Monday Night Painting 4

The Ginger Cat

Oil on Canvas, 9×12

My Sargent Crab in bloom

Today, as I was headed down to the studio, to work on a small equestrian painting, I was bemoaning the fact that I wasn’t painting from life and how I really had to start plein air painting.  So, I about-faced and took my easle and palette out into the windy yard.  My yard has been gorgeous during the past several weeks, all the apple trees flowering in turn and the lilacs down by the northern fence.  I’ve sniffed the apple blossoms several times, but haven’t even been down to view the lilacs close-up.  What a crime!

Today was indeed windy.  It certainly got no warmer than 50 degrees.  I kept thrusting my hands into my pockets to warm them up between brush strokes, muttering “Levitan, Levitan, Levitan…,” channeling the artist’s hardiness, like Sandra Bullock in Miss Congeniality chanting, “Dalai Lama, Dalai Lama, Dalai Lama.”  After about two hours, I had to give it up for the day.  The wind was picking up and I’m a shoo-in for hypothermia.

This is how far I got.  It’s supposed to rain tomorrow, but it’s been supposed to rain for the past two days.  I’m hoping I can get back to it before all the petals are gone.

Monday Painting

This 5×7 figure painting was begun at our Monday Life Drawing Class and developed as far as can be seen below.  I completed it from memory in my studio.   I would have had four hours to paint from this model had I attended last week, but I was too miserable with a cold to go.

I chose a 5×7 canvas because of the time constraints and didn’t attempt a whole figure for the same reason.  It is difficult to paint loosely on such a scale.  The canvas was primed with an acrylic craft paint in a medium brown.  I often prime a canvas with a glossy Mod Podge, which prevents the oils from being absorbed into a matte ground and allows one to go for a finished product more quickly.   To the Mod Podge I will often add a few drops of acrylic paint, a light green being my favorite.  I learned these tips from Timothy C Tyler, who taught a Workshop in Rising Sun, Indiana a few years back.  (More on that in a moment.)  This canvas was primed with acrylic paint with no admixture of Mod Podge.  It was more opaque than I would have liked and was also a matte surface.

This model was quite tanned.  I found, when painting upon that opaque brown, that I was giving her skin too brown a tone.  I could see it once I had the bluish white tones of the background blocked in.  I think it was because the true tones of her skin looked too orange on that brown background and I instinctively toned them down, only to find later that I’d taken too much gold out.  I had then to try to put the warmer tones back in.  Also, her shadows were rather olive.  I can only imagine that this was due to the cool tones of the walls, but that too tipped my palate away from the warmer colors.  I would have loved to start over on this figure and use a canvas with a more familiarly colored ground.

These painting sessions are practice sessions though.  We keep learning.

Monday Night Painting 3 in 2 hours

The workshop I attended in Rising Sun — gosh, how many years back was that?  2006?  — was one of a number of workshops sponsored by Dick Blick called Art Now.  I’ve googled Art Now and it seems to be a defunct program.  This workshop was not only extremely fun, it was also a very productive  experience for me.  Tim is a good instructor.  He taught me how to do hair. (I painted Girl Without a Pearl Earring and The Sun on her Face in the aftermath of that workshop.)   He taught me how to paint reflections into a wet ground and how to leave the skin’s highlights for last.  I wish he was still teaching within driving range.  He offers workshops in Italy now.

We had four days, two devoted to painting a still life, two devoted to painting a portrait.   On two of the evenings, we drove into nearby Cincinnati to visit the Taft Art Museum, which is a small gem, and a gallery where Tim was having a show.   His painting of Persephone was particularly exciting to see.

A portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson by John Singer Sargent, Taft Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH

It was at the Taft that I saw my first Daubignys.  Have I mentioned that I adore Daubigny?

Monday Night Painting #2, 10x14

This is my second Monday Night painting.  I worked on it at the Green Lantern for 4 hours.   You can see how it looked when I brought it home below.  The carpet looked a bit like it was going to take off and give him a ride, so I repainted the corner.

