Straight from the heart

Well, if I stuck with my original title, who would read it?  A post titled, "Half-hearted"?  You've guessed, haven't you, that this continues my disenchantment phase with the on-line course.  But the good news is: (1) This post will be short and sweet (with artificial sweetener); (2) There's actually some fun stuff ahead in the course which I'll be posting in November; (3) It's almost over and then I can reclaim my own priorities.

For now, let's do a quick wrap for the historical record.

October's first artist, Teil Duncan.  Except  for her bright colours, little appeals to me about her work which, by the way, has spun off into a Crate & Barrel product line.  This one of hers had a little resonance:

 So I fulfilled the week's assignment with "Kayak Race - Starting Line" -- a scene my friend L and I had witnessed on our way to a Bard on the Beach performance.

 Next up: Nathan Oliveira, one of whose paintings is shown here:

 Not my kind of guy -- but still, figures in motion.  Can't beat the theme (for me, anyway).  So I Olivier-ed a recent sketch I'd made to produce "Skateboarder."

 Most recently, another new-to-me artist who I won't be getting further acquainted with:  Afarin Sajedi.  I found her images so distasteful that I only half-listened to the lesson's introductory video -- she liked fish wrapped around people's heads or poking out of their ears; sometimes competing with cutlery, such as forks sticking out of heads; and (yawn) she used the colour red a lot.

 Oh, ugh.  Enough of that.  But I decided to serve up fish and a bunch of other stuff in an assemblage called, "At the Beach - Flotsam and Jetsam." 

 For my upbeat conclusion, I'll recall that even from exercises like these. **I'm learning stuff**  You never know where it will lead -- so said the Roman poet Ovid in a quote that I recorded long ago and recently found in a just-surfaced sketchbook:  

"Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish."

It's a jungle out there

So much to explore.  So many trails and by-ways.  So much to learn from the explorers who have gone before, some of them appealing, some of them not.  And here I am, trying to blaze trail on my own through the on-line artist-of-the-week program and deliberately get ahead of the game so I'll have time to work on my own stuff.

Early in the summer, as I looked ahead on the curriculum, I saw Frida Kahlo coming up in October.  Mild knots in my stomach.  Kahlo is coming into her own now from the feminist perspective, but I've had a mild aversion since I read about her decades ago.  Her story and that of her off-again/on-again husband Diego Rivera are so tragic and rather ugly that I was permanently put off. 

So, what to do?  As I was mulling this over, I happened to be in Canadian Tire's garden shop one day and spotted some vibrant seasonal patio pillows....PARROT patio pillows! 

There, among the plants, it all came together for me:-- Kahlo's self-portraits often feature a jungle-y background and creatures like monkeys or parrots.  Of course, I snagged the pillows (a two-for-one sale that day!).  Back in the studio, looking through my sketches, I came across a long-ago pose that I'd captured from memory:

By the next morning, things had evolved to a preliminary sketch and a proposed title, "Frida and I Went Shopping."

By now I'd embraced this project as  "my stuff," and I decided to try to overcome what I call my "colouring book syndrome" -- a tendency to work in flat, clearly contained colours.  (Does "tendency" equal one's "style"? - that's for another day).  I set myself the challenge of painting the first layer of everything in its complementary colour and tried to work with looser brush strokes.

 It was an interesting strategy and downright fun as it developed.

Here's the final version, with its final title, "Frida Gave Me These Parrots."

What would she think?   I couldn't resist giving her a temporary (taped-on) peek in the window to check things out:

I've heard that parrots like to live in flocks, and certainly there was a congenial air in the studio as these new guys arrived to keep company with the colourful parrot thermometer a friend just knew I would love to have.  I guess if they live solo, they can sometimes go a little squirrely.  (as in Flying Squirrely?)

Will it ever be finished?

As the year rolls on, I sometimes find myself thinking...Will this artist-of-the-week program ever end?!  At first, I excitedly studied the blueprints.  Then I found joy in the efforts of the early foundations.  I gave myself a round of applause when I started to see the building rise above ground.  I even announced a new wing.  Yes, it continues to be a wonderful learning experience, but I just want to get through it and place a big check-mark against this item on my 2018 to-do list.

