Wally and our grand-dog Sully.
Our Frenchie Brothers.
Top image is a photo from March 5, 2023.
Bottom image is a wonderful painting by Carol Tamplin, commissioned by our great friend Jan. What an amazing gift Jan! Thank you.
this delicate painting will endure
May 14, 2022 by 8 Comments
On the shelf in my studio in Bloomsbury are four postcards of paintings that I love: The Blue Rigi, Sunrise by J.M.W. Turner; Stonehenge, a watercolour by John Constable; Self-Portrait by Rembrandt, dated 1658; and The Convalescent by Gwen John.
Just one look at this reproduction of Gwen John’s painting and my breathing becomes easier. The whole composition is a symphony in grey. She must have mixed the colours on her palette first—Payne’s Grey, Prussian Blue, Naples Yellow, Yellow Ochre, Brown Ochre, Rose Madder, Flake White—then all the other colours would be dipped in this combination so that every form is united in grey: the dark blue of the girl’s dress, the thrush-egg blue of the cushion behind her back and the tablecloth, the rose pink of the cup and saucer echoing the delicate pink of her fingernails and lips, the teapot like a shiny chestnut. The wall behind her is flecked with mustard-coloured dots placed randomly and precisely, as marks in nature always are, like the speckles on an egg. The painting is as fragile and robust as an egg—the structure of the composition holds everything in place; this delicate painting will endure.
Gwen John instructs the model to loosen her hair and part it in the middle. She wants the model to resemble her. Before Gwen starts the painting, she positions herself in the wicker chair and tells her model that she must sit in exactly the same pose. Gwen lowers her eyes and holds a small piece of paper in her hands. She is completely still, and her stillness pervades the space around her. The room becomes silent. The model now copies Gwen; she looks down at her hands, and she doesn’t look up until she has heard that Gwen approves.
— Celia Paul, Letters to Gwen John (New York Review of Books, April 26, 2022)
Saturday Morning
February 27, 2021 by 7 Comments
Windowsills evenly welcome
both heat and cold.
Radiators speak or fall silent as they must.
Doors are not equivocal
floorboards do not hesitate or startle.
Impatience does not stir the curtains,
a bed is neither irritable nor rapacious.
Whatever disquiet we sense in a room
we have brought there.
And so I instruct my ribs each morning,
pointing to hinge and plaster and wood —
You are matter, as they are.
See how perfectly it can be done.
Hold, one day more, what is asked.
~ Jane Hirshfield, from “A Room” from “The Lives of the Heart: Poems”
Painting, Poul Anker Bech (Danish, 1942-2009), “Sun Dreams”, 1973 via Huariqueje
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
November 30, 2020 by 23 Comments
What do you do religiously—not only often, but with great love and faith? Writing, painting, running, volunteering? Do one of those things today; do something religiously.
KEEP MOVING.
— Maggie Smith, Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change (Atria/One Signal Publishers, October 6, 2020)
Evolution?
April 28, 2020 by 24 Comments
Eric Yahnker with Pandemic Lovers (after Magritte), 2020, oil on linen, 36 x 27.5 in. Eric Yahnker is a contemporary artist born in 1976 in Torrance, California. His humorous, meticulously rendered graphite and colored pencil drawings and elaborate process pieces examine pop culture and politics. He can be found at his website and on Instagram.
Feel that sway…
March 7, 2020 by 17 Comments
As a boy, Picasso liked to draw by candlelight.
He had already intuited that the moving shadows cast by the light would instill a feeling of sway in his work.
~ Colum McCann, Apeirogon: A Novel (Random House, February 25, 2020)
Photo: John Taylor
Lest We Forget
November 11, 2019 by 9 Comments
Alan Sun, Art of Marp: “Did a painting to commemorate the 100th Anniversary of the armistice in Europe. On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, the guns fell silent.” (Nov 11, 2018)
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
September 16, 2019 by 14 Comments
He thinks the prices paid for his works sometimes border on madness. “I want to ignore it, mostly,” he says. “I’ve had sufficient money to do what I liked every day for the last 60 years. Even when I didn’t have much money, I’ve always managed. All I’m interested in is working, really. I’m going to go on working. Artists don’t retire.”
