Sunday, May 23, 2010
New Portrait
Yesterday I took the bus to NYC and spent a glorious day looking at art and doing the gallery thing. The Morgan Library has some wonderful Albrecht Durer drawings, and a great display of Palladio's architecture with lots of models to show just how he brought Greek features into the Roman buildings that have so influenced our formal government structures. Then, up to the Neues Gallery for a major exhibition of drawings, prints and paintings by Otto Dix. Strong unflinching stuff that, but beautifully done. After that, to the Gagosian Gallery for a really big exhibition of Roy Lichtenstein. Happy, delightful pop art that was a very welcome change from the depressing Dix.
Finally, I just went gallery hopping in Chelsea until I got too pooped to go into any further. It made me glad that I am painting in Philadelphia, out here in the Provinces. The contemporary NYC painters just strike me as FORCED. Like they all have to come up with some weirdness and then keep repeating it to establish some Personal Style - maybe an upside down horse floating in the sky, or an eye in the middle of a tree or something like that. Painted on LARGE canvases, of course.
Anyway. I posted a new self-portrait in my last blog entry, but haven't really been happy with it. So I've been doing a lot of tweaking with it, to good effect. Especially, my head is less of a dome - it looked something like the Capital Building, before. Then, my visit to NYC convinced me that I needed to do something more creative about a background. So now it looks like this:
Since my last posting, I finally overcame my timidity and asked one of my Bhutanese Refugee language students if I could paint her picture. She and her husband agreed, so I went to their home and set her up in a chair, adjusted the lighting, took photos and painted her there. I'd hoped to have a second session but it didn't work out and I had to complete her portrait using the photos and memory.
The resourcefulness and resilience of these people astounds me. Granted that living in a refugee camp for years is hopeless, demeaning and depressing, but what courage it must take to willingly leap into an unknown culture, not even knowing the letters of the alphabet, how you will support yourself or your family, and with your bridges burned and all family and support systems left behind. It is a one-way decision, for better or worse.
And so, let me introduce Wei Mae, in the accustomed clothes that she wears every day but sitting in front of a window with venetian blinds:
One final thing. This coming Friday I will be headed out to visit my son and his family in Beijing for a month. I intend to take my paints with me and hope to continue painting there. How that works out, we will have to see. And I don't know if I will be able to post from there, so maybe this blog will be in hold for a month or so.
Finally, I just went gallery hopping in Chelsea until I got too pooped to go into any further. It made me glad that I am painting in Philadelphia, out here in the Provinces. The contemporary NYC painters just strike me as FORCED. Like they all have to come up with some weirdness and then keep repeating it to establish some Personal Style - maybe an upside down horse floating in the sky, or an eye in the middle of a tree or something like that. Painted on LARGE canvases, of course.
Anyway. I posted a new self-portrait in my last blog entry, but haven't really been happy with it. So I've been doing a lot of tweaking with it, to good effect. Especially, my head is less of a dome - it looked something like the Capital Building, before. Then, my visit to NYC convinced me that I needed to do something more creative about a background. So now it looks like this:
Since my last posting, I finally overcame my timidity and asked one of my Bhutanese Refugee language students if I could paint her picture. She and her husband agreed, so I went to their home and set her up in a chair, adjusted the lighting, took photos and painted her there. I'd hoped to have a second session but it didn't work out and I had to complete her portrait using the photos and memory.
The resourcefulness and resilience of these people astounds me. Granted that living in a refugee camp for years is hopeless, demeaning and depressing, but what courage it must take to willingly leap into an unknown culture, not even knowing the letters of the alphabet, how you will support yourself or your family, and with your bridges burned and all family and support systems left behind. It is a one-way decision, for better or worse.
And so, let me introduce Wei Mae, in the accustomed clothes that she wears every day but sitting in front of a window with venetian blinds:
One final thing. This coming Friday I will be headed out to visit my son and his family in Beijing for a month. I intend to take my paints with me and hope to continue painting there. How that works out, we will have to see. And I don't know if I will be able to post from there, so maybe this blog will be in hold for a month or so.
Monday, May 10, 2010
Summing up...
The semester is over now. No more classes with Elizabeth Osborne. I feel a bit regretful about that - she is such a nice person, and I feel that I learned so much from her. I've completed that standing nude now. So three paintings came from her class - all of them in a very different style for me and larger than what I'd typically been doing before. I like all three of them. I don't expect to continue painting in this style, but I have learned a lot from it, and it will surely inform my work from here on. That's a nice feeling.
Here are the three paintings, more or less in their relative sizes. To complete the standing nude the white stripe was added and then toned down, some of the script was reduced a bit, a slight pattern introduced into the cloth along with some assorted tweaks here and there. The deliberately illegible script is from Robert Henri's discourse on the relationship of a model to [her] background.
Of course I have been doing a few other things along the line, too. A future Plastic Club exhibition will be based on self-portraits. Since I've really only done one and that was back in May 2008, I thought I should see what I would come up with now, as a straightforward head shot. So here it is - I think I managed to get my bulbous nose and dome of the head pretty well, and the beard is OK too.
Then, my friend Sheila has set up a 501c3 organization to provide some great art programs to school kids in Upper Darby, called Sunshine Arts. Check it out - she has a great home page on her website. She has a fund raising event coming up, and wanted some art work to sell. I gave her a few things, and also did some sketches with some watercolor added. They are done loosely, and I'm curious to see whether they find interest (ie, buyers) at a fund raiser like that. Here is what I put together for her, working mostly from some of my old sketch books:
