Painting

Playing with Fire

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I have been soooo busy the last few months on things that required my absolute focus – such as making my wedding dress, teaching, and preparing for an upcoming solo exhibition. I was literally up to my eyeballs in yards and yards of ivory silk, wool and cream, and I discovered some truly wonderful people and places in the process. I am now returning more full-time to the world of paint just when spring has begun in the most glorious fashion, and I am hoping that I will have a little more time for writing about painting.


The Palace of Donn’Anna, Naples, Jules Coignet 1843

Henri Carr - Vesuvius in Eruption, March 1944
Naples - Vesuvius by Kajetonas Sklėrius (1876-1932) 12 x 17 in. watercolor, 1929
Joseph Wright of Derby. Vesuvius in Eruption, with a View over the Islands in the Bay of Naples. c. 1776-80. Oil on canvas. 122 x 176.4
Gustaf Soderberg View of Vesuvius from the Bridge of St-Januarius, Naples 1820 National Museum, Stockholm

One of the images constantly in my mind’s horizon is that of Mount Vesuvius, my next-door neighbor. For those of you who have never been to Naples and have heard rumors about how “dangerous” it is, be aware that the real danger is Vesuvius – a silent fountain of “rebirth” from which gushes the thrills, the fire, the dust, the goosebumps and the chaos that form Naples today, a modern city perched on a delicate historical tapestry. The experience is invigorating and intoxicating for an artist, a true adrenalin rush similar to that first enormous crush. But when in Naples, do as the Neapolitans do: Don’t worry about it. Let it overwhelm you, and in the meantime, if you can concentrate on getting some decent painting done, someday someone might really appreciate it.

Here below are some images/fantasies inspired by the presence of this potent volcano, a little tribute to “playing with fire.”

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Artists featured in alphabetical order include: August Wihlem Julius Ahlhorn, Henry Brokman, Achille Carelli, Henri Carr, Franz Ludwig Catel, Edward William Cooke, Jules Coignet, Christopher DiPietro, Johan Christian Claussen Dahl, Robert Dukes, Robert S. Duncanson, Jacob Philipp Hackert, Alessandro La Volpe, Heinrich Reinhold, Charles Remond, Kajetonas Sklėrius, Gustaf Soderberg, Joseph Mallord William Turner, Pierre Jacques Volaire, Michael Wetzel, Joseph Wright of Derby, Michael Wutky

Heads According to Giacometti

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Qu’est-ce qu’une tête?  A good question, always.  I came across this French film on Alberto Giacometti today quite by accident, and as it deepened my Sunday, I am sharing it here in its five parts. After the buttery introduction in French, the English subtitles kick in.
 

 


 


 


 

Dark Alleys & Walter Sickert

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Napoli. Che meraviglia is pretty much all I have to say so far since my arrival. Now that I am feeling a little more settled and have learned my way around in a general way, I am looking forward to exploring all the nooks and crannies – being careful of course when venturing down dark alleys by myself. I have begun painting as well, and I like to keep the windows open so that I can hear the sounds of the motorini, distant hammering, the soccer ball kicking around the courtyard and the sounds of plates clattering. I am wondering if I will be able to incorporate those sounds into the paintings I am beginning.

Whatever one might say about the great sun and light in Israel, I can now personally vouch that it is way over-rated. Just too much of it all the time, never changing, and just too hot.  So hot that it bleaches rather than burns, in my opinion, so that if I had stayed any longer I may have disappeared.  And who wants to feel sticky all the time, from breakfast to dinner? I was once talking to a taxi driver in Israel as we were going from Rehovot to Jerusalem, and he said to me that he loves the heat and sun of Israel, “The hotter the better.” And this he says as we are sitting in sub-zero temperatures of the air-conditioning he has cranked up in his car, for that is how much he “enjoys” the hot weather.

The weather in Naples is changing now from summer sun to autumn rain, and as I make my way around the city to see the different Caravaggio paintings and erotic frescos, it made me think about the work of Walter Sickert (31 May 1860 – 22 January 1942). A German-born English painter and a member of the Camden Town Group, Sickert often favoured somber colors and ordinary people and urban scenes as his subjects, and his works were considered very controversial, even connecting him to murder. He is considered a prominent figure in the transition from Impressionism to modernism, and I can see how he might have been an important influence on certain British painters, particularly Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon and even the young Jenny Saville.



I personally think that his nude paintings are his best works, but I have included here below as many as I could find.  Following Degas’ advice, Sickert painted in the studio, working from drawings and memory as an escape from “the tyranny of nature.” His oeuvre also included portraits of well known personalities and friends, as well as images derived from press photographs. Continued biographical information on Sickert is available here on WetCanvas, and here on Wikipedia.

As much as I do like looking at “dark” paintings from time to time, I don’t particularly revel in them; a good dip down now and then though provides some variety, something I do vastly appreciate, like an enormous platter of antipasti. And of course, Napoli itself. Today I took advantage of a questionable sky and brisk air to explore the neighborhood of Chiaia, with occasional jaunts into alluring doorways and enticing stairs going up up up, ending with an inhalation of sun, salt and surf along Naples’ Riviera.

