A strange and mournful day

Possibly a lot of us Boomers have Simon & Garfunkel song titles running through our heads. But they were, among many others of course, the bards of the generation. I still listen to the Concert in Central Park CD quite frequently.

But I would have come up with that title anyway, because today is a strange and mournful day. Today, in Boston, tanks topped with heavy artillery rolled through the streets of nearby Watertown...all in search of a single, supposedly armed alleged bomber.

Note: Alleged. He has been caught, questioned, tried and convicted only by the American military, media and the hundreds of thousands who sat still for being locked down in their homes to catch one, single 20-something man they were told killed and maimed their fellow citizens. One might well ask what happened to the presumption of innocence first codified in England and accepted--even lionized--by the former colonies. One might ask. And one will ask a bit later today on my Cafe de Flore blog.

At the moment, despite all the totally scary totalitarian happenings in my once-and-never homeland, I had to find something to love, something to celebrate, something to feed my soul.

I found paintbrushes. I have oil painting brushes by only three manufacturers; Winsor & Newton, Daler & Rowney, and ProArte.

Anyone who has heard me wax poetic about the quality of Winsor & Newton paints might expect I'd be enamored of their brushes. I am. They work well. The sort of ergonomic shape of them does, I think, make them lighter and easier to handle than others.

Daler & Rowney brushes are acceptable. They work fine.

But the ProArte brushes are, in themselves, things of beauty. They work well. I particularly like their filberts, which clean up better than most. But I love the look o them The handles are of wood, highly polished and somewhat impervious to being loaded down with dribs and drabs of whatever color I'm using today, yesterday...Their color is mahogany, with little flecks of black. The polished surface reflects an almost textural quality, but they are smooth as silk. I simply love the look of those brushes.

Maybe that causes me to be more careful in grabbing them in grubby mitts; maybe it causes me to take an imperceptible bit more care when cleaning them than I do with the Winsor & Newtons or Daler & Rowneys. Maybe.

I won't, probably, go and buy only ProArte brushes from now on, now that I've discovered how fine they are in a very personal way. That would be a bit OCD, really. I do like them.

Well, OK then. If I have a choice, I'll pick up the ProArte, OCD be damned. I refuse to be hemmed in by a drive not to seem OCD.

I just like those brushes, so there.

ProArte Filbert, my favorite brush. (ProArte website)

Rule Number One for Artists

Monday was a very strange day, even for a former American who had renounced her citizenship a year ago. I never lived in Boston. I almost took a job once teaching riding just over the city line in Revere, but didn't. So I really have no connection, except that two close friends were at the Boston Marathon (they're fine) and the sister of another was, too. (She's not so fine, but a lot better off than most--just a broken ankle, torn meniscus, chipped tooth and multiple contusions and bruises.)

Yes, strange day. So I didn't write an art blog. I wrote a political one. (You can find it here, at Cafe de Flore, where I discuss modern events as I imagine the Lost Generation probably discussed them, perhaps only tangentially, in the 1920s and 30s.)

I did a bit of painting, though; the Cornish life/portrait of a young woman one is still on the easel, waiting for hair. The portrait of Alex is also still on the easel, also waiting for hair. When I've covered their heads, they'll be done. I went a bit farther yesterday, and today pretty much solved the technical dilemmas.

But why, except for Monday which wasn't really the reason, have I hung back?

I refuse to go into the possible neurotic reasons.

However, I can say with perfect certainty that I held back because I was following a dictum offered by another artist. Something about the colours that SHOULD be used for hair, not including Naples Yellow.

In hindsight, after almost wrecking the young woman's portrait and having to scrape and engage in other nasty processes, I can say with stunning conviction: BULLSHIT.

If I'm painting a blonde, Naples Yellow is just damn well going to come into play. End of story.

From this, I developed Rule Number One for painters:  

Never accept another artist's claims to superior knowledge concerning colour mixing and usage.

Is Naples Yellow simply a shortcut to the results of a cunning mixture of Cadmium Yellow, Titanium White, a bit of a red (rose madder or alizarin crimson?) and a touch of green or a greening brown? Probably. I took a colour class once at the New York School of Interior Design (a deflection from my real intent to study at the Art Students League of New York, rapidly remedied as I had no use for cackling co-eds all atwitter over the shape of a Queen Anne chair leg and/or their boyfriend's hairy one). However, at NYSID, with only six poster paint colours, we were taught to mix any shade in the universe. Really. I found it fairly easy and aced the course.