Monday Night Painting, 10x14

On Monday nights here in Mineral Point, a group is meeting at the Green Lantern Studio for life drawing, and in my case, life painting.  We have about an half hour of 5 minute sketches, then settle down for a long pose.  I just joined the group this spring and the above is my first painting from a three-week, six-hour pose.  You can see what I brought home from the Green Lantern below.  Although I liked the negative space surrounding the figure, I didn’t like the look of shiny, white canvas — it was primed with Modge Podge to keep the oil paint sitting on the surface — so I added the toned background and scrolling, which you might recognize as the same pattern I’d created for my kitchen.

6 Hour Painting of a Nude Woman

One of things I wanted to do in Saint Louis was visit the American Kennel Club Museum of the Dog.  It’s located in a beautiful neighborhood across from Queeny Park.

We garmined our way there during a thunderstorm that had caught us out at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site.   Now, I will preface this by saying I had the hours wrong in my mind.  I thought it was open until 5:00 and it turned out that it was only open until 4:00 on Saturdays.  We got there a little after 3:00.  Sue had picked up somewhere 2 for the price of 1 tickets to the Museum.  We promptly produced them and paid, only to be told by the receptionist that we had 15 minutes in which to view the collection.  I was stunned, thinking we couldn’t possibly see the artwork in only 15 minutes!

The AKC Museum was one of my priorities for my Saint Louis trip.  I’ve always liked dog and horse paintings and have painted Pugs for a couple of years.  So, when told we had only 15 minutes, I immediately began to wonder whether we shouldn’t come back the next day instead.  At that point, the docent told us that she could allow us to stay for 30 minuntes and come back tomorrow for free.  That was better.  A colleague arrived at that point from the gift shop and was immediately asked by the first lady how to do a refund.  The issue was apparently going to be decided for us.  The time period available became clearer, however.  The Museum wouldn’t be closed for another 45 minutes, as it was only 3:15, but they would begin closing at 3:45.

Mmmmm….I have to say that these two ladies didn’t seem very enthused to have visitors arrive.  As we were there, we decided to see what we could see and immediately headed for the stairwell.  The larger number of paintings were upstairs.  There were also sculptures and porcelain figurines to be seen, but since I’m a painter and didn’t know whether we’d make it back again — we had only managed to view the excellent museum at the Cahokia Visitors Center earlier and because of the rain, hadn’t been able to walk on the actual grounds, so I knew we would also be returning there, which would take considerable time – I decided to concentrate on the paintings and see as much as I could see.  The stairwell was very dark.  There were small windows letting light in from outside, but only a few of the many ceiling lights were turned on.  I called over to the desk to see if we could have any more lights turned on in the stairwell and received a very abrupt “No!  It’s only dark in there because of the rainstorm.”  (So, what were all those other lights and lightbulbs there for anyway?)

We carried on looking.  The collection is excellent and I cannot urge others strongly enough to seek out this little gem of a museum.  I can only guess that the ladies had a particular reason for wanting to get out on time that Saturday.  It was St Patrick’s Day.  Perhaps they were Irish, I don’t know.  I enjoyed the collection very much and would like to go back someday.  There is a juried art show there every year to which I would like to submit work.  If I am admitted, I would go down to St Louis again.

Ch. Kay’s Don Feleciano-L  by Roy Anderson 1986

There are two portraits by Roy Anderson, both lovely, at the Museum.  I liked the fact that Mayan designs were painted suggestively in the backgrounds to enhance the origin of the dog’s breeding.

Words of Comfort by J Weir

Porcelain Pugs by Meissen

A Meissen Pug is one of the things I most covet as objet d”art.

