The U Turn Portraits-Part Two.
“Of course you will say that I ought to be practical and ought to try and paint the way they want me to paint. Well, I will tell you a secret. I have tried and I have tried very hard, but I can’t do it. I just can’t do it! And that is why I am just a little crazy.” Rembrandt Hamerszoon Van Rijn
The drawing of Kyri (see part 1) was made at the kitchen table in close proximity. Kyri was compelled to look at the drawing as it progressed, which created a kind of gaze tension-translating as an awareness in the drawing. This made me think about the years of attending and then teaching life classes and how I disliked not having the model’s gaze. While understanding the need to objectify the sitter and to technically master the subject, it sometimes made me feel like a voyeur, almost stalkerish. I hankered after the model’s live human gaze and awareness.
“You would hardly believe how difficult it is to place a figure alone on a canvas, and to concentrate all the interest on this single and unique figure and still keep it living and real.” Edouard Manet
Fig. 1. Is Mimi my granddaughter and sister to Kyri. Utterly curious and mercurial keeping still is not yet one of her strengths, but participation is and she kept up a flow of chatter and poses both entertaining and distracting, so that I had to work around her, and patiently wait for her to come back to me, had to remind myself to breathe. So worth it though.
“When you’ve got it, you’ve got it. When you haven’t, you begin again. All the rest is humbug.” Edouard Manet
Having coped with Mimi’s youthful exuberance, I felt ready to notch things up a gear. I did something that I used to do regularly until my self imposed ban, and that was drawing bands in packed pubs. It is a challenging thing to do, the musicians sway and sometimes thrash about, never still, the light is usually dim and people are curious and jostle you or worse. But the atmosphere is fantastic.
“Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.” Frank Zappa
The band was called Willie and the Bandits they play an eclectic mix of “Folk and World music to Blues and Rock. Boy can they play such earthy energy that goes right through you and unfortunately like Mimi I found it very hard to keep still. Perched on a stool with squinty eyes and mouth open it was like walking a tight rope (probably not really) their engagement in the music and awareness of my presence meant that they were not passive models. I loved it.
“If my people look as if they’re in a dreadful fix, it’s because I can’t get them out of a technical dilemma.” Francis Bacon
So rusty and forgetting old rituals like doubling up on all materials in case the lead drops out of your propelling pencil etc. And coping with other people’s expectations and reactions can be always tricky but I have to say that all the academic rigour has paid off in that I feel calmly capable. This type of drawing is a kind of performance art and people feel entitled to see the results and comment freely. Often the remarks are positive but the negative one’s stick, like “My auntie can really paint.” And the perennial “Yes but what is it for are you going to sell it?” “And on this occasion a concerned music goer asked “Are you going to fill that in properly when you get home?”
A painting is finished when the artist says it is finished. Rembrandt. Rembrandt Hamerszoon Van Rijn
I think probably there will be a part 3.