But if I'm not just making little sketches to prove to an interior designer that I could mix, for example, any shade of teal, why would I want to mess with the mere six or eight tubes of oil paints recommended by that artist for portraits, when I could cut to the chase so easily? I wouldn't. I want to paint, not be a pigment chemist.

Oh, well. Just another stile to cross on the path to becoming, as the New Agers would say, self-actualized as a painter. But it has been so vexing, it's a stile I'm not likely to want to cross again. I'm printing out Rule Number One, and hanging it at the top of both easels.

The BBC plays with artistic and political fire

Well, here's a dangerous game...opining about the intersection between art and politics.

Clearly, there has always been an intersection between art and religion. First, it was because all the great painters took as their subject Biblical stories, complete with dying prophets and running blood.

Ghirlandaio's St. Stephen, about 1490-93 (Wiki Commons)

Later, it was because painters took those ancient myths and turned them on their heads, often using what can best be described as graphic rudeness to get the point across.

No one demonstrated against the dying prophets paintings, partly because it was a simpler and basically monolithic society back then. Lots of people demonstrated against the paintings critical of that ancient mindset; often, the demonstrators won and the "objectionable" art was removed. The status quo, which favors myth over reality in religion at least, remained relatively intact.

And now comes the death of Maggie Thatcher. Queen Elizabeth might have made her a lady, but that's the only way she could have become one. No real lady on earth would have destroyed the society that nurtured its people--and did a better job of it even in the industrial and post-industrial ages than a lot of other nation's societies did. I cannot bring myself to refer to the woman as Lady Thatcher. She should, I imagine, count herself lucky that I don't call her the same things I call George W. Bush. But they are not very ladylike things.

In any case, now the question has been raised by possible action at the BBC about whether art is politics and politics art. Not visual art; in this case, the flap is about a song from the original film of The Wizard of Oz, "Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead."

Margaret Hamilton as Wicked Witch of the West; it was her demise that sparked the song "Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead" in the 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz. (Wiki Commons)

Apparently, it has been pushed onto the charts by those protesting public expenditure on a lavish funeral for a--to put it in a ladylike manner--controversial political figure. The BBC's own rubric demands that if a song reaches a certain level, it will be played. To attempt to decide not to play it is, in fact, a political statement, whereas the song itself is not. It is a song.

One must wonder, in light of this, to what other songs the BBC in its infantile wisdom decided to deny airtime because of political statements it assumed the songs reflected. Would certain Beatles tunes, for instance, have been more wildly popular than they were had not the BBC, possibly, shunned them? After all, the Beatles' later stuff was nothing if not politically charged.And that's before the BBC added its own spin.

I can't decide whether I hope the BBC refuses to play the song, or not. If they do play it, it means next to nothing, except that someone at the BBC with some sense decided to simply follow the BBC's own rules.

If they don't play it and it has made its place on the charts...well, I think it means it is time to assess whether the BBC is trustworthy, or whether it has set itself up as the arbiter of whether performance art--as least songs--might be used as a protest against societal ills in the UK, or not.

 

 

Mr. Toad, Carl Jung, and me

The first time I saw Cornwall and west Devon was when my husband and I were on our honeymoon. I'd been to England before, but not this far southwest. I'd liked what I had seen on earlier trips, mainly Surrey and London, but neither of those places reflected my soul the way the landscape of the West Country did. Instantly, I knew I was in the land of my imagination.

Coming into Tavistock, we drove down a steep hill from Heathfield and Simon's childhood home, Heathcot, skimming along in a virtual valley between ancient hedgerows topped by an over-arching alley of leafy trees. I knew at once that this landscape--green, ancient, defined by the gnarled trunks and branches of numberless trees--was the one in my head, and had been all my life.

I attributed that to the books I was read as a small child. Chief among them was a 1930s copy of Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame that had been my mother's book when she was a child. I had a lot of those. Most had 1930s art-deco illustrations. But Wind in the Willows didn't. Its illustrations were lush and full of color and line and busy-ness, very unlike the art deco drawings in other books, usually just black lines and one vibrant spot color. I had the version illustrated by Paul Bransom, I think, rather than the more famous Arthur Rackham versions. But I can't be certain, simply because those books disappeared decades ago, doubtless in one of my accountant mother's intensive garbage-reduction programmes after I had left home. But this is the sort of illustration in my mind:

I wonder if Mole, running away from nameless fears, was as influential in my childhood as Toad's brashness. I rather think so, actually. (Illustration by Bransom from Wiki Commons)

I think it was more than the childhood story books that lodged the landscape of the West Country firmly in my mind, though. I think it was the racial memory described by Carl Jung, posited in my subconscious--memories, feelings and ideas that I inherited from my ancestors. I've always thought that, and now that I've been doing the family genealogy, and have found out one ancestor is interred in Exeter Cathedral and another at St. Clement's near Powderham Castle*, I am more convinced than ever that my attraction to the southwest England landscape and books like Wind in the Willows pre-exists anything American publishers of the 1920s and 1930s were about.

