To fool the eye

Who cannot be fascinated by trompe l'oeil? (And who can actually pronounce it? In our family, it's only JT). I've seen pictures of restaurant murals that appear to be real French doors, opening onto a Provence patio with lavender fields beyond -- and known that the kind of precision needed to produce this exactitude is not my thing.

But recently I've made an overdue acquaintance with Zeuxis, the ancient Greek artist whose painting of grapes was so realistic that birds zoomed in for a taste. And because summer camp is all about doing things spontaneously, I decided to fool around.

I planned to imaginatively insert a window above my studio door and place some empty glassware on its sill. I made some preliminary drawings to plan the size and to get an idea of the reflections.

I knew that for realism's sake, I'd need to make templates next, with
each object carefully structured on a vertical midline.

By the time I started placing shapes in the "window" I had solidly reaffirmed my belief that trompe l'oeil is not my thing. Way too much fiddliness is required to square things up.

Here's the finished piece, which is not going to fool anyone, birds or humans.
My sidewalk superintendant observes that the effect might be somewhat more convincing if the window were placed...well, where a window might actually be. Another plausibility factor, I'd say, is that the surrounding wall needs to be much darker than the light of the "sky." I'm not about to repaint the studio...though it might do wonders for the plaster wall of our 95-year-old house.

Happy NABIS DAY!

I saw a tattered handbill on a lightpost and it took me back to a hot day last July. On this very pole, from the same bus, I'd spotted it (in a more intact version) and its announcement of NABIS DAY. I was so excited! I have little enough in common with the young local artists of SoMa (the South Main area), but evidently they shared my enthusiasm for the early 20th century artists called The Nabis (said to mean "prophets" in Hebrew).

In our long-gone travelling days, JT and I saw a marvelous exhibit of les Nabis at the Grand Palais in Paris. I'm so glad he insisted that we splurge on the exhibit publication (adding another 10 pounds to our take-home luggage of French books and art supplies).


These artists resonate strongly with me -- particularly Bonnard for his gorgeous colours and Vuillard for the feel of his interiors and his use of patterns. One of my all-time favorite paintings is the latter's "Garden at Vaucresson" -- which stands seven feet high!

Some time after our trip, I couldn't resist playing with a much smaller version of garden tangle, with our cabin in the background and what we call "JT's Red Weed" in the starring role. Here's "Garden at Cloudburst," circa 2000.


Recently a simpatico friend, knowing my newfound enthusiasm for The Group of Seven, sent me a card with J.E.H. MacDonald's "Tangled Garden." Obviously, this is a deep-rooted (!) theme for me -- and not just because this year's wet weather has limited my weeding time and the yard is now a jungle. Maybe before summer's end, I'll make something more of all this, both in the garden and in the studio.

Oh, and meanwhile, back at NABIS DAY. That July morning last year when I hopped off the bus, I scooted back to check out the details. It turned out that the poster's corner had been torn off and what I hadn't been able to see from a distance was that it advertised a summer event sponsored by the Legalize Marijuana movement: CANNABIS DAY.

Eyes on the Northwest

An ad for UBC's Museum of Anthropology recalled an old fascination and suggested my next summer camp project. As a child, I was given a small book titled (before the days of political correctness) Indian Children of North America that showed the lifestyles of "Indians" of the plains, the woods, the swamps, the deserts, and -- my favorite -- the Northwest coast. I loved the intricate carvings on the huge canoes and the zoomorphic artifacts, like a huge bear-shaped ceremonial bowl. When we came to Vancouver in the late 1970s, I was already predisposed to love the environment and the characteristic First Nations art.

For many years, we hiked or kayaked every weekend all year round, and every trip was an opportunity to indulge our shared weakness (or strength) for randomly collecting the stones, shells, and pieces of wood that captured our eyes. It didn't take many small bits of cedar, weathered or waterworn, for me to develop a personal theory about the origins of art like the Edenshaws'. Maybe it's very obvious, but I've never seen my theory referred to elsewhere. Take a look at these wood pieces of mine:

Get my drift? The rhythms, the concentric ovals, the eyes... Is there any doubt that these (and probably the swirl of oyster shells) inspired coastal First Nations art?