Wire-Haired Fox Terriers

Salukis

Horse, Mastiff and Newfoundland by Arthur Batt 1881

Realisation by Arthur Wardle

Fox Terriers Chasing Butterflies by Arthur Wardle

Mastiff

Japanese Chins by Cleanthe Carr

I’m becoming familiar with some of the names of the most accomplished dog painters (besides Edwin Landseer, that is):  John Emms (English,  1864-1912), Maud Earl (English, 1864-1943), Arthur Wardle (English, 864-1949).   Note that these artists are all English.  “The influence which the Queen (Victoria) had on her subjects cannot be underestimated.  Her love of animals, her active support of animal causes and her great love of animal portraits, can only have served to instil similar interests in her subjects,” according to William Secord in Dog Painting:  A History of the Dog in Art.  I probably love dog paintings (and horse paintings as well) both because I love the animals, but because I also love things British.

I’ve just come back from five days in Saint Louis, MO with my daughter, Iphigeneia, and friends, Anna and Sue.  I tried to take photographs of paintings I particularly liked in the Saint Louis Art Museum, which I will post here, but with the warning that some are slightly distorted and  cropped, due to the angle from which I could view the painting and sometimes a little blurry due to the lighting available.  Hopefully you will get a taste of the art available to see in Museums in Saint Louis.

Nona, Geneia, Sue and Anna in front of the St Louis Art Museum

The Apotheosis of Saint Louis

Saint Louis a.k.a. Louis II of France, a crusading French King from the 13th Century, is the symbol of the city.

Old Homestead in Connecticutt by Willard Leroy Metcalf

This is my personal favorite painting in the Museum.  It depicts a New England house on a moonlit night and is so charming, I instantly wanted to step into the scene and enjoy the music of crickets and the evening breeze, then join the cozy party indoors.  Notice the lit window on the side of the house.

A Portrait by Anders Zorn

Anders Zorn is a 19th Century Swedish painter who is widely admired for his loose, elegant brushwork and glowing colors, very like John Singer Sargent.

The Banks of the River Oise by Charles-Francois Daubigny

Daubigny is my favorite painter of the Barbizon School.  He often painted landscapes at dusk and is particularly admired for his river scenes.  The first Daubigny I ever saw was at the Cincinatti Art Museum:  One half of the painting was of a shadowed hillside just before sunset.  There are cows lying in grass in the shade.  The last rays of sunlight are illuminating the opposite side of the painting, where one can see a greater distance.  It was that point in the day where one can still see with great clarity everything around you, but wouldn’t be able to photograph it.  The shadows would end up too deep and the sunlit areas too bleached.  At that time of day everything appears to have its own inner luminosity, but it will vanish in a quarter of an hour.  Daubigny was brilliant at depicting that light.  He was out there with his canvas capturing it and memorizing it.  My photograph of the painting of the Oise above does not do it justice.  One must see Daubigny’s paintings to appreciate how good they are.

Medway, Massachusetts by George Inness

An American painter who evoked the atmospheric beauty of landscape was George Inness, who studied in France and was won over by the Barbizon vision.  As can be seen in the painting above, Inness’ interest was in the emotions that landscape and being outdoors can evoke, and saw it as a means to cultivate spiritual appreciation.  “The poetic quality is not obtained by eschewing any truths of fact or of Nature…Poetry is the vision of reality.”

Woman Standing Near a Pond by Edward Mitchell Bannister

While going through the Saint Louis Art Museum, I noted three paintings that were described as being painted by an African-American.  (If the artist’s race had not been mentioned in the write-up, I wouldn’t have known.)   It was interesting and impressive, because of the time period in which they lived and worked.  Bannister lived from 1828 to 1901.  As often happens in the art world, though Bannister was successful and well known in his day, he was largely forgotten.  The Civil Rights Movement of the 1970s brought attention to his work once more and it began to be celebrated and collected again.  As can be seen in the painting above, Bannister’s work deserves the attention.

