Reflecting on Reflections: "Watery World" Series

Like many artists I produce many more paintings than I sell. Maybe some time that will change, but in the meantime, what to do with all the inventory is a head-scratching challenge. I like to have my most recent work on the wall, partly so that, if it does eventually sell, I will have been able to enjoy it a bit first, and partly because faults that need fixing sometimes show up. It's much better to correct a bit of bad drawing or an ambiguous patch of colour while the painting is still in my possession, rather than in a purchaser's home or, worse still, in a gallery!  Still, there's a limit to how much my home and studio walls will bear, and the remaining paintings end up stashed in closets and propped several deep behind my studio furniture. At present this is the fate of most of last year's work, a series of paintings of reflections in water. I wrote about some of them in this blog in September 2011, remarking that my interest shifted from seeing reflections as part of a larger scene to fascination with the reflections in their own right, independent of the things being reflected.

Forest Pond  - acrylic - 27" x 42" - 2011

"Forest Pond" was an important transitional step. As I worked on this, for me, quite large painting, I realized at some point that I couldn't tell exactly where the water level was, so that I couldn't be sure what was "real" and what was the reflected image.
 
As I continued to study reflections in different bodies of water--pools, streams, lakes--I became engrossed in the shifting, unstable, looking-glass world beneath my feet. Anything could happen down there: there was no need for rational explanations. This was very liberating, since I was free to imagine and invent. After all, nothing was "real"--it was just an image, and an unreliable one at that, subject to fragmentation by a sudden gust of wind or sprinkle of rain. On the other hand, standing on the edge of water and gazing down was somewhat dizzying. I suppose it induced a kind of vertigo. I thought it might be a challenge to paint reflections without making a viewer feel queasy and disoriented. At first I myself kept getting confused about which way was up! As I continued, however, I sought out the little cues that differentiate a reflection from above-water reality--the surface ripple, the sky poking through at the bottom of the composition, things on the bed of the pond or stream intruding into the reflections.

Watery World 2 - acrylic - 24" x 30" - 2011

Watery World 3 - acrylic - 24" x 30" - 2011

I began with three variations on a pond in Stanley Park in Vancouver. It was a summer day, and the pond was in a wooded area, with dappled sunlight catching some of the branches. A little waterfall trickled over a rock, wiggling the reflected  conifer needles and crinkling hard edges, but the surface was still enough to make an almost perfect mirror image.

Next I tackled two images of reflections in moving water. These turned into more abstract compositions because the wind on the lake, in one case, and the swift current of the river in the other, splintered and distorted the image.

Watery World 5 - acrylic - 24" x 30" - 2011

Watery World 4 - acrylic - 30" x 24" - 2011

These two paintings happen to be based on photos I took in different places in England, but with a project like this one the geography hardly matters. These are not site-specific landscapes. Reflections presumably behave the same way the world over! (Here I go off into a reverie about bath water spiralling in opposite directions in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. What would that do to reflections? And then there's that perplexing question: where is the dividing line where the water starts to swirl the other way . . . ? Having spent two weeks in Quito I can attest to the fact that nothing dramatic happens right on the equator.)

Watery World 6 - acrylic - 24" x 30" - 2011

The next two "Watery Worlds" were located in yet another part of England. This time I was walking alongside a little stream in rain that fell intermittently as fine drizzle and a soaking downpour. It was the middle of June, and chilly. The stream was described as a "winterbourne", which means that it often dries up in summer. Not too much chance of that the year I was there. The lush vegetation that lined the banks included the copper beeches that show in the paintings as purple leaves.

Watery World 7 - acrylic - 24" x 30" - 2011

Watery World 7 suffered a misfortune in my studio just before the 2011 Eastside Culture Crawl. My year's work was hanging on the walls, with the exception of the work-in-progress, which was on the easel. As I worked on this painting the big studio easel suddenly collapsed and folded itself up, crashing into No. 7 and tearing a two-inch gash in the canvas. Afterwards I realized that a screw at the back of the easel that I hadn't adjusted in months must have worked its way loose. I patched the painting on the back with a square of canvas and lots of acrylic medium, and touched up the paint. It really doesn't show, but of course, if someone wants to buy it I'll have to reduce the price.