Well, even these feelings have precedents in art history -- or architectural history.  No doubt you've heard of Gaudi's famous unfinished cathedral in Barcelona --still a work-in-progress after 127 years.  And this building is just one among many famous or fabulous unfinished buildings -- check this link and, after Gaudi's Familia Sagrada, read at least about the second building on the list.  Eerie.

Still:  The hot and smoky month of August actually brought me to some cool artists, either new or only slightly familiar.  The first, Alice Neel, is someone I plan to revisit.  I *loved* her portrait "Elenka."

With this as my model, I tried to portray my young neighbour -- "Kristina."

Next, the coursework introduced artist David Cambria.  Cambria's portraits would be almost conventional if he didn't smear and blotch and half-patch them over:

 The strong features of his male models brought to mind a neighbour I occasionally chatted with before he moved away in the spring.  I'd always thought he'd be a terrific subject to paint, and one day I made a quick memory sketch of his high cheekbones and deepset eyes.

INSERT BLOG 5 - sketch of guy down the street

With this and the example of Cambria's cover-ups, I managed a fair likeness.  I call this "Palette Man" because I painted it on an old palette.

 August's third artist, Richard Diebenkorn, was well known to me for his powerful drawings in several of my drawing books:

His paintings,  I discovered, were powerful in a different way.   He used beautiful, carefully modulated colours in broad almost abstract layouts, often portraying seated women.   These recalled my own seated figures in my simple 2015 panel painting, "Not Far From SoMa"  -- my first attempt to make a painting from preliminary quick sketches.  I singled out this female figure as a Diebenkorn-type model:

-- to produce this spin-off:

 The final artist-of-the-week (previously unknown to me), was Cathy Hegman who creates often blurred and "washed" images.  It was one of her more defined figures, "Seekers", that drew my attention, particularly this detail:

In a fantastic coincidence, I'd discovered just the week before an amazing learning resource:-- Indiana University has collaborated with the famous Uffizi Gallery in Florence to create 3-D digitizations of the Gallery's sculptures and...ta tum!...they're all available on line.  Do check in and give it a try  -- just follow the cues to be able to rotate the piece in space: all the way around, and in every vertical orientation.  (If you discover how to do somersaults, please let me know).

I chose the marble bust of the goddess "Cybele" and worked from the on-line image to emulate Hegman's figure.

 Wow.  Just reliving some of these challenges I set for myself has been energizing.  I've learned a lot this month and found some exciting byways to pursue in future studies.  Hard to say whether the creators of all those unfinished buildings felt the same way, but right now I'm recalling the wisdom of the familiar mantra:  "The journey is the destination."

Taking a line for a walk

 

 The Swiss artist Paul Klee, who was also a musician, a teacher, a father, a writer, and a very witty guy, once pithily said, "A drawing is simply a line going for a walk."  Well, it happened that most of the July artists in my on-line course are as famous for their drawings as for their paintings -- and in most cases, I chose to focus on drawing even though the course lessons usually opted for paint.

One exception for me, though, was Toulouse-Lautrec.  His drawings are magnificent with oh, such sensitive use of line.  But as I idled through my books, I lingered on his familiar painting "At the Moulin Rouge," thinking the upturned face would make an interesting exercise.  And what was the good of that upturned face without the almost fluorescent green?

 And as for the dance hall -- well, what about the flamenco dancers I sketched at the Dance Centre last November? Here's the outcome:  "Flamenco Rosario at the Moulin Rouge."

 

Next up was Käthe Kollwitz, a lesser known artist greatly revered by those who love drawing -- and by people who are touched by her personal history and commitment to the disadvantaged and oppressed whose sorrows and struggles are reflected in her art.  I discovered Kollwitz when I took my first life drawing courses in my late 20s.  I was so struck then by the unflinching honesty of her self-portraits, made from her own 20s into her 70s -- and here I am now, toward the end of that range myself, with my admiration more than intact.

It was difficult for me to imagine trying to copy a Kollwitz drawing -- her themes sometimes are too terrible in their power -- so I sought out one of  her early self-portraits:

 -- and tried for a copy, in a slightly different medium:

The next week's artist was in quite a different vein -- Marc Chagall, whose paintings almost always seem to convey tenderness and love.   I was momentarily tempted to try to copy "The Birthday", with my friends L and B floating through the air, two Schipperke dogs at their heels.  But reason prevailed, and I chose an atypical Chagall as a better model for my continuing efforts to draw the face.   His "Self-Portrait in Pencil" is odd but compelling:

  My version is based on the memory of a long-ago college friend, "Sandra."

