd already picked up half of the metal "cage" from a 16" circular fan. My motive was originally quite practical. After watching a charming grey squirrel with white socks eat its way through a whole line-up of planted crocus bulbs, I resolved to protect the rest of our bulbs with upturned plastic mesh trays of the kind used by garden centres. The fan remnant came along just as I'd run out of garden trays.

When I placed the circular fixture in the garden, next to an old Pepsi tray I'd snagged from work (incorrigible, isn't she?), I couldn't resist adding to it the metal gears JT had once salvaged for me (incorrigible, isn't he?).

If placed in our front yard, this squirrel baffling set-up would have been Indescribably Tacky. Placed in the back yard, where I view it with a smile from the kitchen window, it's Unashamedly Tacky. Picasso, eat your heart out.

"Channelling Matisse"

Yes, of course I like Matisse. He's up there somewhere on my list of favourite artists, for both his exquisite drawings and his many enchanting paintings. Just lately, I've realized that it's natural for me to connect with Matisse -- for his colour, his patterns and, despite his sober appearance, his exuberance.

There's one painting of his, though, that I've always intensely disliked -- "Decorative Figure on an Oriental Background". On my innocent assumption that snapping a photo of my own book is not violating copyright, I offer this mini-glimpse:--

From the first time I saw it, and it is often reproduced, I've winced at the incredibly ugly fabric background and the figure's bolt-upright vertical back. Well, surprise, surprise. Over the past year, I've been reading a 2-volume work on Matisse by Hilary Spurling, and along the way, I learned many interesting things relevant to this painting. First, this fabric pattern is so well known in classic French decorative arts that it has a name --Tissu-something-something (…sorry I didn't make note of it), and Matisse adored it. Second, his hometown of Bohain in northern France has been famous for centuries for its weavers, so much so that Napoleon chose them to work for the Empress Josephine. Although Matisse's father was a matter-of-fact grain merchant, the family was inevitably immersed in their hometown's aura of fabric, colour, design.

Third fact: The "decorative figure" is just that -- a large statue Matisse created, not a human figure. And with its straight back, he was asserting his legendary fascination with the vertical. In his young days, fellow artists nicknamed him "Monsieur Plumb Line" for his devotion to checking his verticals with a plumb line -- and then, in a very conscious way, playing the horizontals and the "arabesques" against them.

If you've been watching this spot since the last post, you'll have guessed that my funny little sculpture with the flat horizontal bottom is about to reappear. I don't remember how the impulse struck me, but I decided I'd do a riff on my un-favourite Matisse, using my own "decorative figure".

First, I needed to construct another prop, a small wannabe mirror that was *total fun* to make though far less elaborate than Matisse's.

Then I dug in my packrat's stash for some vaguely similar fabrics and potted up a small cactus for a set-up like this:

Originally, I thought I'd do a horizontal layout vs. Matisse's vertical, but at an early stage, I realized I'd do better sticking with his original vertical orientation.

Although I made a horizontal variation on his background fabric, I decided to "copy" the other colours and patterns in the original. I tried to pay attention to the contrasts in tonal value, the extent to which the various patterns are "exact" or "inexact," and the use of line. You'll notice that my figure's flat horizontal bottom was lost almost immediately in the fascination of the cloth flowing around it.

I didn't even try to deal with the weird stuff that's going on in the background. For example, the way the fabric comes forward on the right side suggests that the figure is sitting near the corner of a wall -- but no corner is evident. And the brown flowing mass behind the figure's head and right arm -- is that hair?? Don't know.

Well, no matter. I did what I could, and it was rather thrilling to tackle the whole thing. About midway along, I'd come to realize that I would be covering almost every square inch with pattern.

Almost every working session, I'd find myself asking, " Oh my god, where is this going?" You can follow the steps as I worked away, wondering, "Is this going to anchor somehow? Will the centre hold?" I think, in the end, it did:--

And my funny little mirror? It did take on a life of its own, didn't it? Coincidentally, after finishing this painting, I found in a different book a small black and white reproduction of Matisse's painting "The Artist and his Model" with this same mirror:

Later I found a colour version reproduced. Wow!! Can this guy use colour or what?!?!

After all this, you might wonder if I've changed my opinion about the original "Decorative Figure on an Ornamental Background." Answer: Sort of. Looking at it so carefully over a couple of months, I've certainly become used to it and have to admit it's something of a wonder -- the way it all locks together.

In retrospect, I can see it would have been very fascinating and challenging to stick with the idea of a horizontal version -- mirror and all -- and to choose different colours related to each other in the same way that the colours in the original relate to each other. (This might have taken a couple of years rather than months.)

Matisse was such a perfectionist that he often reclaimed paintings that had been sold in order to make adjustments. And he certainly wouldn't have shied away from trashing Version One and re-doing it if he saw a better way. For Kelly Mo-tisse, though, when it's done, it's done. Ouch! "Don't say 'done', say 'finished,'" my mother would have said.

Eh bien. C'est fini.