Watery World 8 - acrylic - 30" x 24" - 2011

Nos. 8, 9 and 10 are back in Stanley Park. They are all reflections in the ornamental pool in the garden outside the dining pavilion. There are tall conifers growing there but also more exotic plants like the giant gunnera in No. 8 and the red-leaved plant in No. 10. On this occasion the sun was shining, creating yellow bars on the water which faded out the reflections and let the bed of the pool show through.

Watery World 10 - acrylic - 24" x 30" - 2011

 www.myartclub.com/judith.fairwood

Next blog post will be in June

                                                                               

Getting Going Again: "Vincent's Mutants"

I got off to a slow start this year, but now I'm back to painting after a lengthy break. I was out of the country, first in England for Christmas, then in Mexico, and in neither place did I engage in any art activity, except for taking a few photos. My blog lapsed too, while I waited for the urge to write to come back. As I wrote in December, in "The Tyranny of Tinsel," I've told most of the stories associated with my inventory of paintings, so any blog writing will have more to do with recent and current art activities than with the past. Perhaps this year the title "Easel Talk", which I chose in haste just over a year ago, will be a more accurate descriptor, although my first idea, "Easel Thoughts", which I think was rejected by Google as already taken, might be even better.

Mt. Seymour at Sunset - acrylic - 20" x 20" - 2012

Back in the studio, I first finished off an addition to my "In Praise of November" series called "Mt. Seymour at Sunset." On the day after a heavy fall of snow, the North Shore mountains, as seen from my balcony, were an improbable shade of pink as they caught the setting sun. In contrast, the shadows on the lower slopes appeared startlingly blue.


Next came three small paintings on a theme proposed by my friend and studio mate Eva Wideman for this year's group project for Vancouver Sketch Club members. We settled on the title "Quotes from the Masters." The idea is to refer in some way to a famous painting, without exactly copying it. We thought this would be both fun and a learning experience.

Negative image

The "quoting" could be done in many ways, but I chose to model my work on three of Van Gogh's iconic images, but in their complementary, or reversed, colours. This turned out to be a fascinating and challenging project. First I tackled the famous sunflowers, which Van Gogh painted a number of times. I used a print of the version in the National Gallery in London. To view please go to www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/vincent-van-gogh-sunflowers . My first step was to print out a negative of the print, which gave me the reversed colours. However, I wanted to keep the tonal values as close as possible to the original, not have the lights and darks reversed, so next I made a greyscale print.

Greyscale image

Finally, after a preparatory drawing, I started painting on a 18" x 14" canvas, about half the size of Van Gogh's.

The project turned into a colour exercise more demanding than any I'd encountered since my first year colour course at art school. I also had to use a lot of imagination. I was thinking all the time about colour theory, the colour wheel, complementary colours--the very issues that Van Gogh himself had wrestled with. But one problem that Vincent didn't have was deciding which colour wheel to use. For him the primary colours were red, yellow, blue, and their complementaries, on the opposite side of the wheel, were green, violet and orange. My computer and printer go by a different colour system, in which the primaries are yellow, magenta, cyan, and their complementaries blue, green and red. I tied myself up in knots trying to decide which way to jump, and in the end, inevitably, I went by intuition and used the colours that seemed to work best. Another issue that had not previously occurred to me was the relative "heat" of the hues. Warm colours, the reds and oranges, appear to come forward in a painting, while the cool blues and greens recede. But I didn't want my sunflowers to recede like shrinking violets, so I had to make the blues as vibrant as possible. Of course, I was also working from a little print, which may or may not be an accurate representation of the original colours. And finally--a consideration that didn't occur to me until I'd almost finished the project--I have cataracts that may require surgery later this year, so I actually have no idea whether I'm seeing colours as other people do, and maybe this wasn't the year to be doing this kind of work! Anyway, here is my first "Mutant":

Blue Sunflowers - acrylic - 18"x 14" - 2012

I went on to follow the same procedure with "The Yellow Chair" and "The Sower,"
www.vggallery.com/painting/p_0498_0499.htm
www.vangoghmuseum.nl/vgm/index.jsp?page=4500&lang+en  with these results:

Blue Chair - acrylic - 18" x 14" - 2012

Blue Moon - acrylic - 14" x 18" - 2012

Having completed four paintings and made a good start on two more, I feel really back in harness. Next blog post in about a month!

www.myartclub.com/judith.fairwood

www.myartclub.com/the.vancouver.sketch.club

 www.myartclub.com/eva.wideman

The Tyranny of Tinsel

From Monday to Saturday each week I read the comic strips in the local paper. I have a huge admiration for the artists who keep their strips going day after day, month after month, year after year. One of my favourites is "Cul de Sac" by Richard Thompson, a family saga featuring a repressed, nerdy little boy and his little sister, who has a Type A personality and no inhibitions at all. In a recent strip, when preparations for Christmas were getting going, the boy stuck a tatty bit of last year's tree trim on the ceiling, and called it his "Tinsel of Damocles." This inspired phrase has kept me company since the moment I read it. Essentially, it encapsulates the same sentiments as I expressed in my painting "A Long Wait" (please see last month's post). The sad fact is that apart from the few years when my children were children and I had to be a closet Santa Claus, I am not very good at Christmas. My malaise started the year I moved to Canada. In December I went to California to visit some family connections, not quite blood relations, with whom my grandmother had exchanged the occasional letter. On Christmas Eve, I of the iron stomach suffered an acute and embarrassing attack of nausea. Fortunately I recovered quickly enough to enjoy the turkey dinner the next day, but for several years after that I came down with some ailment just in time for Christmas. Usually it was a streaming cold or a digestive upset, but one year it was a full-blown flu that hit just as I got home with a mountain of festive food, none of which I could even look at.

In recent years my seasonal indisposition has taken the form of the November blahs (again, see last month) and an ostrich-like denial that Christmas will ever come at all. This is accompanied by a slump in my energy level, which is never too elevated in the first place. Then, at the last minute, the mood lifts and I suddenly spring into action, sending off cards, shopping like crazy just when most things have sold out, and putting up a few token lights and decorations. Oddly enough, and touch wood, the physical ailments are a thing of the past, and I have no trouble enjoying Christmas when it actually arrives.

This year my "tinsel of Damocles" has had an extra strand dangling ominously over my head: the weighty responsibility of having to write a blog post. I know no one's festivities are going to be wrecked if my readers don't hear from me--they're probably much too busy to care--but my own self-respect requires that I deliver on the promise I made last month to write a new instalment mid-December. And here I am, well past the mid-point of the month, still procrastinating. The trouble is that, since starting this blog since February, I have already written about most of my inventory of paintings, or at any rate those that have stories associated with them. So perhaps it's time for the blog either to end, or to evolve into more of an ongoing journal about what I do in the studio.

While I think about this question, I'm signing off for 2011 with a painting done earlier this year. It's the one I'm using this year as my paper Christmas card, and comes to all my readers with my best wishes for Christmas etc. and 2012, and with my heartfelt thanks for your support and encouragement of both my painting and my blogging efforts.

First Snow - acrylic - 24" x 18" - 2011

myartclub.com/judith.fairwood 

Next blog post? We'll see!  

The Colours of November: Not Only Grey!

Thirty days hath November . . . and in a typical year, here in the rain forest, most of them are wet and dreary. As I explained earlier this year (Please see "Painting in a Wet Climate", Feb. 27) I've been collecting photographic images of November, and later painting from them, for several years now. I began doing this to stave off the seasonal depression which I associated with the weeks leading up to Christmas, and was pleasantly surprised to find that there was no shortage of colourful painting material to be discovered.
 
So here we are, in November again, and I'm at the planning stage of another painting on the theme "In Praise of November," based on a photo I took last year. It's an odd image, a "witch" crudely crafted from a child's hockey stick, a store-bought mask, and duct tape. Evidently this creation was thrown negligently aside once Halloween was over. I spotted her lying recumbent on a chafer-ravaged front lawn, grinning complacently at the sky.