Geneia particularly liked this portrait by Renoir

The Tenth Street Studio by William Merritt Chase

A Pond Near the Road by Theodore Rousseau

A contemplative painting by Frank Benson

Renoiresque portrait -- I'm afraid I don't remember by whom

Street of the Great Captain at Cordoba by Childe Hassam

Stairway at Auvers by Vincent Van Gogh

An Orientalist Painting in the Impressionistic Styte

Unfortunately, I don’t remember who painted this.  I have always found Orientalist paintings colorful and interesting.  I especially like the paintings of Jean-Leon Gerome.  This one was unusual, because it was painted by an impressionist.  I’m afraid I only carried my camera through the museum, not a note-pad, and I don’t remember the artist.

Landscape by John Henry Twachtman

One of the things that was pointed out about Twachtman’s work was the “shimmering effect” he created with broken color.  This painting really does have the shimmering effect that water vapor and sunlight might create.  When viewed closely, the paint is very layered and broken.

American Impressionist Painting

I don’t remember the artist, but one of the amusing things about things about this artist, is that when the Impressionists first exhibited in France, this American artist regarded their paintings with “horror.”  Twenty years later he was painting just like them.  Our senses are educated in beauty by familiarity.

Attachment by Sir Edwin Henry Landseer

Too bad it’s a little blurry.

Arab Horsemen a la Delacroix

I don’t remember who painted this, but I liked it.  There was a Delacroix painting too, with its characteristic, violent postures and action.  Here is that one.  It’s a little blurry.

Weislingen Captured by Gotz's Men by Eugene Delacroix

A better image may be viewed by clicking here.

Bridge in New York State

Three Women in a Studio by Max Beckmann

This was the most domestically pleasing of the many Max Beckmann paintings at the St Louis Art Museum.   The description beside it included this note:  “As with many of Beckmann’s early works, the painting is inscribed HBSL in the upper right, an abbreviation for Herr Beckmann Seiner Liebsten (Mister Beckmann to his love), a dedication to his first wife, Minna.”

The Sinking of the Titanic by Max Beckmann

For a better image, click here.

Scene from the Destruction of Messina by Max Beckmann

This painting depicted insanity patients being apprehended after a great earthquake in Messina in 1909.  For a better image, click here.

Portrait of a Woman by Frans Hals

Repose in a Park by Jean-Baptiste Joseph Pater

The Promenade with the Railroad Bridge, Argenteuil by Claude Monet

Native American Horse Thieves portrayed a a French Artist

Presumably these are plains Indians.  Note that one of them is wearing a leopard or jaguar skin.  The French had a very romantic view of American natives ever since James Fennimore Cooper wrote and published the Leatherstocking Tales in France.

Skating Near a Town by Henryk Avercamp

Nana, Female Nude by Lovis Corinth

Perseus Rescuing Andromeda by Cavaliere D'Arpino

This lovely Perseus and Andromeda is painted on lapis lazuli.  That’s what the deep blue is.

Wanderer on a Mountaintop by Carl Gustav Carus

Carl Gustav Carus was a friend of Goethe and a renaissance man.  In 1811 he graduated as a doctor of medicine and a doctor of philosophy. In 1814 he was appointed professor of obstetrics and director of the maternity clinic at the teaching institution for medicine and surgery in Dresden.  He wrote about art, psychology, especially that there is an antagonistic unconsicous poised against our conscious selves, and physicology, developing the theory of the vertebrate archetype.He learned landscape painting from Caspar David Friedrich, whose work the painting above strongly resembles.

Portrait of the Artist's Brother by Louise Elizabeth Vigee Le Brun

Louise Elizabeth Vigee Le Brun was an Eighteenth Century artist who painted many portraits of the French nobility, including Marie Antoinette.  Her work was critically acclaimed in her lifetime.  She was able to combine marriage, motherhood and a career in art, a fact that is commented on persuasively to Marie Grosholtz  in Madame Tussaud, a new novel about the French Revolution.  Marie Grosholtz was the maiden name of the famous and equally accomplished wax portraitist who later became Madame Tussaud.  She lived, worked and survived the events of the French Revolution.  I highly recommend this novel.  Vigee Le Brun painted this portrait of her brother when she was only eighteen.