St. Keyne Holy Well, one of the very few photos in our personal collection of woodlands in Southwest England. (Photo by S.P. Tiley.)

And yet, neither I nor my husband photograph woodlands very often. We tend to photograph Dartmoor and beaches and quaint houses in charming villages like Mousehole (the pronunciation of which, I might add, I knew long before my then-new husband tried to trick me with it; racial memory there, too, perhaps.) Maybe it's because we don't need to photograph Mr. Toad's woodlands; Simon grew up in them in Tavistock, and I brought them with me at the very core of my being to my current incarnation on earth. We both know them very well indeed.

* Never fear. Like all families, I have at least as many horse thieves in my family tree as highly placed nobles. I even have an impoverished Canadian Indian and a feckless Irish-American Southern jockey. Mixed bag, to say the least. Or in short, I'm an America-bred, Irish-citizen England-resident mutt.

Getting the lead out

The following really contains random musings on art and the making of art.

***

I painted in verdaccio on Saturday, the underpainting of a portrait of Alex, my favourite male model. I am almost frightened to finish it; I'm so pleased with the freedom and truly lovely modelling, all at once, that the verdaccio allowed.

Oh, well. Needs must. As soon as it dries a bit.

However, while making a few small adjustments to the underpainting this morning, based on some photos I also took that day, I began thinking...a dangerous activity, at best.

Easel No. 2 gets some attention

When I finished that, I returned to the scenic part of the portrait of Julia on a train. The scene will be finished with clouds of steam and smoke from the antique engine, so it is not going to be painted in photographic realism at any level. I'm sort of bored with that part, really, and began defining objects with black lines.

Black lines? You used black lines in a painting? A PORTRAIT? The voices of professors I never had filled my head.

How does that work? I got an undergraduate degree in English Literature from a very academically intense university in the US. I was literally afraid to take art courses there, despite my room-mate, an art major, encouraging me. Years later, I studied at the Art Students League of New York because the art in me needed an outlet. And thank the gods for that. ASL is the most un-academic place on earth, a place where art technique is taught, but experimentation is applauded. A place where there are few absolutes; when I was there, the few that existed were learned in the life-drawing classes of the late Robert Beverly Hale. They were essential, however.

Back at the easel....

So there I was, using the lining brush to define the outside of an antique dining car railway carriage in Ivory Black, and thinking--finally--that academics probably has no place, or little place anyway, in the production of art.

And for some reason, the name of my friend Judy Hoffman, a Baltimore artist, popped into my head.

Possibly that's because her late father, Earl Hoffman, was quite famous, and bequeathed to her his formula for an ancient Italian painting medium, which she manufactured in the basement for years.And which I've been thinking of getting her to send to me, across the wide Atlantic.

***

Earl Hoffman was not a classical painter; he painted with broad strokes, capturing scenes with artistic freedom. He was a contemporary of Ann Didusch Schuler, and, with her and four others who had studied at the Baltimore Institute College of Art, a member of a group of artists known as the Baltimore Realists. Schuler, who was the aunt of my husband's late first wife, had passed on in 2010. Because of the family connection, we had quite a collection of her works, some sold a few years ago, some transferred to Simon's daughter before we moved to the UK, but one Old Masters-type still life in our dining room still.

The art school Ann Schuler founded continues. I met the lady once, about seven years ago, at her annual Christmas party when her son would light real candles on the Christmas tree for just a few minutes, lest house and school go up in smoke. Ann Didusch Schuler was lovely that evening, both physically and personally, in welcoming me as the new wife of her late niece's husband.

I love that I decided I really wanted to meet my husband after seeing this photo of him at a reception at Ann Didusch Schuler's art school.

 *** 

I miss Judy. We shared a love of painting and horses, and often rode together. I miss my stepdaughter. I even...sometimes...miss Baltimore, a city I have often described as a weird combination of the best parts of Paris and the worst parts of Calcutta.

Such is life. And art.