Meanwhile I'm again taking photos of anything that strikes me, and have added to my collection some mouldering hosta leaves, a seagull sitting on an industrial chimney, and a litter of fallen crab-apples. This year it's not hard to find bright colours, as in this image of a heap of gunnera leaves photographed today in Queen Elizabeth Park. With a third of November already gone, we've yet to have a sharp frost, a gale or a serious downpour, and the trees have kept their leaves much longer than usual. Although the native trees tend to have yellow leaves rather than the brilliant reds of Eastern Canada, there are enough exotic ornamentals in Vancouver to provide an impressive range of hues.

A Long Wait - acrylic - 2009 - 18" x 24"

My first November painting is called "A Long Wait." I took the photo from the window of a waterfront restaurant on Vancouver Island. The old seaman isn't a real person, but a wood carving, one of a group of figures. I don't know anything about the sculptor--if you do, please pass on the information. Whatever the old man is waiting for--his ship to come in, perhaps?-- combined itself in my mind with the long wait for Christmas when decorations go up right after Halloween, or even sooner, and look tired and tawdry long before the actual holiday. To me, Christmas in November seems as hopeless as standing in the rain and looking out to sea.

Last of the Leaves - acrylic -  2009 - 20" x 20"

In spite of the stereotyped notion of November as rainy, the weather can actually vary from mild and benign, like today, through fog, hail and rain, to heavy, though usually short-lived, snow. Several of my November paintings feature trees or other vegetation in various types of weather.

November Snow - acrylic - 2009 - 20"  x 20"

After the Storm - acrylic - 2009 - 18" x 24"

What a difference a couple of days can make! After Thursday's sunshine a sudden change brought strong winds and heavy rain. The mountains disappeared into the mist, the trees were stripped of their leaves, and this afternoon I drove back from the suburbs in sleet! Such abrupt changes prompted "After the Storm" and "November Rainbow." The former was a view of the western sky as seen from the Oakridge parking lot at twilight; and the rainbow appeared in the east one stormy evening, splitting the sky into blue and pink, and casting such an unearthly light on the buildings as the base of the arc that the old tale about the crock of gold seemed entirely credible.

November Rainbow - acrylic - 2009 - 24" x 18"

Next  weekend I'll be taking part in the annual Eastside Culture Crawl for the seventh time. If you live in the Vancouver area I hope you will include our building, Portside Studios at 150 McLean Drive (northeast corner of Powell and McLean) on your itinerary. Here's a map, and you can check out the details at www.eastsideculturecrawl.com

Two November paintings that I will be showing at the Crawl this year are "Lakeside, November" and "Blizzard at Night." Please come and see the real thing!

Lakeshore, November - acrylic - 18" x 24" - 2010

                                                                                  

Blizzard at Night - acrylic - 20" x 30" - 2010

  www.myartclub.com/judith.fairwood

Next blog post mid-December

Pet Projects: A Cat, a Dog and a Lizard

A few years ago, at the annual Eastside Culture Crawl, a boy of ten or eleven came into the studio and stared for some time at my display of paintings, after which he offered me some advice: "What I think you should do," he said, "is to paint pictures of puppies and kittens, because I think people would really like those, and would want to buy them." Of course, I thanked him for his suggestion, and I hope I was gentle enough in my attempt to explain that a great number of paintings of puppies and kittens have been produced in the world and that I prefer to choose more original subjects. What I probably did not add was that it is difficult to paint animals--particularly baby ones--without falling into the cloying sentimentality of pastel greetings cards and old-fashioned drawing-room pictures. It is, however, possible, as some of the masters have shown: you don't have to be soppy about dogs to enjoy a little book called David Hockney's Dog Days--here's the cover: 

Hockney's two little red dachsunds aren't sitting up begging with bows around their necks: in most of the paintings they are just stretched out asleep. Somehow the artist has made them delightful without being cute or uncanine. If I could paint puppies and kittens like that I think my young visitor might be proved right.