The Village Church by Henri-Joseph Harpignies

Another of the Barbizon School of painters, Henri-Joseph Harpignies painted this distant church in the Allier region of central France.

View in Sussex by Thomas Gainsborough

The Silver Goblet by Jean-Simeon Chardin

Calvary -- I don't know by whom

 Amazing Miniature

Detail from Attachment by Sir Edwin Henry Landseer (Anna got a clearer picture than I did.)

This portrait is of some unfortunate painter’s father — I don’t remember which one — but he didn’t want his son to be an artist.  It’s pretty apparent in his face, don’t you think?  He didn’t think much of modeling for a portrait either, I take it.

Judith and Holofernes

Portrait of a Gentleman by Gilbert Stuart

Betalo Rubino, Dramatic Dancer by Robert Henri

Horse Thieves

This romantic interpretation of American Indians by a French artist has one of the horse thieves wearing a leopard or jaguar skin.  It adds an exotic element.  The French became enthralled with the American frontier when James Fennimore Cooper wrote his Leatherstocking Tales in Paris.

Still Life by William Merritt Chase

The Country School by Winslow Homer

Me below the statue of St Louis

Hope you enjoyed your abbreviated tour of the St Louis Art Museum.   There were a number of paintings that were not currently on view – I know this from perusing the St Louis Art Museum Website — so I’ll have to get back there someday.  I had thought to visit Kansas City, MO on this trip too, but it turned out to be impractical.  Another day, another art trip!

Entrance Hall Alcove Sitting Room, Wightwick Manor

Have nothing in your houses which you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.  William Morris

I’ve been writing about the Arts and Crafts movement in Sweden, Finland and Great Britain, and I just found a wonderful synopsis of the philosophy by Stephen Calloway in the book, The Arts and Crafts Houses in Britain:

The great protagonists of the Arts and Crafts cause were in a real sense revolutionaries.  The artists, craftsmen, thinkers  and writers, architects and designers who initiated the movement in the second half of the nineteenth century and those who carried it forth into the twentieth shared an ideal of changing the world….That this revolution was to be entirely peaceful one does not mean that it’s aim was any less radical.  But this would be an uprising of makers, not destroyers; of artists and aesthetes, not iconoclasts.  These high-minded revolutionaries had no wish to pull down governments of rdepose kings.  They sought, however, nothing less than the overthrow of what they perceived to be an iniquitous social order, a system founded upon the exploitation and degradation of labour; a system based upon greed that filled the marketplace with shoddy goods and a commercial world that found the inevitable expression of its debased values in the ever-increasing ugliness of modern life. 

The desire of these revolutionaries was to bring about a new artistic and social order not by forcing change and innovation upon an uwilling public but, rather, by showing that there is a better way to live.  This improvement would be achieved, they believed, in large part, by a return to the old ways.  Their goal was to re-create a world in which beauty could again triumph over meanness, ugliness and utilitarian compromise.  By championing the old craft skills against the power of the machine, they aimed at the reversal of the inexorable and overwhelming trend of nineteenth-centruy “progress” towards the production of almost all everyday goods in soulless factory conditions.  The men and women of the Arts and Crafts movement sought, above all, to transform manufacture and thereby to change society, bringing content and delight to the rich man and the poor alike through the making of beautiful things.  In the joys of fine craftsmanship lay the answer to the besetting miseries of the age; all would achieve happiness, either as the reward of honest work or through living well in the possession of Beauty.

The quintessential expression of these lofty, but, as they fervently believed, universally applicable ideas lay in the creation of the “House Beautiful.”  Not surprisingly, this was an ideal most readily achievable by the rich, but it remained a concept that, at its most utopian, aimed at the improvement of not only the mansion of the wealthy p0atron but also the simple dwelling of the working man. 

