Annals of eccentricity

 

 

 

 

 

 

Happy April 1^st!   

 

Did I once foolishly suggest that I found the very mention of early Dutch or early Flemish painting to be….yawn…boring? Today's Special proves quite the opposite:  "The World Feeds Many Fools" by an unnamed someone of the "Netherlandish School of the 16^th Century."  Far from boring – and it's certainly very eccentric!

 

Actually, when I first learned the word "eccentric," probably at around age 10, I knew it was one of MY words, and eccentrics were among my kind of people.  This affinity for eccentrics was mightily tested in the dark days of the winter just ended.

 

It started innocently enough.  I'd realized that the Vancouver Public Library (VPL) offered music streaming among its digital resources.   I wondered if the offerings might include my favourite cello suites by the renowned long-gone cellist who performs them best – Maurice Gendron.  Our old audiotapes had been retaped at home at least twice over the decades – before they finally gave up the ghost. 

 

Wonderful!  Thank you, VPL.  Gendron and Bach are on tap – and in the catalog search, I'd noted a neighbouring listing of another Gendron:  Adelard A., author of "The Artist and the Line."  Never heard of it.  Never heard of him.  But I was intrigued.  Certainly, line is a key element to be considered in visual art, and I was reminded of the great 20^th century artist Paul Klee....

 

who wittily wrote:-- "Drawing is taking a line for a walk."

 

Before long, Gendron's somewhat yellowed 1954 book was in my hands.

 

In the introductory pages, he describes himself as having been a young art student in 1920.

 

He's not exactly an engaging writer, but after more paragraphs of similar tone, he begins his "lexicon of lineology."  Here's a sample page – "caprizant line" is rather irresistible….but a "carefully drawn line" vs. a "carelessly drawn line"?

 

In total, there are 132 similar pages!  Can you imagine?!?  He's like the unstoppable Sorcerer's Apprentice, bringing line after line after line….many of his own devising.  Beyond eccentric.  Certainly obsessive, to say the least.  And now I really wanted to know:-- Who was this guy??  

 

It was a dark and snowy night in early January when I set to work – quickly discovering that Canada was full of Gendrons – Quebec in particular, where almost every generation and every branch had an "Adelard" of its own.   No wonder "Gendron" is a name as common for the French as "Smith" is for the English – since it derives from the Old French for "son-in-law."  And with all the kids in these families, there must eventually have been plenty of those.

 

My internet searches led me to pages like this:

 

I could barely believe one old handwritten record listing 14 siblings, born one year apart -- each with one of the old French-Canadian names like Celestin, Agénard, Evrard, Achille, Bonaventure, Aubin, Rosaire for the boys; and Aglae, Apolline, Hyacinthe, Scholastique, Theoriste, Cephise, Mathurine for the girls.

 

Whew!  Time to take a break and, in the spirit of Old Quebec, watch the snow fall.  There were so many byways, so many false leads.  The author had described himself as an art student in 1920 – yet he had an LLB?  (Canadian designation for a lawyer).  If he'd gone to art school – when and where?  Ditto, law school? And how old would he have been for each?

 

Canadian Census data was if-fy – formal census procedures and timetables didn't even kick in for all provinces in the same year.  And I'd wandered fruitlessly in the byways of early art schools, law schools, history societies large and small, Canadian government data, Quebec government data, French-Canadian equivalent of Ancestry.com, maps and vintage photos of small towns – and on and on.

 

I had found one plausible connection to Aylmer, Quebec – a family listed in the 1911 Census with a 10-year-0ld boy named "Adelard."

 

His birth date and parents' names even connect to a 1975 obituary in Nashua, New Hampshire – Adelard L. Gendron, born in Quebec.  But – oh, no! – the library book shows the author as "Adelard A."  Yet, not to be completely discouraged, I recalled somewhere seeing an Adelard with "Adolphe-Leopold" as a middle name.

