A world in two words

A few years ago, my wise friend A alerted me to a favourite quote of hers by the writer Henry James:--    

"Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language."

How could these words not remind me of a summer romance that stays with me after all these years?  It's just a slight jump from "summer afternoon" to "Sunday afternoon" and to my first introduction as a young teenager to Real Art.  Our family had moved to a suburb of Chicago, and I had the immense good fortune to begin to learn and love at one of North America's great museums, the Art Institute of Chicago.

No wonder my heart beats faster when I see the lions at the gate (back door, actually) of the Vancouver Art Gallery.

But back to the Art Institute and my first and enduring love:-- Georges Seurat's great painting, "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte."

I might almost have been in this 1963 crowd -- note the bouffant hairstyles and vintage (!) coats.  Except then, as now, I always travelled solo or with a trusted friend or two. 

This painting inevitably brings back the whole world of my high school years in that suburb.  My first boyfriend knew how I loved it and made a special trip in to Chicago to buy a reproduction as a gift for my birthday.  My mother helped me select a frame (such a grown-up thing to be doing!), and it hung in my lavender-blue bedroom from then until decades later when the parental house was sold.

It has struck chords elsewhere, too -- maybe too many elsewheres since it's been endlessly reproduced in whole or in part on everything from fridge magnets to Broadway musicals.

But I couldn't help it.  Once it resurfaced in my life via Henry James' quote, I longed to capture the major female figure in contemporary dress.  Not an original idea -- but irresistibly enticing.  So when a model at my drawing session struck a pose slightly resembling her stance, I started to strategize.

But what to do about that monkey?

Its funny little canine companion gave me a hint, and I set to work on a preliminary study, inspired by two very special little critters of my acquaintance.

My original plan was simply to have the couple and the dogs against a background that would barely suggest La Grande Jatte.  As I began to lay in my painting, though, I saw that their background needed to be beefed up a fair bit, and so I added a few more figures (but not all of them!) and the tree in the distance.

Still, I saw that against the dominant placement of my figures, I'd need to do more.  There was nothing for it but to call in the pointillist brigade and emulate....very slightly...Seurat's own approach.  Everyone has learned about this, right?  Seurat's idea was to reject colour mixing on the palette and to develop colour with adjacent dots that the viewer's eyes would mix optically.

I was glad that I wasn't working on Seurat's scale -- the final version at the Art Institute of  Chicago is ten feet wide.  For that matter, I was glad I wasn't working on the scale of a preliminary cardboard face I'd painted as a warm-up (size 8" x 11").

Those dots took a fair bit of time although they're not nearly as varied in colour as Seurat's.   But the whole exercise was fantastically instructive -- how to get the tan of the tree trunks; how to vary the darkness in the shadows on the grass.  Wow.

So here's the outcome:  "What Are You Doing This Sunday?" (copyright 2019)  It still gives me a mild guffaw (do I enjoy my own sense of humour too much?), but it was *seriously* worth doing.

And as for those two special dogs who inspired me at an early stage:--  I think I overheard them saying, "We're NOT purple -- and with our own perfect summer afternoon drawing to a close and the sun rising again tomorrow, why would we ever want to spend Sunday in the park with George?"