About Visual Notations

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Over the last year, I have developed the craving to compile a place for an ever-expanding collection of visual notations, in addition to my personal musings on my own paintings. My new Visual Notation posts will focus on Great Notations and Contemporary Visionists, highlighting painters from then and now who depict the world out there through the process of perception – the mind filtering that takes place as we see, touch, feel, smell or hear something, along with the contemplations, recollections, aesthetic reactions, intuitions and phantasmic proposals of possibility that the mind performs. These perceptual painters are concerned with exploring and learning something more about this world we live in, but cannot be called realist painters in the way known today. They are not interested in painting reality exactly as they see it, for seeing is only one element of the senses. They are humanists, concerned with what the gift of life might mean, and they labor with sincerity, earnestness, humility and arrogance to try to represent it. They stand out for me because they have a gift of acute and broad vision that goes beyond just a delight in the surface of things to the deeper, higher, beautiful abstractions holding everything together, both in the natural world and in the picture plane. They are seriously consumed by the infinite potentials of rectangles and the juxtapositions of colors and shapes within it, and they paint, in my opinion, as if their heart depended on it.

For those of you who have subscribed to my painting blog (the blog tab at the top), you will continue to receive those posts directly to your email, as well as the new visual notation posts. I hope you will enjoy them all. For those new here, please feel free to take a look around and if you wish to receive posts by email, simply click the subscription button below.

The image to the right is a clip from an astounding fresco piece that I came across in Naples at the Museo Archeologico this June. The full painting, down below, depicts the Trojan horse being dragged victoriously into the city of Troy in utter celebration, unaware of the doom to come from the Greeks. There are uncountable art treasures around the world, but these figures and shadows threw me into a time-traveling warp so jolting that I think I may have permanent whiplash.

Martian & Rose

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Sounds like a good name for a cocktail, come to think of it. I have been eyeing these green fellas in the grocery stores here for a while, and I finally had the courage to buy a few and bring them home. I had no idea what the name for this thing was, so you can imagine the type of google searching I had to do until I came across Kohlrabi. Just a little oil sketch here, nothing special. The vegetable itself ended up inside a tasty pie.

Home Stretch

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With summer nearing quickly, so is my time in Israel, and this is causing me a bit of a panic. Have I painted the bedroom enough? Have I painted anything enough? Two years ago, my fiance came up with a new problem to solve in the world of condensed matter physics, and two days ago he found the solution. It is an enormous relief and a cause for celebration, a marvelous achievement after an important post-PhD assignment at the Weizmann Institute – but it also means that we will be moving on to a new place soon. New problems to create and solve. Packing, moving, and unpacking. Looking for a new apartment, discovering a new neighborhood.

I can’t quite relate to the kind of relief he is feeling, even though the parallels between painting and physics are so striking. As a painter, I can spend a heck of a long time on a painting, trying to resolve it as I discover new problems along the way – but whether the official “end” of a painting refers to relief and the solution to the problem is another unknown. I can paint a ton of failures, one after the other, filling a room with them. The worst is perhaps when I paint a failure but don’t know it. Just last week, I splurged on 30 new wooden panels. They are not too large (for moving and packing) but already I have started paintings on nine of them. I am trying to balance the urge to paint more with the desire to paint sincerely and honestly and with the knowledge of limited time and impending change.


Blue Diagonal

As I paint my messy home with nostalgia of our time in Israel, I am looking forward greatly to knowing what our new home will be, knowing that it is around the corner. Somewhere and sometime soon. Although we can change countries and cultures with a mere airplane ride, I think that the memories of places stretch from one place to another, exerting themselves on how we think and what we find important, despite the distance of time and place.


Postcard Painting



Purple Blanket

November News

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backlighting

Well, autumn has almost arrived in Israel, beginning with powerful thunderstorms last week leaving pools of water for me to sludge through on my way home from Jerusalem. It is still sandal season this week, but at last I am in need of a sweater and jeans.

I have not been at the easel often recently, for exciting reasons I will share soon, but I was able to work on this painting sketch above (50 x 65 cm). My intent was not to do another self-portrait (I still have no grasp of Hebrew to approach people for model requests), but rather to focus on the backlighting scheme, how everything is painted gray at first, belongs within tones of gray and only lines of light delineate the elements in the painting. Sadly, this photograph shows more contrast than seeing the original.

I don’t tend to like “obvious” paintings, the ones where you know instantaneously what you are looking at. I prefer putting important elements in the shadow, elevating something apparently plain by rendering it more fully, alluding to the absence of someone or something. I guess I just like to make paintings that you can only understand more fully if you look at it more slowly.

I have some tremendous inspiration for an upcoming set of painting series, which will focus on my love of, and educational background in, humanism. Some will be dark, others outdoors, and for still others I will need a ladder. I have a few model “victims” in mind other than me and my cat, and I look forward to beginning them, to seeing where this melding of knowledge, memory, and in-depth observation will lead.