Dinosaurs 'R' Us

When the new campus of Emily Carr University of Art and Design opened last fall, its president proudly showed off its new media labs and robotic studios and blithely described the school's painting and sculpture programs as "living archaeology." 

I'm still deciding how much to be appalled.  But then -- everyone loves dinosaurs, don't they?   Yes, I do understand the difference between archaeology and paleontology.  Whatever.  In any case, painting and sculpture are not quite endangered species (not quite), and I'm pressing on regardless.

With a nod to the current generation, I'm continuing my formal art studies in an on-line format.  Yikes.  Uncharted territory.  But it's shaping up to be kind of fun.  It's a year-long course focusing on the portrait through Western Art history.  Each week there's a new video lesson taught by one of several talented instructors.  Then the members of the cyber-class do their own thing -- following the instructor's model or adapting the artist's style or doing anything we feel like doing -- and the output is posted in a private Facebook group.

As January draws to a close, we've raced through the Renaissance with lessons on Piero della Francesca, Caravaggio, Leonardo and Giovanni Bellini.  It's no surprise that the master works of this period have a religious theme, but I've found myself enchanted with some of the supporting characters in the predictable dramas.

Searching for an alternative to the first lesson's Piero Madonna, I was bowled over by the compelling self-assurance of this angel on the sidelines of a fresco called "Madonna del Parto" ("The Pregnant Madonna"):

Using prints I'd pulled from the internet, I set up my easel in a way that will probably become my norm...

 ...and produced a guardian spirit for my studio.  I didn't quite capture her/his mesmerizing gaze, but.......as we say in the Facebook group:  "I love love love this!"

 Week 2 presented a very loose and dynamic drawing approach to the dramatic contrasts of  lights and darks of the artist Caravaggio.  Some of my classmates did gorgeous things with the central Christ figure of "The Calling of Matthew"  but I chose another figure in the crowd.

I spent half the week on a rather satisfactory pencil version and worked away until I felt like I'd need the rest of my life to finish it.

I made one more splashy attempt with Conté crayon (a combination of wax/clay and charcoal) and then called it a wrap for the week.

And then -- a funny thing happened on the way to my next production.   I'd already decided that when we reached Leonardo, I would do something with my all-time favourite "Lady with an Ermine."

 And then....a cat crept into the picture.  A dear friend sent photos of her holiday spent with son and family, starring as always her Angel-Granddaughters.  How could I resist trying to put the younger teenager and the family cat into Leonardo's serene masterpiece?  Here it is, with apologies to all the dramatis personae, none of whom has been done justice.

One offshoot of this exercise was a renewed determination to keep working on hands.  And so as Bellini Week rolled around, I searched on the internet for something of his that would offer challenging hand models.  I found another compelling angel in his altarpiece of San Vincenzo Ferreri.  I cropped the image to a long vertical slice and printed this in giant size for my studio reference:

I then had the interesting experience of scaling up my smaller print-out to an unfamiliar vertical format...

for my grand finale:

Keep in mind that each of these assignments was done within a week in about six hours, not my typical twenty.  You can see a capsule of some of the developmental steps here. 

Whether or not my continued explorations will prove as exciting as excavating dinosaur bones or unearthing an ancient mosaic buried in volcanic dust, I'm reminded of a statement by the artist/teacher Donald McIntyre:

"Painting is ultimately a bit like mining.  You explore and explore; then it dries up and you keep on like an idiot hoping that something else will come along...Every now and then, you do a painting which is the start of something different in your life."

- Donald McIntyre, Acrylics Masterclass

And so I push back my sleeves and continue to work.

Facing facts

Inevitable, isn't it?  That as the two-faced god Janus looks forward and backward at the new year, so do we.  My self-portrait here will be 30 years old this August -- I was 43 that hot summer day when I took a break from working in the garden, came inside, and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror.   The very dark glasses,  my old lime green T-shirt, and the intense red scarf  I used to wear kayaking called out for a painted self-portrait that I didn't then feel capable of attempting.

My face and hair have certainly changed since then, but some things remain constant.  I'm still striving to draw and to paint; I'm still entranced by the human figure.  So as I continue to draw live models at the drawing studio, I also hope in this year 2018 to develop more confidence in portraiture.

As I spun my wheels on that subject this fall -- how to accomplish it, what to do next -- a magic conjunction came my way.

I found the coolest library book based on artist Julia Kay's mind-boggling "Portrait Party" project.  And the book called out on my shelves to be matched with a gorgeous sketchbook from my friend L-of-the-Rocks -- oh, so inspirational for its delicious thick artist's paper and Vermeer's "Girl with a Pearl Earring".  (Oh, dear, someone just told me that her timeless face is now available on a shower curtain!!!!)

As I finished working on my Flash Mob figure paintings, I started using the sketchbook to do one portrait drawing each weekend, sampling styles from Julia Kay & friends.

  

Meanwhile, I was scanning the horizon for a possible winter semester course to take.

