Leroy's Art Blog

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Frances!

It's been about a year since I received a commission from the 1st Unitarian Church to paint a portrait of the suffragette/abolitionist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (b.1825 - d.1911). Harper had been a member of both this Church and the Mother Bethel AME Church, here in Philadelphia.

It took some time to complete the portrait, and then a series of things kept delaying its delivery and unveiling ceremony. But now the date is firm: Sunday Morning, Feb. 20, in a service that will feature Harper and her decendants, and include special choral music and also the Universal African Dance and Drum Ensemble, who always give a fantastic performance. That afternoon there will also be a concert at the Church by Sweet Honey in the Rock. It will be quite a day!

I've wanted to share the Harper portrait on this blog ever since I finished it, but felt that it shouldn't be shown until the formal unveiling. However, it is now the featured image on a newspaper brochure promoting a weeklong series of events, called: A Brighter Day Tomorrow - Rediscovering Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, sponsored by 18 Organizations organized by The Moonstone Arts Center. Some 10,000 copies have been printed and they are publicly available as of yesterday, so it seems that the wraps have been taken off.

Here then, is the Portrait. I also was asked to write an Artist's Statement for inclusion in the newsletter. It is awfully long to include in a blog but hey, this is a big deal for me, so I'll include it anyway. ( Nothing says you have to read it unless you want to.)


Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, by Leroy (oil on canvas, 48"x36")

Artist's Statement:

The objective of the portrait painter is not only to provide a likeness but to capture the personality and vitality of the subject. A portrait is akin to meeting a person through a conversation rather than by merely looking a photograph of the person, accurate though that photograph may be.

In approaching the portrait of a living subject I first make several sketches. This allows me to speak with and observe the subject over time, a process that continues throughout the development of the portrait. Thus I come to know the subject through many mood changes - curiosity, interest, boredom, impatience, humor, and more. Building on this background, the portrait becomes a composite that reflects all these intimacies within an authentic context, woven into the likeness of the subject.

Similarly with a historic figure such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, the first step in creating her portrait a century after her death is to clearly recognize her uniqueness. To accomplish this in her absence, I immersed myself in her writings, what has been written about her, the context of her life and times, and her calling.

Harper (b.1825, d.1911) was a woman of unusual inner strength and vitality, proud and self-assured. The first verse of her powerful abolitionist poem Bury Me in a Free Land begins as follows:

“Make me a grave where’er you will,

In a lowly plain, or on a lofty hill;

Make it among earth’s humblest graves,

But not in a land where men are slaves.”

When she was 47, already a well-known national lecturer on abolition and suffrage, poet and author, she wrote in a letter to a friend:

“The other day I, in attempting to ride in one of the [Philadelphia] city cars, after I had entered, the conductor came to me and wanted me to go out on the platform. Now, was not that brave and noble? As a matter of course, I did not, but kept the same seat. When I was about to leave, he refused my money and I threw it down on the car floor and got out, after I had ridden as far as I wished. Such impudence!”

This then is the spirit and the fire that my portrait of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper needed to reveal.

How to begin? Research at the Library Company of Philadelphia confirms that there are two photographs of Harper at maturity as well as one photograph and one etching of her as a young woman. They have been reproduced in subsequent histories and essays, sometimes of doubtful quality. But all of them portray a woman of great poise, dignity and determination.

From these choices, the formal photograph taken for the frontispiece of her most famous book is the genesis for the portrait. Specialists at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and at Philadelphia University indicated that the photo dates to about 1895, and they shared with me dresses, fashions and photographs of the type a woman such as Harper would have worn.

In the photograph, Harper stands before a typical backdrop used for photography in this period, a scrim painted with classical columns and encircling vines. Although these columns really have nothing to do with her life or work, they are suggest the formality that she would have desired for a public presentation, and represent the conventions of the period. And so the columns are retained (minus the vines) in the portrait.

These choices were the easier ones. A greater problem was find the correct way to incorporate Harper’s character, and then to approximate her skin color when working only from black and white half-tone prints. At this point another strong black woman, Ronsha Dickerson of the Universal African Dance & Drum Ensemble, stepped forward and agreed to model in Harper’s posture. So the final Harper portrait is based not only on the Frontispiece half-tone photograph, but also on multiple photographs and a study painting with Ronsha Dickerson for skin color and to observe how light falls on the chosen posture.

Final choices were compositional. Harper is depicted as a mature woman, but at a somewhat younger age than the 1895 photograph. She is leaning forward slightly with head high, and appears about to speak. One hand rests on her best-known book, Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted, and her other hand is open in an attitude that welcomes the eye and beckons toward the book.

It is indeed an honor to portray a figure such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. May her memory and her concern for human rights and equality live on!

Leroy Forney

February 20, 2011

With special thanks to:

First Unitarian Universalist Church and Rev. Nate Walker, for the Portrait Commission itself, and for their strong support throughout the development and presentation of this work.

Nancy Packer, Collection Curator, Philadelphia University, for her discussion and collected displays of the Leg of Mutton sleeve and Pigeon-Breast bodice.

Dilys Blum, Curator of Costume and Textiles, Philadelphia Museum of Art, for providing photographs and historical context for fashions of the late 19^th century.

Ronsha Dickerson and the Universal African Dance & Drum Ensemble for their inspiration and assistance.

Labels: Frances Harper, Portrait, Statement

# posted by Leroy Forney @ 4:15 PM

Monday, January 10, 2011

More Small Paintings

I've made a bunch of new "speed paintings," maybe better called Quick Studies. An interesting thing about these little (6x8") paintings is that they feel so free and easy. They really are like making studies or sketches for a larger work. But some of them, more than I would have expected, turn out to be interesting on their own right. And it is an easy way to try things out before using them in a large scale painting. As Nancy Bea Miller suggested, I've come to of think of them rather like a musician doing scales to maintain technique and skill, and maybe try some different fingering in the process.