Someone who really knew how to let a line loose on a walk was the next week's artist, Egon Schiele.  If you know drawing, you know Schiele.  If you don't and plan to go browsing the internet, be prepared to blush -- he ran into censorship problems in his day, along with his mentor Gustav Klimt.  Schiele's painting (or coloured drawing?) titled "Donna Seduta," is Essence-of-Schiele:

 I recalled that I'd made a drawing at the drawing studio that comes rather close to his pose:

I then wandered a bit far from Schiele terrain as I saw the opportunity to do a study for a painting I've had in mind.   I'm enthralled when I catch a glimpse of the young woman across the street coming or going in her fantastic costumes -- it turns out she's a children's entertainer.

Watch this spot.  She'll be back some day in my repertoire.

July had five weeks, and the fifth artist-of-the-week was Giacometti.  You've no doubt seen examples of the wiry, knobby sculptures for which he's famous.  But again, I chose to search out an example that would keep my desired focus on the portrait.  Here's his drawing "Bust of Annette."

 -- and my spin-off, "Girl on the Bus."  Maybe another day in another way, I'll try to capture her fantastic haircut -- absolutely shorn brush-cut style on one side of her head, with wild flowing hair on the other side.

It was a month focused on drawing and reminding me again of how much I love my pencils, and my pens, and my markers, and my charcoal, and my brush-cut brushes clipped short for making real lines, and the huge rush and intensity of making marks on paper.

Michelangelo, that dynamo, said it all: 

"Let whoever may have attained to so much as to have the power of drawing know that he holds a great treasure."

Well, HE had "the power of drawing."   And for us wannabes, there's encouragement in his words that reveal that even he felt there was so much farther to go.

 "Lord, grant they I may always desire more than I accomplish."

It's in my genes

 

In the past year or so, I've been able to pursue my artistic passion for the human face and figure.  But it seems inevitable that occasionally, shoots will emerge from my deep-rooted response to nature and thereby to botanical art.  One of my earliest blog posts was on the genetic source of this connection -- I come by it honestly!

While playing on the sidelines of my on-line course, I've been trying to keep up with "my own stuff," the gazillion ideas that have nothing to do with the artist-of-the-week program.  One of those  ideas, convoluted I grant you, was a painting of a botanical artist -- "botanical" in the sense that she'd be covered with tattoos that would intertwine with a leafy background.   Early in the year, I played with this idea in a postcard-sized study that showed me I needed to go back to the drawing board.

As the months passed and I began to assemble a stack of studies from the life drawing studio I attend, I realized I could use one of these as my prototype pose.

Originally, I thought I'd show the Bot-Artist's sketchbook, but I dispensed with this when I saw how limiting it would be within the size of my paper.

Well, it's a good idea to spend time looking before drawing/painting -- so I shifted gears to show her examining a leaf.  And I knew *just* where to find the big leaf I needed.  Back to my photo archives for my 2002 painting, "Dreams of Wild Botanists (warm)":--

 A flip of the orientation, and there was the very oak leaf  I had in mind (hard to see; it's a you-had-to-be-there kind of thing):--

That put me on the right track.  I was able to enlarge the figure on the page to work in the way I wanted to.

Now, what about the background?  In one of  those flashes of insight or wackiness, I had a hunch that one of my early heroes, William Morris, just might be able to supply the....er, wallpaper.

 

Found!  I knew Morris was a kindred spirit.  There's my oak leaf in his "Granville" wallpaper pattern!   I mentally superimposed his oak leaf onto mine and from that, I worked outward, modelling my foliage and its relationships on his.

 And here, in a clearing in the jungle, is the outcome:  "Botanical Artist," copyright 2018.

In the spirit of acknowledging All Those Who Made This Masterwork Possible, I'll sign off with a plate from the works of my many-times-great-grandfather, John Linnaeus Edward Whitridge Shecut.  As you will read, he was a bit of a nut case himself.