Recently someone I consider a wonderful person died. As I age I keep receiving these alerts that life is brief. So as the saying goes, I return to art, which lasts far longer. This past weekend, I attended a walk at Aquetong Spring Park in New Hope, PA given by the Philadelphia Mycology Club. The person leading the walk struck me because her features seemed straight out of an early Lucian Freud painting. I also completed the portrait of my puggle Sammie, which I will be giving to her amazing Veterinarian Dr. Jessica and the staff at Lambertville Animal Hospital.
I worked some more on my portrait of Sammie. This old dog breaks my already broken heart 💔 I applied various cool and warm shades to her coat and I more clearly delineated her eyes.
Yesterday, I began this portrait of my 17-year-old puggle Sammie. I have been wasting too much time lately. Seeing this beautiful face reminded me of the important things in life.
I am focusing on both composition and color particular to nature as I work on improving my landscape painting. My impetus was this lovely acrylic painting on wood panel by Nora Muchanic. I am learning a lot just by looking at her sense of color, brushstroke application and simple but elegant composition. Her painting is entitled “Lone Tree.” I recently visited Andalusia in Bucks County and was impressed with the design of their gardens, as well as all of the natural beauty found along the Delaware River. My painting is called “Road to Andalusia.”
Every time you wear sandals instead of shoes you make yourself vulnerable; you do so if you go barefoot. Why do our bodies make us open to judgement, or worse, attack? Why do we allow ourselves to live inside skins that can be ridiculed, pummeled or desecrated? And after we have been humiliated why do we say “once more, please?” Good questions for which I don’t have the answers. Rather, I choose not to answer. This particular illustrated body is in danger because something has weakened him. His feet being exposed seems to be the least of his problems.
When I first learned about Caravaggio, one of my professors talked about why the artist painted a figure’s dirty feet. These dirty feet showed that the painter used every-day people to represent Jesus’s disciples. The gutter was brought into a work of art. Low meets High. The art of Caravaggio is for the masses and about the masses. Those feet demonstrated that Caravaggio came from a world that was decided on the streets. This is very different than the figures seen in Rubens: those lush, bathed and neatly quaffed figures more at home in the Courts of Kings and Queens.
This is where I am with the most recent painting. Perhaps I have overworked these feet already, and I am feeling a bit insecure about that.
No, no, no, do not paint small areas separately, almost completing them, or actually completing them, without first laying in larger areas of light and dark, or color. I was taught since I began courses in painting, that every portion of your painting surface should be colored. Never leave the bright white of canvas because color is relative; a color is seen differently depending on what color it is next to. So, I have departed from that rule here, and I did so with Portrait of Cat and other paintings as well. Why? Perhaps it is too much confidence, or arrogance. I have been painting for 40 years. I have grown to expect certain eventualities. I believe I can figure out what colors will do as I progress through a painting. All will come to fruition in the end because I have put in a great deal of time and effort learning and relearning as I have made my art over the decades. And it is gratifying to kiss some rules goodbye.
My work on this new painting made me want to look through a book on Pontormo by Salvatore S. Nigro to examine figure compositions. I was struck by the conveyance of silence found throughout the works. The silence is in the formal compositions of the paintings themselves and in the time and attention it requires to examine them. In The Visitations we see the saints communicating through glances. Even in a painting that would logically contain noise conveyed through screams we see dignity in silence. In Eleven Thousand Martyrs only three figures have opened mouths and their heads and bodies are shown with care and delicacy; they symbolize suffering nobly endured. No screams these, only loud sighs emanate from their lips. The viewer sees these images of pain and we are forced to contemplate them in silence, as befits their locations in churches, monasteries and hospitals. No unnecessary or necessary sounds, only the subjects’ and the viewers’ thoughts ricocheting back and forth, one to another. I hope to achieve something of this, one of the many beautiful aspects of Pontormo’s works, in my new painting, which is coming along (detail below) With this terribly warm and humid weather, I will have to reserve my painting times to early mornings and evenings, so I have enough ventilation in my studio.
then start in small increments. Which is exactly what I did these last two mornings, when I spent 30-45 minutes each day drawing the figures for a new painting.