~ Lesley M.M. Blume, The World According to David Hockney (wsj.com, Sept 9, 2019)
Other notables from this essay:
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“I have the vanity of an artist. I want my work to be seen. But I don’t have to be seen.” —David Hockney
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“[The drawings] seem to exist fully formed. It’s like he bleeds them onto the page.” —Arne Glimcher
- The drive up to David Hockney’s Los Angeles home in the Hollywood Hills is a narrow, winding route, full of hairpin turns. At the top of a hill, his compound is fortressed away behind an expanse of fence, hidden within a barely tamed jungle of palm trees and bird of paradise plants. Nearly every surface—the walls, the walkways connecting the buildings, the handrails and the roofs—has been painted brilliant colors: bubblegum pink, cerulean, canary yellow, sea green. ~ Lesley M.M. Blume
Painting above by David Hockney: The Road to York through Sledmere, 1997 – oil on canvas 48×60 in.
Morning Light
December 21, 2018 by 15 Comments
Stephen Howard, Morning Light (Tree Island Series), Oil on Board, 800 x 800 mm. (via Your Eyes Blaze Out)
“Born in Masterton, Stephen Howard lived in Christchurch, New Zealand for several years before relocating to Auckland. Howard paints New Zealand architecture and landscape, but manipulates the subject matter to give an atmospheric sense of strangeness. Contrasts are his thing – a tree against the repetitive patterns of an apartment block, a pale concrete building with a dark doorway and rust over the door. Howard seldom depicts a single place. He takes buildings out of their original context and re-imagines them in a way that questions reality, rather than reflecting it. His work is contradictory in that the organic forms of his colour field works are achieved by calculated attention to detail and the building up of many layers of paint. Howard has been exhibiting in solo and group exhibitions in Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland since 1978.”
See more of his incredible art here: Parnell Gallery.
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
October 22, 2018 by 18 Comments
I still wasn’t sure exactly what form the painting would take. But I did know how I should begin. Those first steps—which brush to use, what color, the direction of the first stroke—had come to me out of nowhere: they had gained a foothold in my mind and, bit by bit, taken on a tangible reality of their own. I loved this process.
~ Haruki Murakami, Killing Commendatore: A Novel. (Knopf, October 9, 2018)
Photo: cnd.ha (via Your Eyes Blaze Out)
Murakami’s brushstrokes
October 19, 2018 by 19 Comments
Autumn steadily deepened around me.
The sky opened up, the air clear and crisp,
the clouds like beautiful white brushstrokes.
~ Haruki Murakami, Killing Commendatore: A Novel (October, 2018)
Photo: Matt Champlin with Brushstrokes
whereon thou standest is holy ground
July 17, 2018 by 28 Comments
One viewer who did not dismiss Millet was Vincent van Gogh. In 1875, he visited a large auction show of the artist’s late pastels. Van Gogh, who had not yet fully embraced his own artistic vocation, was smitten. When he entered the room, he later wrote his brother Theo, “I felt something akin to: Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.”
Van Gogh was not alone in his reaction. Millet’s pursuit of humble subject matter and his skill as a draftsman would influence artists for decades. Pastels facilitated his innovations with perspective. Requiring no drying time, they were easy to rework, encouraging spontaneous expression. They also made him a virtuoso of green. “Path Through the Wheat” (c. 1867) abounds in sunlit grassy hues. Forest tones anchor two companion pieces, “Primroses” and “Dandelions” (both 1867-68), which Millet seems to have composed while lying on his stomach in the shade.
~ M.J. Anderson, from ‘French Pastels: Treasures From the Vault’ Review: Delicate and Delightful. Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts presents works by Degas, Millet and others, rarely shown due to the fragility of their powdered surfaces. (wsj.com, July 14, 2018)
Notes:
- Photo 1: ‘Path Through the Wheat’ (c. 1867), by Jean-François Millet
- Photo 2: ‘Primroses’ (1867-68), by Jean-François Millet
- Photo 3: ‘Dandelions’ (1867-68), by Jean-François Millet
Lightly Child, Lightly.
January 11, 2018 by 13 Comments
I’m getting somewhere now, I’m feeling lighter. I’m coming unstuck from scrapbooks, from albums, from diaries, and journals, from space, from time. Only a paragraph left, only a sentence or two, only a whisper.
I was born.
I was.
I.
– Margaret Atwood, from “Life Stories,” in The Tent
Notes:
- Painting: The Blue Hour by Jon B. Paulsen
- Prior “Lightly child, lightly” Posts? Connect here.
- Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”
part of the painting’s magic is that it brings together its time and yours, its place and yours
December 26, 2017 by 9 Comments
If you have ever stood in a room in front of a painting by Munch, or Van Gogh or Rembrandt for that matter, you will know that part of the painting’s magic is that it brings together its time and yours, its place and yours, and there is comfort in that, because even the distance that is inherent in loneliness is suspended in that moment.
– Karl Ove Knausgård, in a preface for a catalog for: Edvard Munch: Between the Clock and the Bed – an exhibition at the Met Breuer, New York City, November 15, 2017–February 4, 2018. (The New York Review of Books, Dec 7 2017)
Notes:
- Post Inspiration. Rainer Maria Rilke from The Poetry of Rilke: Nothing is too small: against a gold background / I paint it large and lovingly / and hold it high, and I will never know / whose soul it may release.
- Art: Edvard Munch, “The Sick Child” (1907) via San Francisco Chronicle
- Quote Source – ekphora.
Canvas once touched by the fingers of both Giorgione and Titian
November 15, 2017 by 17 Comments
We stand before a canvas once touched by the fingers of both Giorgione and Titian.
I know that restorers’ fingers may long since have erased all traces of the two masters’ palms,
still it’s difficult not to be moved.
~ Adam Zagajewski, Slight Exaggeration: An Essay
Notes:
- Painting 1 (‘La Vecchia / The Old /Woman’, c.1506) by Giorgione (1478-1510), an Italian painter of the Venetian school in the High Renaissance from Venice.
- Painting 2 (The Entombment, 1559) by Titian (1488-1576) an Italian painter, the most important member of the 16th-century Venetian school.
- Related Posts: Adam Zagajewski
Most of him is lost to us of course.
November 7, 2017 by 17 Comments
Mike Lankford, opening lines in his biography titled “Becoming Leonardo: : An Exploded View of the Life of Leonardo da Vinci:
“Most of him is lost to us, of course. The timbre of the voice, the thoughts visible in his eyes, the physical gestures when happy or sad, the way he walked, his smell, his hands, the habitual grimace his friends knew all too well but no one bothered to record—all that is lost. When he was young there was no reason to write any of it down, and when he was old he became too hard to describe, too strange. What to do with Leonardo?”
Walter, Isaacson, author of Leonardo da Vinci, in an interview in By the Book in The New York Times Book Review, Nov 2, 2017:
Q: Which book was most helpful to you in working on your biography of Leonardo da Vinci?
A: Leonardo’s own notebooks. More than 7,000 pages still, miraculously, survive. Paper turns out to be a superb information-storage technology, still readable after five hundred years, which our own tweets likely (and fortunately) won’t be. Leonardo crammed every page with drawings and looking-glass notes that seem random but provide intimations of his mental leaps. Scribbled alongside each other, with rhyme if not reason, are math calculations, sketches of his devilish young boyfriend, birds, flying machines, theater props, eddies of water, blood valves, grotesque heads, angels, sawed-apart skulls, tips for painters, and studies for paintings. I love his to-do lists, which have entries like “Describe the tongue of the woodpecker.”
Painting: Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci
I Needed Color: Free from the future. Free from the past. Free from regret. Free from worry.
August 12, 2017 by 28 Comments
What do you do when life chooses you? You can choose not to do it. You can choose to try to do something safer. Your vocation chooses you. When I really started painting a lot, I had become so obsessed, there was nowhere to move. In my home, paintings were everywhere. There were becoming part of the furniture. I was eating on them. I found myself looking around at one point, a really bleak winter in New York. It was just so depressing and I think I needed color. […]
You can tell what I love by the color of the paintings. You can tell my inner life by the darkness in some of them. You can tell by what I want by the brightness in some of them. […]
I think what makes someone an artist is they make models of their inner life. They make something physically come into being that is inspired by their emotions or their needs…
I like the independence of it. Love the freedom of it. No one else tells you what you can and can’t do…and, there’s an immediacy to it. Art has to be service, like you are servicing your subconscious…
When I was a kid I spent half my time in the living room performing for people. I spent the other half of my time in my bedroom by myself writing poetry and sketching. I was not the type of kid that you could say as a punishment: “good to your room” – because my room was Heaven to me. My isolation was welcome…
I don’t know what painting teaches me. I know it just frees me. Free from the future. Free from the past. Free from regret. Free from worry…
~ Jim Carrey, excerpts from I Needed Color
Note to Self: Who knew that the star of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994), Dumb and Dumber (1994), The Mask (1994) – had this talent.