Here at summer camp, where the intent is to do a lot of splashing around, I decided to assemble some of my pieces in a long band -- like a silver bracelet perhaps?

I decided to work very loosely with a larger than usual brush on top of an old painting.

The final outcome -- "Eyes on the Northwest" -- was a personal amble into the past, recalling hiking trails and beach walks.


It was also an invitation to recall one of my all-time favorite works of art, a treasure at the MOA: Bill Reid's Raven and the First Men. Check out his exquisite piece (which stands about 10 feet high, as I remember) and see if you don't agree that its origin could be found in a morning's walk, gathering tidbits from the high tide line of a coastal beach.

A balancing act

Just before heading for summer camp, I finished a painting I'd been thinking about for over a year. I'd been reading about Berthe Morisot, "the female Impressionist," and came across a contemporary critic's assessment of the painting she submitted to the famous (in retrospect) 1865 Salon:

"Since it is not necessary to have had a long training in draughtsmanship in the academy in order to paint a copper pot, a candlestick, and a bunch of radishes, women succeed quite well in this type of domestic painting." (-Paul Mantz quoted in BERTHE MORISOT: THE CORRESPONDENCE, ed. Denis
Rouart)

Okay. Copper pot + candlestick + bunch of radishes = "women's work"? Very well. I can do that. I think I'll give it a try.


Some months passed as I finished my Astrological Plants series and then waited for radishes to be seasonable. Meanwhile, the idea came to me to use not just the named threesome, but three of each item and then to see how I could create a balanced, harmonious composition with the 3x3 subject matter.

Usually I play with compositional possibilities via thumbnail sketches, but once I had the June radishes before me, I saw that a quicker way would be to make small prototype objects which I could easily move around. By now, I'd realized that cast shadows could be an interesting design element and so I painted a small family of paper shapes: candlesticks, copper pots, radishes, and "shadows."

In one exciting session (which felt like a cross between playing chess and playing with paper dolls) I tried the pieces in various configurations. The prototype composition, shown here, was planned to sit against folds of background fabric which would run in diagonal opposition to the lines of the shadows.


Here's the final outcome -- which altered the 3x3 concept a bit when I split up one of the radish bunches. You can view the progression here.

The painting's title "Balancing Act" refers both to my compositional game and, with a small feminist salute, to Berthe Morisot herself -- and the immense balancing act she maintained between her role as the daughter of privileged 19th century Parisians and her compulsion, nonetheless, to be an artist.

Heading for summer camp

I have such happy memories of summer camp -- six 2-week stints at two different girls' camps in the years I was aged seven to twelve. What was so memorable, over fifty years later? Living in the woods in tents or cabins, swimming every day, hanging out in a relatively egalitarian environment, singing songs from around the world (Take it from the top: "Waltzing Matilda." I know all the verses and even the meaning of "jumbuck" and "billabong"). Maybe what was best was stepping outside the routine, doing different things just for fun.

And in this spirit, I decided it was time to go off to summer camp -- every morning, in the studio. All kinds of preliminary plans for paintings routinely drift in and out of my mind and sketchbook (I'd just finished a big one that I'll post next time), and I'm putting this mental list on hold for a while. Instead, I'm going to play, just for the fun of it. Oh, some of this will be painting, but maybe I'll try some odder ventures than usual.

My first session at camp started two weeks ago. I cracked into an unopened pack of modelling clay and summoned up the spirits of Campfires Past. By the solstice, I'd assembled a tent's (or teapot's) worth of little girl campers.

This was not without its challenges. The clay began to dry within the 45 minutes I worked on each figure and would dry further with each passing day. This meant that the first figure, securely anchored to the edge, lost its balance overnight -- and required firmer seating on a little deck chair (and a hat to hide her embarrassment).


I had to invent some odd poses to connect the figures to the teapot.


One small paddle-like hand broke off and had to be reattached with a
"towel" -- leaving this camper looking like a snake-handler.