The Master - acrylic - 2005  

In spite of the pitfalls I have of course had a go at pets, though mostly not my own, and I am currently engaged in painting a black and white cat. Black fur presents a challenge, as it's hard to see enough detail, and flat black hardly ever looks right. I didn't have that problem with my own cat Stripes, whom I painted several years ago. As his name indicates, Stripes was a tabby, but his mother was a Siamese. He was the only survivor of his litter--the rest were stillborn or died after birth. The Siamese heritage combined with the indulgence he received from his mother and his human family in his infancy produced in Stripes a cat of great intelligence, character and mischief. Above all, he had Attitude. He was afraid of nothing, except perhaps the vacuum cleaner, and would take on prey of any size, bringing home at different times huge rats, a squirrel and a young crow, the last of these still very much alive. And he accomplished memorable feats, such as dragging my daughter's fleecy bathrobe down the stairs to the kitchen, where he tried to stuff it in his dish. Of course he regarded himself as head of the household, as is shown in my painting "The Master", in which he clearly has the upper hand over my son.

Patrolling His Wall - acrylic - 2008 - 24" x 32"

My first attempt at painting a dog was "Patrolling His Wall". I am always a little disappointed when people say "Aww" as if the dog looks cuddly and sweet. Actually he was all businesslike ferocity, though I hope he did have an affectionate family life when he wasn't working. I can't tell you his name, his breed, or whom he belonged to, or even for certain if he was a male. He was a massive guard dog--look at his heavy collar--and he erupted, high up on the old city wall of Brasov in Romania. My companion and I were having a beer on a cafe terrace at the foot of the wall, when something must have startled him and provoked a volley of deafening barks above our heads. I photographed him from below, but cropped off most of the wall in my painting. In doing so I lost something of the dog's vantage point, but having the focal point perched on top of a virtual mountain just didn't work as a composition. 

I think dogs are at their best when they have a job to do, and this dog took his responsibilities very seriously indeed. I hoped to capture his determination to protect his property at all costs--which is why I don't want him to be seen as a softie. As regards the painting, it was difficult and frustrating, in part because of the awkward viewpoint and perspective. I value it chiefly for the foliage in the background, which is painted in a looser and more impressionistic way than I had been able to achieve before.

Soon after making the acquaintance of my future son-in-law, I also met his bearded dragon, a lizard about a foot long who lived in his comic-book store. Simon had had the dragon some ten years by then, which speaks highly of his handling and feeding of it, since many reptiles meet an untimely end in captivity. However, after another year or two it died, and one year I had the idea of painting it for Simon's birthday. I had gathered that the dragon was female and that her name was Trish. I therefore asked Simon to lend me some photos of "Trish," at which point he told me a bit sheepishly that her name was Chish, a contraction, he explained, of "chickenshit."

Although he hunted, Simon was not able to find any photos of his pet, so I had to go further afield to find models. I didn't want to work from someone else's photos, so I drove out to the Reptile Refuge in the further reaches of Surrey, on a dark, rainy afternoon. The Refuge, which I believe has now closed for lack of funding, had a collection of bearded dragons along with many other adopted reptiles, many of which had been abandoned by their owners. I found my way to the dragons' quarters, squeezing past a school group in the narrow space. I asked if I could photograph the lizards, which would have necessitated a flash, and was not surprised when permission was refused. So I stood close to the glass, jostled by the school children, and made some sketches. Later I chose one of them and made Simon's birthday present, but then I used the same pose for two different versions, which became more colourful each time.

Lizard 2 - acrylic - 14" x 11"

In Memory of Chish - acrylic - 12" x 12"

Lizard 3 - acrylic - 12" x 12"

Of the above paintings, I sold "The Master" and "Lizard 3", and Simon seemed happy with his present. Another dog,"Designated Driver", which I featured in my blog on April 23, 2011, also sold, as did my other attempt at reptiles, "Cancun Conversation" (blog March 6, 2011.) So I'm not doing too badly with my animals, and maybe that young boy was on the right track, even if I'm not up there with David Hockney.
 

www.myartclub.com/judith.fairwood 

Next instalment mid-November

Reflections: Looking into Water

The first time I thought of reflections in water as a subject for painting in their own right, rather than as an incidental element in a landscape, was in 2006-7, when I painted "Geometry of Reeds." I had taken a couple of photographs at Emma Lake in Saskatchewan (please see my blog post of February 7, 2011, for more details of this trip), but had been surprised by the results: I had intended neither to take such a close-up view of the reeds, nor to take the picture in black and white. I never found out how I had managed to take these photos, but I liked the way each reed and its reflection made an arc, and the way the two halves of the composition were almost, but not entirely, symmetric. In the painting I added non-realistic colours from imagination, but otherwise kept close to my mysterious photographs.

