Well Read

Well Read

6" x 10"

Prismacolors on Fisher 400 

The last one was so much fun I had to do one more. Unfortunately I had to use me as the model because Maggie and I posed at the museum. That's fine really but its just not my best side. 

Anyway... the work of art I am in front of has some meaning too, but not as much as the other one. My husband had a print of this painting hanging in his room in college which is where we met. It is Fragonard's Young Girl Reading.  On the National Gallery's website it has this to say about the painting:

 "Fragonard painted several young girls in moments of quiet solitude. These works are not portraits but evocations, similar to the "fantasy portraits" Fragonard made of acquaintances as personifications of poetry and music. He painted these very quickly—in an hour, according to friends—using bold, energetic strokes."

The fun thing about doing these miniature paintings is it feels like your tiny pencil tip is a big paint brush - with every stroke counting!

detail of my drawing about actual size!

Mini Maggie

Dress Casual

6" x 10"

Prismacolors on Fisher 400 paper (mounted to Gatorboard)

 It is my contribution to the CPSA convention Silent Auction.

This piece was fun for me  in many ways. First off I am a HUGE fan of Karin Jurick and her popular series of people at museums, also of the famous Norman Rockwell where an older gentleman is looking at a very modern painting.  I'm not trying to be either one of them, but wanted to try the scenario of a museum goer myself. Since I am working in colored pencil with a very small tip it lent itself to a miniaturist's approach which I very much enjoyed doing.

Okay now for the meaning in the picture. It may look like an innocent girl just at the National Museum of Art looking at  a Whistler painting. Well... its not. :-) It is of my friend Maggie Stiefvater. Recently we went to that museum together and walked through beating up some very famous paintings.  This one - Whistler's Symphony in White - was one she liked that I was not too keen on. I couldn't get past the fact that when viewing it at the museum you don't even see the girl. When in front of it you look smack dab in the open mouth of this scary looking dead wolf rug that she is standing on!  Then if you look up at the girl's face you get nothing but glare on the mirror-like surface of the face. It seems that Whistler at some point rubbed the face off and repainted it, but left an oval of a smoother surface around her face.

That's not what is funny about my drawing though. The girl in the foreground is Maggie Stiefvater - bestselling author of the Wolves of Mercy Falls series. The first book, Shiver, is about a girl named Grace who falls in love with a wolf/boy. In the summer Sam is a boy  but when the weather turns cold he becomes a wolf (not a werewolf but a full wolf which is much prettier). The story turns into a race of time to treat his wolfie affliction before the weather runs out.

Shiver has been on the NYT bestsellers list for a gazillion weeks and is still there now on the paperback list. The second of the series Linger is due out in July.

The girl in Symphony in White is very different from the character Grace however. She is emotionless, almost a shell of a person staring out in an odd gaze. Grace is much more like Maggie in the foreground with her sassy stature, ponytail, and mail bag. So why does Maggie like this painting? Could it possibly be a melding of her Faerie series and the Mercy Falls wolves (the Ice Queen Faerie defeats the wolves of Mercy Falls)?  I don't know but this drawing is my way of asking that question. :-)  Don't tell me though Maggie - some things are best to wonder about! I'd be crushed if you told me you just liked the brushstrokes!

Below are some more pics to get a sense of scale. The wolf and Maggie on the left are about actual size (Maggie's body is only 4 inches tall). The picture on the right has a couple of pencils and a penny for comparison.

& the Dish Ran Away with the Spoon

& the Dish Ran Away with the Spoon

well that's the title anyway. :-)

This was a lot of fun... albeit time consuming for such a small piece. There is so much going on in that little square. I almost think it doesn't work, its so busy... but hopefully I managed to pull it together by lumping values together (sort of like Hopper did) and simplifying where needed. I think you can see what I mean more in the .jpg below where I used the cutout function in Photoshop Elements to lump the major value shapes in the piece. I used the shadow down the center of the cloth as a dark shape leading the eye up and framing around the coffee cup... which actually mimics that long black shape in Hopper's Chop Suey picture on the table.

One of the most fun things about this was getting to know Hopper's painting better. He used objects, color shapes etc pointing this way and that all over the picture, which I tried to mimic in my drawing. Other things I mimicked was the writing on the cup with the sign in the painting, and the resting areas of the white of the table. I'm sure there's more - and you can let me know!

