My youngest niece and
her husband (I posted pictures of their wedding
some time ago) had their second baby on September
14th. I haven't seen the infant boy in the
flesh yet but of the photos they sent,
one in particular just cried out to be painted.
So here's my version, digitally drawn on
graphic tablet, from the photo below.
By the way, in case you're
wondering, I don't use photos as digital layers
to trace and paint over or to make more 'painterly'
by using filters. In this and other digital portraits
I start with a blank page and look at the original
photo as if it were a live model, drawing and painting
directly from it onto my graphic tablet, using Photoshop
brushes. I consider it cheating to manipulate a photo
itself with digital processes in order to produce
something that may look like a painting but is actually
an altered photograph.
Mother-and-child paintings
are legion but, at least to my knowledge,
there aren't that many of father and child.
This one has got to be a contender, don't
you think?
September almost gone
already! Sorry for the long gaps between
posts - have been busy offline. I will (really
really) be posting more Vie
en Rosé soon.
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but my altered version, inserting a
different view from those spectacular windows and a more
appropriate soundtrack. Unfortunatley the sound doesn't come up on my video below but it's working fine on the main Blaugustine and also at blip.tv
If you didn't see that BBC interview
it's available at this
link for another five days. Try watching it while playing Leonard
Cohen's The Future.
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Just to show I'm not sitting
around brooding guiltily all the time, heh heh, here are
some recent portraits done for the ongoing Julia
Kay's Portrait Party. If you go to my Flickr
page there
you can see bigger versions by clicking on each picture.
And I'm nearly nearly done with the big Prism painting.
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The thoughtful comments to the last
post here and at my main blog are forcing me to look further into this murky topic.
Having established that what my own particular guilt-harpy
keeps harping about is that I'm guilty of Squandering
My Gifts and Not
Living Up to My Potential the logical next question is:
what exactly are these gifts or potential which I'm supposedly
not living up to? Do they exist at all or are they yet another
mirage? Another false concept plugged into my brain by the
competitive, egocentric, celebrity-obsessed culture we live
in?
Well, you know, maybe.
But I don't think so. What I think, what I know gut-wise,
is that I really do have gifts I'm not using. It's not
vanity or arrogance to say so because gifts are gifts
and the real reason why the exasperating little
guilt-bug keeps buzzing around me is because it knows that
I know that I'm built to fly but settle for crawling - I
crawl very well but that ain't flying - and I'm designed
to burn bright but settle for flickering, a flicker flicker
here, a flicker there.
You may say ah, but that's what we
are: crawling, flickering creatures, doing our best against
all the odds. Well if that's what you'll say, I'll have to
disagree. Because what I really know down in my deepest
of deep guts is that many of us have a locked cellar full
of unused gifts - or maybe just one unused gift. It's not
a thing, not even a talent, but a degree of feeling. It
doesn't necessarily mean achievement or success in worldly
terms. It means being willing to risk flying, Icarus-like.
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Are you pursued by it? Does
it wake you in the morning and stand over your bed at night,
sometimes even following you into your dreams? Is it beside
you as you sit at your computer screen right now, asking
why you're not doing something you should be doing? Has it
whined inside your head so often and for so long that you
take it for granted, like the ticking of a clock or a tickle
in the throat? Very like the ticking of a clock since it
keeps on nagging about all the time you've wasted in
the past, are wasting now and will waste in future.
Can you tell that by YOU I
mean ME?
Does your guilt ressemble my guilt? No? If you are one of
the fortunate few who can do that living-in-the-now thing
without feeling guilty, then arrivederci:
go and smell the roses while I and the rest of us guilt-prisoners
examine the walls of our cells and ponder our escape.
Let me make clear first of all that
I don't want to get rid of guilt completely. I just want
it to stay in its place and speak only when necessary. For
example to indicate politely that the stone I've just tripped
over is exactly the same one I tripped over last week or
last year. A kind of unobtrusive, gentle Dr.Watson to my
dynamic Sherlock Holmes. What I don't want is
to be dominated, harassed, bullied, interrupted and nagged
by a mere concept, a chimera, a mirage.
What does it look like anyway?