 

Is this how people go quietly bonkers when they're isolated in the midst of a blizzard?  I wasn't going to let that happen!  I needed to stop searching, ground myself, and have some fun interacting with this eccentric literary production. 

 

Here's the man who would help:

 

Handsome dude, eh?  I found him among photos of McGill University law grads and borrowed him as an Adelard Wannabee.  I drew a simple outline of his profile and also drew deeply on Adelard A. Gendron's counsel:

 

"An unartistic line is an inartistic line."

 

And then I began to fill in the blanks, starting with a line related to my own blepharoptosis  (about which I have no cause to worry):

 

I looked for other possibilities to match the line to a context – a CONVEX one in this case.

 

And I just plain enjoyed some JOYSOME lines.

 

It was a memorable weekend, after all – the drain pipe thawed, the snow was deep enough for fun with a shovel, and I still had a gift of delectable holiday fruitcake to nibble.  I even invented some lines of my own:

The wistful line is one that traces the entanglement of wisteria and suggests the emotion of wistfulness that Adelard A-L Gendron could not himself be definitively traced.

As for Adelard, was he an eccentric?  Why, it's written all over his face!

 

 

One more tug at those braids

 

 

 

I couldn't move on from the previous post.  I had to make one more try at that model's beautiful little face and her multi-coloured braids – this time, her head and hair only.  A twist of fate, or the weather, gave me a hand.

 

Coincidentally, in a seemingly endless February interval when snow alternated with sleet, one of my art newsletters posted a painting by Zinaida Serebriakova.  I'd never heard of her but was immediately taken with her style.  It seems that this early 20^th century Ukrainian artist made her name with a self-portrait she painted when she was snowed in one weekend!

 

Look how contemporary this is.  I checked further on-line and found another of her self-portraits that presented possibilities for me.  (And with a little delving, I also learned that her surname has its base in the word for "silversmith.")

 

Why not give that scarf a try?  Here we go –

 

I painted over an old canvas, created a new face, added an exuberant head-dress and loose braids and…….seriously:  What was I thinking?!?!

 

 

 

This bore no resemblance to Zinaida, and the next day I painted over that wild head-gear.  Maybe I could salvage things if I called in my old pal Hashim Akid with his verve and slashing brush strokes?    Well….it happened that my canvas panel was getting more than a little textured from all the paint-overs.  The face that I'd hoped to resemble an Akid called out instead for a dermatology consultation.

 

 Still – I decided to see it through.

 

Right.  It's another in the WWIT Series.  (What was I thinking?)   At this point, I resolved to start all over with a new canvas and a new theme.  But then I happened to notice this famous image among the reproduction prints on my bookshelf. 

 

 Did I dare?  Why not?

 

NO!!  We've all seen better Vermeer spin-offs than this. One of my favourites shows a cat with a pearl earring, and the paint-by-numbers might not be a bad idea either.

 

Spending so much time with these braids reminded me of a story my father once told.  He was born in 1900, eventually the eldest of six siblings in an Irish-American immigrant family.  He might almost have been one of the kids in this early 20^th century schoolroom.  Note the way the desks march closely in lines.

 

He'd been amused to see these old-style desks still in use in my own first schoolroom in our little paper mill town in northern New York state.

 

"What are the holes for?" I asked.  Those were for inkwells, he explained, because in his day, children learned to write with a nibbed pen, dipped directly into the ink container.  Then, trusting that I would always be the responsible good citizen that he was, even from his prenatal months, he  confessed:  A girl with long braids had sat in the seat in front of him – and no, he did not grab the braids and call out, "Carrots!"  

 

Day after day, as she moved her head one way or another, he was so tempted to dip the end of her braid in his inkwell!  But no, he resisted – by that time, he had a couple of little sisters of his own and no doubt realized what a disaster the ink stains would be for another child's mother faced with the wreck of a threadbare school dress.   A touching memory for me, thanks to those multi-coloured braids.