You can never escape the bonds of family history, no matter how far you travel. And the skeleton of a house can carry in its bones the marrow of all that came before.
April 21, 2017 by 21 Comments
Later he told me he’d been afraid to show me the painting. He thought I wouldn’t like the way he portrayed me: dragging myself across the field, fingers clutching dirt, my legs twisted behind. The arid moonscape of wheatgrass and timothy. That dilapidated house in the distance, looming up like a secret that won’t stay hidden. Faraway windows, opaque and unreadable. Ruts in the spiky grass made by an invisible vehicle, leading nowhere. Dishwater sky.
People think the painting is a portrait, but it isn’t. Not really. He wasn’t even in the field; he conjured it from a room in the house, an entirely different angle. He removed rocks and trees and outbuildings. The scale of the barn is wrong. And I am not that frail young thing, but a middle-aged spinster. It’s not my body, really, and maybe not even my head.
He did get one thing right: Sometimes a sanctuary, sometimes a prison, that house on the hill has always been my home. I’ve spent my life yearning toward it, wanting to escape it, paralyzed by its hold on me. (There are many ways to be crippled, I’ve learned over the years, many forms of paralysis.) My ancestors fled to Maine from Salem, but like anyone who tries to run away from the past, they brought it with them. Something inexorable seeds itself in the place of your origin. You can never escape the bonds of family history, no matter how far you travel. And the skeleton of a house can carry in its bones the marrow of all that came before.
Who are you, Christina Olson? he asked me once.
Nobody had ever asked me that. I had to think about it for a while.
~ Christina Baker Kline, from Prologue of “A Piece of the World: A Novel”
Art: Christina’s World is a 1948 painting by American painter Andrew Wyeth, and one of the best-known American paintings of the middle 20th century. The woman in the painting is Anna Christina Olson (3 May 1893 – 27 January 1968). She is likely to have suffered from Charcot–Marie–Tooth disease, a genetic polyneuropathy. Wyeth was inspired to create the painting when he saw her crawling across a field while he was watching from a window in the house. Wyeth had a summer home in the area and was on friendly terms with Olson, using her and her younger brother as the subjects of paintings from 1940 to 1968. Although Olson was the inspiration and subject of the painting, she was not the primary model—Wyeth’s wife Betsy posed as the torso of the painting.[4] Olson was 55 at the time Wyeth created the work. (Source: Wiki)
MLK
January 16, 2017 by 17 Comments
…Almost 50 years after his death, we remember MLK as the transcendent figure who helped lift the South out of Jim Crow. We also remember him as almost preternaturally calm in the face of great pressure and danger. […] He was a young man, still in his 30s—foisted onto the national stage with actors many years or decades his senior, suspect in the eyes of both younger and older civil rights leaders—and the burdens of leadership took their toll on him. […]
Since the age of 26, King had lived a mercilessly public life. He spent as much time, if not more, in airports and hotel rooms as he did at home with his wife and children. He faced relentless pressure to raise money, mediate internecine disagreements within the movement, speak before local civil rights groups and act as the national spokesman and government liaison for the black freedom movement. It was not the life that he chose. Rather, it was the life that chose him.
On his birthday, Americans celebrate King’s accomplishments and commemorate his martyrdom. It bears remembering, too, that he struggled with the role he played. And that he willingly surrendered life’s comforts—small and large—to give himself wholly to a country that didn’t, in his brief time here, fully appreciate him.
~ Joshua Zeitz, excerpts from The MLK History Forgot
Cover Source: The New Yorker by Kadir Nelson, a Los Angeles-based artist who painted this week’s The New Yorker cover, a tribute to the civil-rights leader. “My image is a celebration of Dr. King and his vision. What happened to his dream of racial and economic equality, and what is the impact of non-violent resistance over half a century later? It’s a conversation between the past, the present, and the future.”
It’s been a long day
August 24, 2016 by 23 Comments
Once I witnessed a windstorm so severe two 100-year-old trees were uprooted on the spot. The next day, walking among the wreckage, I found the friable nests of birds, completely intact and unharmed on the ground. That the featherweight survive the massive, that this reversal of fortune takes place among us — that is what haunts me. I don’t know what it means.
~ Mary Ruefle, Remarks on Letters from Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures
Notes:
- Painting: Put a bird on it by Truls Espedal (via this isn’t happiness). Quote: The Chateau of My Heart
- Related Posts: “It’s Been a Long Day“
Live & Learn 