Has anyone ever seen a Guilt? I don't mean the kind
that could be and should be haunting you if you've done something
really really bad, but just the average,
non-descript, irritating voice-over which never stops droning
that....uh....what exactly is it droning?
I've been working on it and staring
at it so much that I decided to take time off and
make a slideshow of some of the stages up to now. There comes
a time in every painting, for me anyway, when every part of it is frozen and something radical must be done in order
to get the flow going again. That's where I am at the moment
but I haven't yet taken any radical steps.
Do you see a black rectangle? The slideshow will start playing in a minute or
two. If it doesn't, you can watch it over at my blip.tv page. Unfortunately, the shape of the video screen doesn't
allow for the whole height of the painting to show and the
panning effect distorts it even more. Ach! Next time I won't
use it.
For some reason, the music doesn't play over here but it works on the main Blaugustine and at blip.tv.
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I've been working on it, hoping to
finish before my birthday (August 7) but I can't predict
what the painting wants to do. Here you see it in my studio
and how it sort of flows into the surroundings. I think I'm
going to change the title to PRISM . The colours in
this photo do not accurately represent the real thing.
Speaking of birthday: can I have some
requests as to what you, my loyal visitors, would like as
my birthday post? You know, like those radio request programmes.
I will try to comply with your wishes, unless they are awkward
questions like, how old are you?. The answer to that, my
friends, is blowing in the wind.
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I'm about to make sweeping statements
but this is my blog and I'm allowed to sweepstate as much
as I like. You are encouraged to refute, agree, elaborate,
contradict, and I hope you will do one or more of these things
because, frankly, comments are few and far between over here
lately and I'd like to boost the participatory factor. So,
here goes.
There are two types of creatives: receptives and obsessives.
Receptive-creatives have
hyper-sensitive antennae which are continually picking up
visual, verbal and subliminal information and sensations
from the surroundings. Receptive-creatives are easily distracted
because of the abundance of stimuli bombarding them. When
an object or subject captures their attention, they will
give it total concentration but only until the next
stimulus becomes impossible to ignore. The variety and intensity
of input vibrating their antennae is such that the degree
of success (in worldly terms) which their creativity achieves
depends on the amount of time they are able and willing to
give to any particular message the universe sends. A state
of readiness to absorb, combined with uncertainty about whether
the material really merits absorption, is the
receptive-creative's normal modus vivendi. I, ahem, am among
those who fit into this category.
Obsessive-creatives are driven
by a compulsion which demands single-minded focus
on a chosen path and the avoidance of anything which might
disturb, distract or question this choice. They too are receptive
but in a one-track way and they arrange their lives so as
to feed their compulsion and insist that anyone who comes
close should either support it or stay out. Dedicated, opinionated,
blinkered, uncompromising, workaholic, eccentric,
egocentric, extraordinary, are some of the adjectives
frequently used in describing them. I would prefer
to be an o-c rather than an r-c but I have
never succeeded in remodelling myself. Lucian
Freud is among those who are probably born into this
category.
I have not been one of the many admirers
of Sigmund's grandson's painting (or of his grandad for
that matter - don't let me get distracted!) but
I didn't want to miss this
exhibition because I hoped to be goaded
into pursuing a completely contrary path. So
I took my lethargic body to the Pompidou -
nowadays ressembling a decaying community centre designed
by committee - and escalated, via a bird's eye view
of the Rue Beaubourg, to the sixth floor galleries where
Freud's Atelier paintings were impressively hung.
Pompidou Centre entrance hall.
View from sixth level
of the Pompidou Centre.
I did not expect to be impressed. But
I was. Not impressed as in awestruck but as in, this
is important stuff - must sit down and take it in slowly.
First of all, his colours.
They are greys, browns, ochres, meat-red, black
and the occasional dusty yellow-green. They are Old Master-ish,
museum-ish colours, destined for posterity and weighty
gold frames, defiantly academic, you could even say anti-modernist.
Then there's the light. The grey
light of London bed-sitters in lonely winters and sweaty
summers. The cold light of dawn, post-coitum triste.
The sleepless night light of regret, apathy, desperation.
