Is it a collision or a convergence?
This promotion photo for a spring Vancouver dance performance started something for me, something with an irresistible momentum that's just gathering speed.
Eventually it came together with a bunch of other stuff floating around in my creative ether:-- The street scene at Budgie's Burritos, the serendipitous Roundhouse drawing sessions, my determination to recycle old paintings and clean out my old Aquatic Centre sketchbooks, and my channeling of Serge Hollerbach's "Shrimp on a Bed of Lettuce."
Oh, yes. And then there's my occasionally expressed suspicion of current word usages -- "lean in", for example.
Well, let's just call all these things packed into one space a Flash Mob -- because that's what's happening here in The Yellow House studio. All those impulses arrive every morning about 6:30, take up different poses, try out different skin tones, have various colours applied to them -- and eventually, something like this emerges:
This one eventually produced "Lean In," the first painting in my new hold-onto-your-hats series. After the pencil study, based on poses from my old sketchbooks, the first step was to select another sacrificial painting. In 2003, I *loved* these Sitka spruce cones, but it's time now for some second growth forest.
Once again, I resolved not to do a painstaking scaling-up but worked directly with water-soluble white pencil for the initial lay-in.
This approach was not without its problems. I soon realized I had too much space on hand and needed an additional figure in the upper left corner.
When I first painted the background, the underlying pattern of the spruce cones created a weird energy.
And how about these wild patterned tights?
Early in the game, I cropped some of the right side and some of the bottom edge to pack this flash mob closer.
I'd been working away for about two weeks when my friend B took me to see "West Side Story" starring (well, as far as I was concerned) her gifted son Michael as A-Rab, one of the Jets gang. At one moment in one of the fabulous group dance routines, my mouth fell open: "Ohhhhhhh my god........if I could paint this!".
Next morning in the studio, I couldn't resist lightening the hair of the central figure. Then, as I worked along for another week or two, I found myself referring to this figure as "The Michael."
I had to laugh at myself when I overheard my internal dialogue...."What about this arm in front of The Michael?....hmmmm, tomorrow I'll work on the turquoise suit...oh, right...and I better adjust The Michael's..." And of course, all this played out to the irrepressible (interminable?) background hum of "When you're a Jet, you're a Jet all the way..."
Here's the outcome -- "Lean In," Flash Mob Series #1. (The usual step-by-step slide show now takes place in Google Photos. Too bad Picasa has been disabled.)
Well, I feel totally affirmed in the direction I'm going. I'm always thrilled when I discover I'm thinking in the same vein as a master artist, and here's what I *just* found in one of my drawing books (- Figure Drawing, John Raynes).
You can check out Pollaiulo's flash mob here. And seriously....... don't you think the Vancouver photographer who started me on this trend MUST have seen Fernand Léger's Les Acrobates en gris (1961)? (Currently on my bulletin board; photo taken at the Musée d'Orsay in 1993...sigh)