Geometry of Reeds - acrylic - 40" x 30" - 2006

 I sold the painting at the Eastside Culture Crawl in 2007. It was the first time that a potential client had seen a painting of mine on the Internet, and had come in specially to find it. The client liked the real thing, and wanted to buy it, but since it was quite large (40" x 30") she felt she needed to go home and measure her wall before committing herself. I agreed to hold the painting until she came back. When she did she was clearly quite upset. While she was talking to me the first time, someone had broken into her car and vandalized the door handle so the door wouldn't close. She had nevertheless gone home, done her measuring, and returned to complete the purchase--leaving an unlockable car in the same parking lot! I felt that her  determination and enthusiasm for my work was as big a compliment as the deal itself.

It wasn't until 2010 that I returned to the study of reflections. I had suggested the subject to the Vancouver Sketch Club as a possible theme for a Club exhibition. My fellow members took up the challenge with enthusiasm, and I produced three small paintings myself, while collecting ideas for larger ones.

Bridge on the Lydd - acrylic - 11" x 14" - 2010

"Bridge on the Lydd" was painted on site during a painting holiday at Brambles on the borders of Devon and Cornwall in Southwest England. Artist hosts Janet and Peter offer short courses, workshops and art retreats in and around their old converted farm property (to view see www.bramblesartretreat.com ) where in June 2010 the glorious summer weather allowed us to paint outdoors every day. Even so, we got a bit chilly working in the partly dried up river bed, and the high spot of the day came when Peter left us for a while to bring us hot Cornish pasties from the nearest pub. 
 

Fishes in Circles - 8" x 8" - 2010

 "Fishes in Circles" and "Public Baths" were painted with the Sketch Club show in mind, but more immediately for the Anonymous Show which is mounted each November by North Vancouver Community Arts Council. It's a fund-raising event for the Council, with each painting being priced at $100, of which the artist keeps half in the event of a sale. The paintings all have to be eight inches square, and are displayed anonymously, which is supposed to entice buyers to gamble on acquiring, for a very modest price, something which may have been painted by someone famous! Gallery walls covered with the tile-like paintings make for a very attractive display, and this is a painless way to collect original paintings, whether or not they are a sound financial investment. www.nvartscouncil.ca/exhibitions/anonymous-art-show-2010

Public Baths - acrylic - 8" x 8" - 2010

The window of my studio space overlooks the roofs of the buildings across the street, and I enjoy watching the birds--mostly seagulls and pigeons--that congregate there, especially when the rain has left big shallow puddles. The pigeons in "Public Baths" reminded me of ladies at a beauty salon as they offered each other preening advice and admired themselves in the mirror. No one snapped up this small painting in the Anonymous Show, but it did sell in the summer at the Sketch Club show at the West End Community Centre.

The Picnic - acrylic - 24" x 20" - 2011

And so to 2011. One of my first paintings this year was "The Picnic"-- my only attempt so far to paint human beings reflected in water. It's based on a photo taken on one of my trips. I have no idea who the people are, and I don't think they would recognize themselves from this portrayal. Perhaps it's better that way, as I'm not sure they were enjoying their day out very much. As with other paintings of people, I was interested in the body language of the subjects. In this case, there seems to be little connection or communication between the man and his wife, who are each lost in their own thoughts.