I had to change the Hopper painting a little. The Chop Suey painting has two focal points - the women in front and the couple in the back... well when you add my focal point of the coffee cup and spoon - that's just way too many focal points... so I decided to fade in the couple in the back of the Hopper painting instead of having them stand out... the same thing for the big yellow square next to the girls on the right... I just made it stand out a little less to keep the focus on the girls.

& I just got back from getting a nifty matt cut around the corner at Creative Encounters so when it is at the Silent Auction (during the CPSA Convention) it will look nice and tidy. They helped me pick a matt and showed me this green core black matt... which seemed to work. It didn't occur to me until I got back from the studio how the green core really made the green lines on the cup and saucer really work!


Wednesday is the last day of school for the kids which means my studio will stay mostly empty for a while. If anyone want to see/reach me just email me and I can come in. As far as blog posts go... they will be fewer and farther in between probably for the summer and may include more sketches (from our trip to Maui we are taking in July), but don't worry I'll be back in full force in the fall for sure... and will be here. If you haven't subscribed or "followed" me yet nows the time to signup so you won't miss when I start posting more again.

What I Did OverSpring Break & What I am Doing Now.

I know, I just got back to work from helping my husband with his eye condition and then I had another hiatus for the kids' Spring Break. My mom flew in from Chicago and had a visit while the kids were off - so I was busy busy busy - just not with drawing. I did take the family to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge MA which is art blog worthy. I had wanted to go since I found out about it and finally I had the excuse of going with someone (my mom) who would also appreciate it. The kids actually loved it too - they had a fabulous scavenger hunt for the kids to do which lessened the "I'm bored" factor.

The paintings were as fabulous as I thought they would be, if not more. Its always fun to see famous work in person and since I grew up with Norman Rockwell prints throughout my house - his work  is up there with the Sistine Chapel ceiling. The things I was most surprised about were the size of his paintings - which I knew about about but to see them large in person made that fact real. It was reassuring too - since I had decided recently when working on my portraits I would only do them life-size or right around life-size. Every minute detail in a small portrait can make or break a likeness or the emotion of the sitter. 

Another thing I noticed throughout many of his paintings was how much he pushed back lesser significant details into the background using low contrast values or desaturated colors. Take a look at the famous Thanksgiving painting by Rockwell and really look at the objects on the table and how low contrast the values are. The low contrast on the table really lets the faces pop out around it - which are the important bits. He uses this throughout his paintings with the backgrounds as well as objects. I wish I could find the boxing painting which is a really great example of desaturating the colors as well as lessening the contrast - but I can't seem to find it on the net. 

Another surprise was how on certain paintings Rockwell added an overall texture t the paint for effect. Not on certain objects - but over the entire painting. They even had a photograph of him adding this texture to a top layer of paint using a broom! 

Since my visit I am a bit obsessed with the idea of doing a modern version of the painting below complete with all the modern toys kids seem to bring along with them on car trips... I'm amassing the props now - I've got my friends car that would be perfect complete with kayak on top, my kids of course... but I need to borrow a dog from someone??? Anyway - I greatly recommend going to the NR Museum if you get a chance. 

As far as what I am doing now... I have started a still-life and should be doing several as I need to bring some to the Monadnock Gallery in Keene. I bought a bunch of produce and various items today and had a photo shoot. I'll be bringing them (washed) to class tonight... to eat not to draw. :-) 

Walking Into a Rothko

Mark Rothko

Untitled / Grey and Black

The more I work on this the more I feel like the model walked into a Mark Rothko painting and leaned on the mass of colorful greys.

Words from Mark Rothko (taken from his wiki)
"I am not an abstract painter. I am not interested in the relationship between form and color. The only thing I care about is the expression of man's basic emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, destiny."

In the June 13, 1943 edition of the New York Times, Rothko, together with Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman, published the following brief manifesto:

1. To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risks.
2. This world of imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense.
3. It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way not his way.
4. We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.
5. It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted."
[Rothko said "this is the essence of academicism".]
There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing.
We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless. That is why we profess spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art."

Wow.

As always the art world is ever changing. I believe the art world is struggling right now with how realism and figurative art fits into the world that modernists such as Rothko created. Struggling not only with being seen as going backwards in the progression of the art world, but also with the notion that using the tools of our time (photography, computers) makes realism redundant.

Personally I find our times exciting and hope I live long enough to see where it all takes us!

I can hardly believe I am almost finished with this. Unfortunately I can not work on it today... I have to drive to a gallery and then obligations at my kids' school, but it is probably fair to say it will be finished by the end of the week. Not too bad for how big it is and how small my paintbrush was (the tip of a pencil).