I had plenty of faces to work with.  For decades (shocking, the time measurement!), I've collected and filed interesting faces and gestures from media photographs.  One day, my files turned up a film festival brochure, and I was struck by the compelling face of renowned (now long-gone) French director Eric Rohmer.  Aha!  I resolved to try his face in a different style each weekend.

I could have gone on for more than a month...

...but this new and popular book came due at the library, and my sequence ended for a while.  (No problem in the long run since I've ordered the book as a holiday gift to myself). 

In a quick succession of ups and downs, I learned that the course I'd hoped to take wouldn't be offered -- but that an unrelated on-line course I'd discovered looked promising.  I'm starting Week 3 of that now and will report more the next time.

Meanwhile, for septuagenarians like me -- OMG, the synapses definitely fire more slowly these days!  It's taken me three  years to realize that I finally wear the mantle of that term that I've known for....well, decades.  Nonetheless, the future is bright for aging artists, according to classic Japanese artist Hokusai.  He lived to be 89.

  

"From the age of six, I had a passion for copying the form of things, and since the age of fifty I have published many drawings. Yet of all I drew by my seventieth year there is nothing worth taking in to account. At seventy-three years I partly understood the structure of animals, birds, insects and fishes, and the life of grasses and plants. And so, at eighty-six I shall progress further; at ninety I shall even further penetrate their secret meaning, and by one hundred I shall perhaps truly have reached the level of the marvelous and divine. When I am one hundred and ten, each dot, each line will possess a life of its own."

Time to pick up the beat

A new year -- and time to pick up the beat!   Searching through my pile of  "postcards" (the quick things I splash down in the interest of using up excess paint),  I found this dancing figure to be the perfect symbol for the season.  (It's based on a beautifully photographed dance festival program.)

I'll tell you something, though.  Picking up the beat North American-style can't begin to compare to the pulsating performance of the flamenco dance troupe I watched and tried to sketch in a darkened theatre in late November.   Theirs was another surprising performance at the Dance Centre where I try to catch their low-cost noontime performances and, sketchbook in hand, see what I can capture of fast-moving dancers.

I'd braced myself for something intense and rather anguished, like the flamenco guitar music I'd heard before.  It turns out, though, that there are many kinds of flamenco -- and this performance must have been based on the graceful, the joyous, and the thrilling.

There were three dancers, sometimes performing together...

 ...and sometimes dancing solo.

What was truly mesmerizing was the beat -- or, as it's called, the compás -- the profound, deeply embedded characteristic "anchor" to all flamenco.  Each set might start with a single dancer, moving with stamping feet to her own accompaniment of clapping hands.

Then, the demure, refined singer in her high-necked, long-sleeved flowing dress would seamlessly join the compás or sometimes, acapella, she might begin the set herself.

 Finally the guitarist, who later described himself as the least important of all, would join in.

 Throughout, at just the right intervals, the beautiful young singer would call out encouragement to the dancers with what sounded almost like the French "Allez!" with a soft ending -- "Alleh" you might say.  This turned out to be "olé" pronounced with soft yet insistent vowel sounds.

The finale had a truly touching moment when the troupe's founder and director stepped into the circle.  An ardent woman in perhaps her mid-60s, she was dressed in a long-sleeved black tunic with black leggings and boots.  She stepped forward, effortlessly picking up the compás, dancing to perfection the pulsing steps she'd learned so long ago, moving towards her young dancers with emphatic hand-clapping, saluting them -- as they in their turn acknowledged her expertise with hand-clapping salutes in return.

If I seem to be a mini-expert on compás, it's because these midday Dance Centre performances always conclude with an informal discussion session.   The founder-director had only about ten minutes to speak and said the absolute basic thing to understand about flamenco was its 12-beat rhythm -- and the necessity for all the participants to have/understand/know/feel this, the compás.

It's almost always set by the dancer (occasionally by the singer) and supported by the singer and the guitarist -- and just to make things very interesting, it's subject to change as the piece develops and the dancers innovate.  Both the director and the guitarist talked about how it took time and extraordinary effort to learn these rhythms which then become totally intuitive and organic -- exactly as I had just witnessed.  The flamenco rhythms are more fully explained here, oddly enough by a company that manufactures a device that purports to help teach them!

In this playful interval in the last week of the year,  I thought  I'd see what kind of "postcards" I could develop from my drawn-in-the-dark sketches.  Here's one of  three dance poses.

But really, it was a you-had-to-be-there kind of experience, one of so many good experiences I had in 2017.  On that note -- on that beat -- let's bring in some more of the troupe and say "Olé!" for the year 2018.

  

Shifts, splits and a walk off the beaten path

Okay, you've been warned.  Expect no direct routes in this Gemini's forward movement.  Instead, there might be byways, detours, aimless rambles, and an occasional lift-off by hot air balloon (a Gemini device if ever there was one).  Buckle up as we travel the winding path that brought us to my latest painting.

