No fooling – Spring is just around the corner!

 

 

On this Mardi Gras eve, I'm going to ignore the pouring rain and the wind rattling the roof vent and dream ahead to warm days and beautiful gardens.  The photo shows a very special one I'll aim to visit again in 2022.  I was introduced to it by my friend M, who used to take me for wonderful jaunts in her part of town – until her part of town became a ferry ride away.

 

As the sign says, it's Il Giardino Italiano, a collective gift of the Italian community to the City of Vancouver – an enchanting pocket of gorgeous landscaping and ingenious sculptures that sits near the grounds of the PNE.  One of its special features is "The Opera Walk," which you can view in close-up in this article.

 

Who cannot love Italian artistry?  As I semi-seriously study art history, I can never tear myself away from the Italian artists of the 13^th through 16^th centuries.  And so it happened that in my imaginings, something else came just around the corner at Il Giardino – a figure from this fresco showing "The Investiture of St. Martin" at a historic chapel in Assisi, Italy, part of a series by notable painter Simone Martini.

 

Sometimes I find that the faces in the crowds of famous paintings are as interesting as the key subject.  While St. Martin is being invested as a knight, musicians play on the sidelines.  I totally fell for this rather goofy-looking guy, clever musician that he is – playing two pipes, one from each side of his mouth!

  

 

It must have been that hat that twigged my memory about The Opera Walk and the sculpture representing Canio, no doubt, of the opera "Pagliacci" ("Clowns").

  

 

Serious opera fans might choose to bow out at this point.  There's nothing at all lighthearted about the story in "Pagliacci," and – spoiler alert -- things are going to get a bit irreverent from here on.  

 

But it's the hat!  Make that plural:  the hats!!  I had to put these two guys together, and their convergence is totally within the bounds and spirits of "Chromo-Surrealism" where anything goes as long as it's colourful.  Here's my thumbnail plan:--

 

 An early phase:--

 

 

And the final version (imagine musicians playing offstage) -- "Clowning Around at Il Giardino," (copyright 2022).

 

There are so many motifs to relish at Il Giardino – have you guessed that you haven't seen the last of it yet?  Yup, I think I'm sensing a small series in the works, as long as no one throws any stuff in the waterworks!

 

 

Going for gold?

 

 

 

 

Well, er, not me.   I'm the non-sports fan who hopes to slink away unnoticed after dipping my brush into this puddle of iridescent gold and iridescent copper.

 

But there IS a game of my own invention that I like to play – though it's not as much fun since we began to wear masks and my local adventures became limited to short trips to predictable destinations.  The game consists of this:-- On any trip I take outside the house, I try to mentally store three images and later, from memory, reproduce them in my sketchbook.  The three "catches" I aim for are:  (1) An interesting face; (2) a figure in costume; (3) a figure in an unusual pose. 

 

For example, when I accompanied a neighbour to the bank, I noted this attractive young woman in the line-up.  She was dressed entirely in black, with such an array of stuff hanging from her belt that I thought maybe she was from a nearby construction site.

 

I resolved to make a painting on a small canvas, trying to capture the black garments and experimenting with a suggested technique for beginning a face study – plunging the shadow side into darkness.  I placed the figure on a stool, outside a window, thinking of the title "Waiting in the Cold" – maybe for her booster shot?

 

Before starting, I'd realized that the standing pose of my sketch would itself have little interest.  And despite about four sessions' work on the pose and its setting, the whole thing quickly became boring.

 

Let's chalk it up.  It was a pretty dumb idea, and I began to paint over the whole thing.

 

By the time I'd returned to the studio the next day, though, I'd decided that that was the coward's way out.  Seriously: I had a compositional puzzle at hand – how to make a strong vertical shape interesting – and I ought to give it another shot.

 

I know!!  I'd add additional vertical shapes and aim for some interesting connections among them.

 

As I looked at the blank space above the figures' heads and thought about this second try, a new title came to mind:  "At the Second Chance Café."   That gave me scope to "activate the space" as my original life drawing teacher would term it. (OMG - that was 40 years ago?!!)

 

Here's the final version.   

 

You can see that there's a little more movement and variation in structure – triangles, diagonals, a semi-circle. 

 

Although these two gals have come in from the cold, I think they're still waiting for their coffee to be served.  In fact, this production is only slightly less boring than the first try.

 

As I've observed before, sometimes a canvas seems to have a curse on it.  I'd painted "Second Chance" on top of a less than inspiring painting from almost exactly a year ago:  "Another Dark Day at the Zodiac Café."  It seems this canvas just cries out to be painted over again and again.

 

Well, there's nothing for it but to fuel up with coffee again tomorrow morning and move on to my next event.  Let's let Winston Churchill sum it up:--

 

"Success is stumbling from failure to failure

with no loss of enthusiasm."