Since the spring I have been exclusively concerned with reflections, but from a different angle. I became fascinated with looking down into reflected images, without reference to the objects above the water surface. I am at present completing the tenth in a series called "Watery World", which will have to wait for another time.

www.myartclub.com/judith.fairwood 

www.myartclub.com/the.vancouver.sketch.club 

Next blog post mid-October

Facing Facts: assorted not-quite-portraits

After reading my blog entry on "Travelling Hopefully" back in March, a friend emailed me the following question:
Do you deliberately avoid faces? It seems to be quite noticeable and has me wondering what the faces are like, and perhaps I don't want to know anyway. It is intriguing.

It was an intriguing question for me too. Certainly I had no intention of being coy and deliberately hiding the faces of my subjects . . . but neither had I ever attempted to paint a real portrait. What exactly is a portrait, anyway? To me it goes beyond the definition in my Collins dictionary--"a painting, drawing, sculpture, photograph or other likeness of an individual, esp.of the face." A truly achieved portrait says something about the essence, or soul, of the person, which the artist has perceived and communicated. It's more than skin deep. Oddly, and for no reason I can explain, I feel no particular desire to paint portraits in this sense, and portraits by other artists, even great ones such as Rembrandt, are to me not the most interesting kind of paintings. Since earliest childhood I have been fascinated by faces, and can remember filling notebooks with drawings of them; but I don't think I ever thought of them as real people, even though I had a fanciful belief that if I coloured them they would come alive at night when I was asleep.

Twelve - acrylic (date and dimensions not recorded)

I have, however, produced a number of paintings featuring people, especially members of my immediate and extended family, and have been surprised on several occasions to find that the resulting image, even if the back was turned or the face partially concealed, was instantly recognizable, and not just by me! An early attempt was "Twelve", which was based on a postage-stamp sized segment of a not-very-good snapshot. The girl had long since grown up, and may very well prefer to disown this version of herself, but even her mother acknowledged the likeness! I was not, however, trying to capture an exact likeness of her face, let alone her soul, but rather to express, as indicated by the title I chose, the truculent negativity that I remember as part and parcel of puberty and early adolescence.

Next Move - acrylic - 14" x 18" - 2005

Two Cakes - acrylic - 24" x 18"

In some paintings of people, it was the direction and intensity of the gaze that interested me. Children are good subjects for this, because of the whole-hearted, whole-body concentration that they bring to tasks. "Next Move" and "Two Cakes" are examples, both based on family photos.

The Bike Lesson - acrylic - 30" x 14"

In the case of "Bike Lesson" it was the body language that appealed to me. The little boy, both proud and precarious, is on the brink of taking off on his wheels. He is well protected, with his helmet and knee pads, but still needs the caring touch of his father, soon to be left behind as the older generation always is.

"On the Ferry" (see above) combines the intent gaze with the directional body language, so that the four men seem to be racing ahead of the ship towards their destination.

Shore Line - acrylic - 16" x 14" - 2008

"Shore Line" is another painting of back views. This time, the gaze is implied in the huddled body language of the old ladies, who seem to be shifting and fidgeting  as they share confidences about what they see. I imagined them as poised on the brink of their end-of-life voyage that is not far off; but the purchaser of the painting put a more cheerful spin on it: she saw it as a depiction of herself and her friends a decade or two in the future, enjoying companionship and a day on the beach.

Snooze - acrylic - 30" x 24" - 2010

Finally, two recent paintings of family members show quite a lot of face, and are certainly recognizable, but again my intention was not really to paint their portraits. I have always enjoyed watching babies and small children sleep, because they work at it with the concentration that it deserves, given its extreme importance. (Adults, in contrast, tend to regard it as a necessary waste of time, a sort of void between periods of real life.) The little boy asleep in the car is patently recharging his batteries ready for another bout of three-year-old boisterousness. His cap and work shirt amused me, too: he might have just come off shift on a building site!

Seaside Pub - acrylic - 16" x 24" - 2011

"Seaside Pub" shows an elderly, long-married couple sharing a special moment. Again, the gaze and body-language are the important items. I painted the picture for an exhibition on the subject of love--in this case the love of two people who have grown closer over the years and can still enjoy a private joke or intimate confidence.The exhibition jury declined my painting, but I'm still glad I did it. It's a statement of optimism about what a relationship can be.

www.MyArtClub.com/judith.fairwood 

Next instalment mid-September