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……