The merciless light of hospitals, morgues and bus stations
at 4 am.
Then there's the flesh,
his subject. Passive flesh
offered up to be penetrated by his dominant, hypnotic
gaze. Naked but not erotic bodies splayed in apparent abandon
on the bed, sofa or floor, seemingly obeying the master's
stage-instructions to "be themselves" but, in truth, being
only what he requires them to be. He
says that what interests him in people is their animal side
and that he likes seeing his subjects "as naturally and physically
at ease as his dog." However, far from
being at ease in their theatrical set-up, Freud's actors
are more like tranquilised laboratory animals, their vitality
suppressed, coerced by the painter's will into becoming still-life
- even the dog must relinquish all doggy energy if he's to
play a part
in a Freudian tableau. But in the coruscating
self-portraits, perhaps the only time the artist allows his
model to confront him as an equal, Freud achieves magnificent,
courageous insight.
I understand the necessity
of establishing rules of engagement when absorbed in
the intensely difficult process of looking at
and transcribing a human presence. The artist may be
inwardly
saying to his subject: go away! I mean stay,
but don't talk, don't move, don't interact, just be still
so I can observe you without being observed. So it makes
sense that Freud prefers his models to be asleep
or in a kind of trance induced by long hours of posing,
but his determined focus on flesh as meat, to the exclusion
of any other aspect of identity (as far
as he's concerned, the matiére of his portrait
of a person is that
person) must be the reason I left Lucien Freud's Atelier
very impressed, but ultimately disappointed. The old
Peggy Lee song ran through my mind..........Is
That All There Is?
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The purpose of this trip was
to accompany my sister to a worrisome medical
appointment
which, thankfully, turned out not to be as worrisome
as expected.
She went back to Rome the next day and I decided to
stay on for a few days. Unfortunately, some time
between
arrival and departure I was caught by one of those
bugs (not les
moustiques:
in addition to les
moustiques) which gets you by the throat, nose,
lungs,
limbs, intestines and joie de vivre. What with the
heat-wave
and intense pollution, joie was
drastically reduced and vivre consisted in
shuffling
very very slowly between cafés and
any place with conditioned air, a modern convenience
which
in normal times I shun, but these are not normal
times.
I had made an appointment to visit
Andrei
Korliakov as I was eager to meet the Russian
historian
who had found a long-lost painting of mine (see January
20, 2010 ) and I
brought my camera but, engrossed in conversation,
stupidly
forgot to record this encounter. Never mind, I'll do
it next
time I'm in Paris. Seeing again my bold,
enthusiastic painting
of cypress trees in Florence after all these years
was a
big thrill and I happily complied with Andrei's
request that
I write on the back to confirm it really was painted
by me.
It is now part of his very interesting collection of
works
by Russian (or Russian-connected) artists, most of
which
he discovered by chance during forays in the marché
aux puces.
Korliakov is a genial
and dedicated researcher who has made it
his life's work to build a record in photographs and
documents
of a fascinating slice of human history: the exodus
of thousands
of Russians from the cataclysmic revolution in their
homeland
to the many other countries where they started new
lives.
Working alone in his well-equipped Paris studio
(state of
the art scanner and computers) with the dogged
patience
and astute persistence of a detective, Andrei
assembles the
information which he finds or is sent to him by
exiled
Russians and their descendants, into impressive
albums that
are produced, published and distributed by himself.
His next
volume will be about Russians who went to South
America and
I promised to send him all material I have about my
father's experiences in Paraguay and Brazil. If
anyone reading
this has Russian relatives or friends with
connections
to South America, or anywhere else in the world, do
get in
touch with Andrei (email and postal address are on
his website).
Such fortuitous links are the raw material his
research
depends on.
I mentioned a painting I did
long ago
of an old man, Colonel Kermanoff, who lived near
my father's property outside Asunciòn and to my
astonishment,
Andrei instantly located a photo of Kermanoff as a
young
man: it seems he was an important person in the
pre-Soviet
army and the records show he eventually ended up in
Paraguay.
Who knew? Another serendipitous happening!
Colonel Kermanoff by NdA. Oil on canvas.
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