Boadicea and other global issues

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Boadicea--or Boudicca if you must (Wiki Commons)

Work on Boadicea, Queen of the Icenii.....

Her face has been repainted five times. So far. I think this is the last.

She's younger than I thought...not my fault. It's just the way the paints happened.

And yesterday, she told me in no uncertain terms that she did not like the blue/black/white tartan I had sketched in. Now she's in emerald green.

And so it goes.

This morning, the light source changed. Repaint all the highlights, all the shadows.

And now that I've removed her boob--not really, just painted a garment over it (does this make it a structural element?)--I suddenly realized her fur cape had to move a little.

As every artist knows, you change one thing...one little thing...and suddenly, the whole balance of the painting is in a cocked hat.

Her left shoulder isn't right. Or is it the fur? I loved the fur, spent a lot of time making it rabbit...something Boadicea had lots of access to, since she lived about 63 AD, well before the blight that virtually wiped them out in England, during the last century, Myxomatosis. The Australians introduced the disease in their country in the 1950s to cut their rabbit population back; apparently, it did NOT do the job, since the monster jack rabbit is still the butt of Aussie jokes. However, its emergence in the British rabbit population was a disaster. I'm not going to post a photo of a poor little bunny with the disease, but if you want to see what it did to them, click here. And then it killed them. Thousands of them.

From the Wikipedia article about it:

Rabbits suffering in the last stages of the disease, commonly called "mixy" or "myxie" rabbits, are still a common sight in the UK. Unfortunately, the disease has wider consequences apart from the death of rabbits. The Spanish Imperial Eagle and the Iberian Lynx, among others, are now almost extinct because the decline of the rabbit population, which is about 80% of their diets, has caused mass starvation. It is not uncommon for shooters to specifically target infected rabbits, viewing the act as being merciful. However, in 2005 the UK Land Registry conducted a survey of 16,000 hectares of its land and reported that the rabbit population had increased three-fold every two years – likely a product of increasing genetic resistance to the virus.

Maybe we should think of changing things in paintings as the death of a species; the roll-on effects can be disastrous. Except we can get up from our comfy chair, pick up the brush...and create that world anew, with or without myomatosis, as we prefer.

Healthy British rabbit, my favorite kind (Wiki Commons)

***

On that repainting of Boadicea...I read a critic's comment the other night about modern paints and painters. Quoth he, modern paints have a flat, white look because we buy paints in tubes instead of crushing lapis lazuli, etc., to create our own pigments which we then mix in our own medium. Since that moment, I have abandoned my long-standing ability to mix any color on earth and get it right, a skill I learned not at art school but at my short-lived foray into interior design. Being an art junkie all my life, before I finally gave in and studied art itself, I thought interior design would do it, so I forked over some cash to the New York School of Interior Design for a colour course and a period furniture course. The colour course was great, even though the instructor was an awful woman. (As I recall, she lived in an apartment once inhabited by horror movie star Bela Lugosi. I think she caught something.) The period furniture lecture was horrid, mainly because it was full of teenage bimbos more interested in Studio 54 than a career. (So now you know how long ago THAT was....) Anyway, I didn't last long among the decorators; my heart was in the studio.