And I admit, even for little girls, they all look quite asexual.


I thought I'd have clay enough for only four figures but saw, with some scrimping, I could manage five -- but she's pretty anorexic.


So what camp-in-a-teapot is this, anyway? I could borrow a page from the book of my friend B, tea drinker and out-of-the-box leader extraordinaire, who did a whole employee recognition riff with custom-made tea boxes with labels like sereni-tea, facili-tea, curiousi-tea, flexibili-tea. But these girls (and their counsellor) seem to occupy another dimension. In fact, they strongly resemble extraterrestrials. Maybe it's a place called Camp E-Tea. ??

Rembrandts rule!

A few years ago, I came across an article about tulipimania , the 17th-century Dutch rage for exotic and hugely expensive tulip bulbs. The phenomenon is now billed as one of the first economic bubbles since fortunes were lost when the inflated tulip market collapsed. What's more, the intriguing tulips of old Dutch paintings owed their stripes (called "flames") to a virus -- so they turned out to be a botanical bust, as well. The flames in today's versions have been hybridized (no virus), and once I understood that the now so-called "Rembrandt Tulips" are easily and inexpensively available, I had to have some and I had to paint them!

Serendipitously, I found them in my favorite mail-order garden catalog, and while the bulbs wintered in our garden, I had a chance to consider what I'd do with those stripes in the spring. (You know my methods, Watson. If one patterned object is good, two or more must be better...) Some months later, the tulips, a Gala apple, and some striped fabric converged in "Rembrandt Stripes" (copyright 2008).


This year, there's been a further convergence. The Rembrandts again bloomed in our yard, my series of "Plate" paintings was on my mind, and meanwhile, I'd discovered the most marvelous book and author/art historian:

The time was right to haul out that striped fabric and do something more with the Rembrandt tulips and a golden-yellow plate. I adjusted my original set-up, changing the plate's placement vertically (more fabric at the bottom) and reversing the colours of the fabric's stripes. Here's the outcome: "Yellow Plate Special" (copyright 2011)-- you can watch it materialize here.


I see it as the middle portion of a triptych, with "Blue Plate Special" to its left, and "Orange Plate Special" to its right. And for now, I'm putting the "Plate" series to rest.

Plate tectonics

No sooner had I finished my "Blue Plate Special" -- after wrestling with how to position the plate -- then a plate appeared in a painting every time I opened an art book. I saw them flat, flat with objects on top, tilted, stacked, upright, dead centre, moving out of the picture...what else?

This world of possibilities rekindled my long-standing interest (dating from the time I bought the blue plate) in doing a series of paintings, each with a different coloured plate. I have some odd plates but none with a gorgeous design like my thrift store blue plate's. So I decided that in my second painting -- "Orange Plate Special" -- the rich pattern element would come, not from the plate itself, but from accompanying objects: a small Mexican dish and a piece of fabric. I did a small study with these three elements, and overall I thought the composition would work.



Guess what? It didn't -- and this became evident rather early in the process. You can follow its evolution here and watch a fourth object recruited almost at the last minute to fill some space. Not the way I like to work -- but here's what we have so far in The Plate Series: "Blue Plate Special" and "Orange Plate Special" .

After I pulled this off (more or less), I recalled a comment by Matisse in a wonderful collection of his writings I've recently discovered. Originally, his point about "squaring up" didn't entirely make sense to me, but I see now that "Orange Plate Special" -- in its small 5" x 7" study versus the finished 15" x 20" version -- is an example of just what he talked about. The guy knew his business!

"Composition, the aim of which should be expression, is modified according to the surface to be covered. If I take a sheet of paper of a given size, my drawing will have a necessary relationship to its format. I would not repeat this drawing on another sheet of different proportions...nor should I be satisfied with a mere enlargement....An artist who wants to transpose a composition from one canvas to another larger one must conceive it anew in order to preserve its expression; he must alter its character and not just square it up onto a larger canvas." (- Matisse, Notes of a Painter, 1908)