The idea of a house fashioned, for those who could afford it, from top to bottom according to the vision and design of a single artist or architect waqs, of course, nothing new; in the early eighteenth century William Kent had been celebrated for the care that he bestowed upon devising the entire look of his projects, specifying everything from the the plan of the house and its every architectural flourish down to the shape of the chair or table, the fall of a drapery and the moulding of a picture frame.  Adam, Wyatt, Soane and other architects of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had revealed a similar genius for dictating the interior decoration, choosing colours and fabrics and designing the furniture for their houses.  But such architects held themselves aloof from their craftsmen and tradesmen, expecting them to follow design drawings and the written specifications of works to the letter…..

William Morris, the founding father of the Arts and Crafts and the tireless powerhouse of the erly days of the movement, was the first to approach the whole question of design and manufacture in a new way….Having fallen under the infulence of the Pre-Raphaelite poet-painter Dante Gabriedl Rossetti, and already in love with the literature and legend of the Middle Ages, Morris made the great intellectual leap of seeing in the art, the buildings and the craftsmanship of that distant era a viable model for reforming the ills of modern industrial society. 

To Morris and to other thinkers, such as John Ruskin, the impoverishment of the visual and material culture of the day appeared as the damning indictment of both the gross social inequalities and the creeping banality and imaginative impoverishment of the modern world.  The great answer, as Morris would argue over a period of forty years of ceaseless activity, lay in reversing the century’s headlong rush towards urbanisation, captialist trade, factory production and the division of labour, in favour of a return to ancient traditions of both work and social orgainisation.  The reform and salvation of the nineteenth century was. he suggested, to be achieved only by a return to the wholesome ideals of an earlier age.  Morris urged in particular the adoption of the ethos of the medieval guildsmen and master craftsmen.  These were men, Morris believed, who had pride in their skills and knew the value of fine materials.  They were, crucially, designer-makers who understood every process of their trade and took delight in the making of beautiful objects, simple in structure and adorned with meaningful ornament.  Working in this way, Morris hoped, workmen would once again be their own masters, employed by enlightened and honourable patrons; how could such men fail to take pride in their work and live fulfilling lives?

Morris and the others of his ilk didn’t manage to revolutionsize the values of their fellowmen, but they did manage to create houses, paintings, furniture, wallpaper, books and other items that were worth preserving and loving.  That is their legacy and I don’t think any artist can hope for more.

When I read this description of the Arts and Crafts inspiration, I identify it as an indictment of the American predilection for immediate profit, rather than even an intelligent evaluation of beauty ( since communities that preserve their better architecture attract more people than those that don’t),  the wisdom that knocks down homes of archtitectural significance in order to put up a fast-food shop or drug store, as has been done in my memory in Verona and Platteville.  Mineral Point remains a sort of oasis and I hope it goes on that way.  In the meantime, my spirit is with those Arts and Craftsmen, who worked at making beautiful things and hoped to inspire their fellowmen to do the same.

My Hearth at Rosewind Cottage

I designed the painting around the hearth by taping tracing paper to the wall and just drawing to fill the space.  Then I would add on another and continue the design.  The swirls and scrolls grew, page by page.  I would tape the pages together, then flip them and do the other side of the center.

Hearth Design in Progress

Painting around my hearth

A friend decides to keep me company

The painting hanging to the right of the fireplace is Auction by Ken Stark.  My late husband, Matt, bought it for me as a surprise, because I admired Stark’s paintings so much in a exhibit at Story Pottery in Mineral Point a few years back.

Auction by Ken Stark

My Plate Rack, Rosewind Cottage

Breakfast in my new kitchen

I couldn’t wait to bring this painting home from the Iowa County Courthouse, so I could hang it in my new kitchen.  I rhapsodized to my daughter, “Doesn’t it look good in this room?”  She replied, “That’s because it is this room, Mom.”