Several years back,  JT was immersed in a physics textbook.  "Hmmm.  This is interesting," he said.  "Um?" said I, not expecting it to be.  "Yes, the Red Shift phenomenon."  Colours!!!  Maybe this IS interesting?!  He explained that "the red shift" has to do with changes in wave frequency -- in sound waves, it's what produces the wonky variation in, say, the sound of an ambulance siren moving away from you.  "And there's a Blue Shift, too."  Fascinated?  Read more here.  But I had all I needed:  "Red Shift, Blue Shift" -- the title for a future painting in which, well, reds would shift to blues and vice versa.

Fast forward now, via hot air balloon, to early 2016 when I was drawn to a breathtaking exhibit at Vancouver's Italian Cultural Centre -- artist Lilian Broca's "Judith Mosaics."  

These astonishing mosaics of glass tile are tremendous -- over six feet high, four feet wide.  As you'll see on her website (there's lots to explore there), they're conceived as if they were huge pages from a sketchbook.  Against the vibrant colour of the central scene, neutral toned tiles have been arranged to suggest the artist's drawing that has not yet been "filled in" -- a work in progress.  Some even recreate along the edge, in tile, the spiral binding of an artist's notebook.

Six months ago, when I received a greeting card with one of the images from a former colleague who works at Il Centro, I fell in love again with the rich varied colours and the imaginative treatment of the preliminary lines on the "sketchbook page."

Now, I don't remember how I made the leap -- but the prospect of a painting called  "Red Shift, Blue Shift" came back to me.  All I needed was a set-up --

 -- and a quick 5" x 8" study

 ...and I was off:

EXCEPT:-- I'd planned to begin with a painted underlayer for the "grout" and immediately (belatedly!) realized this would alter any colour laid on top of it.  Forget that.

Also, I'd started out thinking like a tile maker/supplier.  Tiles would come in small squares and certainly not be curved.  I quickly abandoned that idea and was soon supplying myself with "tiles" that were rectangular, diagonal, rhomboid....  "We can supply all your customer needs."

I was almost a third of the way along when I really began to understand how the shape of the tiles and the line of the grout could contribute to the movement and "readability" of the design.

Although I'd set out to learn from Lilian Broca about her choice and placement of colours, in the end I probably learned more about laying tiles.  Consider this:  The finished painting measures about 14" x 20," and each square inch contains on average 12 tiles.  Each tile had to be painted at least twice to achieve full colour.  That makes 640 brush strokes -- minimum!!!  (But still:  How many tiles would go into each of the Judith panels?)

Here's the grand finale, in all its splits and shifts.  (To see its progression, click here)

Shifts and splits

Were you thinking that the future would be crystal-clear to me after my personal critique with a wise and generous artist/teacher?  Maybe you assumed that with new insights, I'd march forward in a straight line?  Not likely.  Did you forget that I belong to the tribe of Geminis?  (...you never knew?)   Split Personality is our collective middle name.

On the one hand, I'm very excited that I've been encouraged to press on with things that fascinate me -- like my Flash Mob series.  Even if they're far from the mainstream, even if they're "flat" and graphic, rather than painterly, even if no one else responds favourably except me, myself, and in this case, Generous Artist/Teacher. 

I'm also excited as I discover a kindred stream of artists that were recommended to me -- Alex Katz (coincidentally a favourite of my friend A) and Milton Avery.  Along with them, I'll place a lesser known favourite of mine, Fairfield Porter.  And what the heck, for a timely touch, how about David Hockney? 

So:  Fair warning from both sides of my Gemini split.  There will be shifts and turns in the year ahead -- new things in the spirit of what I've been doing, but also things in the category of "stuff I've been wanting to try" or "stuff  I need to get out of my system" or "stuff I could learn from by doing."

For now, as a kind of kick-off, I have the benefit of a recent 5-hour workshop with Artist/Teacher, who offered some new and sometimes surprising ways to tackle figure drawing. 

How about this?  Start with a stick figure.  Seriously???  Yup, the trick is to start with the feet (to push yourself not to run out of space at the bottom) and to include the key anatomical landmarks -- knee, pelvis, elbow, base of neck.

 When everything's in place, flesh it out:

Who's responsible for that idea that artists must be able to draw a straight line?  Well, it's helpful in this exercise -- capturing the shape of the body strictly with straight lines, as another kind of preliminary step in developing a drawing.

It's tempting to consider the following idea as "full of beans" -- but it's surprisingly useful to realize that the human torso can be seen as bean-shaped, and to use this insight as another kind of preliminary layout.

So:  Give the bean a try and then begin developing the figure in terms of simple shapes.

Similarly, there are other "templates" that can be captured and put down as preliminary guides.  Here's a front view, then a back view.

Or, for study purposes, do drawings focussed solely on the torso.  Note how these figures end at the knees and elbows.  (It felt weird doing this!)

There were lots more ideas flowing in this workshop, and I'll conclude with my favourite -- something I've worked with for decades:  the contour drawing.   Look intently at the figure, select a contour, and move your pencil deliberately along that line.  Invariably in my experience, a remarkable likeness can be captured as you notice and record the unique turns and directions of the particular body. 

You can see that the model (an impressive 6'5" Scandinavian, who didn't flag through five hours of almost uninterrupted posing) is looking off into the future, wondering ...."What did she mean by 'shifts and splits'"?