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.

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Next instalment mid-September

Looking Through: "Lunchtime in Paris"

Lunchtime in Paris - acrylic - 18" x 24" - 2010

This painting is based on a photograph that I took in the cafeteria of the Musee D'Orsay in Paris, where I happened to be having lunch right at noon. It's another "Looking in/Looking out" painting (for other examples, please see earlier instalments of this blog), but this time the outside view is glimpsed through an immense clock which dates back to the days when the building was a railway station. The clock in my painting is reversed, like a mirror image, because its front was on the outside of the building and would have provided the time of day to passengers approaching the station. It faces the Seine, with the Tuileries Gardens in the distance.

I was in Paris for a week, in June of 2009, with the same friend who accompanied me to Cancun (see blog post on "On the Ferry", March 6, 2011.) This trip was not, alas, a free one, but it was a very good deal--airfare from Vancouver, bed and breakfast for a week, transfers and taxes, a boat ride on the Seine, and a half-bottle of champagne, all for $1300 each. Since I had not had the opportunity to do any cultural sightseeing in Paris's since 1967, when I was whisked into the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa, which blew me away, and the Nike of Samothrace, which didn't, my main objective was to spend as much time as possible in the art galleries. We visited the Orangerie, the Louvre, and the Picasso and Dali museums, but enjoyed our day in the Musee D'Orsay the most. (As a retired language teacher I feel embarrassed at not putting the acute accent on "musee," but don't know how to do it.) We also fitted in a day at Versailles, and always made sure we left time for strolling, sitting, just generally hanging out, and of course, eating!

Back in my studio in Vancouver I started painting the scene on a 20" x 24" canvas. It was one of the most difficult challenges that I have set myself. The massive iron framework that supports the clock itself is seen from a slight angle, and is nearer to the viewer than the clock face, so that the various circles are not quite round, and not quite concentric. The spokes and segments of the circle needed to look as if they were equal, but they weren't quite, because of the oblique angle. And painting those Roman numerals backwards proved to be extraordinarily difficult, though I still can't quite understand why. At the point where I was beginning to despair of ever getting the perspective acceptable it occurred to me to check the corners of the canvas stretcher, and sure enough, they weren't right angles and the sides were slightly askew. No wonder I was having so much trouble! I took the canvas off the stretcher, which I took back to the store for a refund. Then I restretched the canvas on a slightly smaller frame--18" x 24"--which worked a lot better. Even so, the painting was a struggle from beginning to end. I have to hope it was a useful learning experience, because the irony is that the paintings that are most laborious to produce rarely turn out as well as the ones that seem to paint themselves. I think part of the problem with "Lunchtime in Paris" was that I had fallen into the trap of being enslaved by my photo, and feeling that the composition had to be literally and mathematically accurate. Since completing this painting I have tried to be less literal, and to let myself play around more with the composition. It's certainly more fun that way!



Art Practice News:

This post is a bit later than intended because I was away in England for 3 weeks, and just returned. While I was there, in addition to visiting family and friends, I took a wonderful short course called "Adventurous Drawing" at West Dean College in Sussex. Please see www.westdean.org.uk for pictures of this amazing place and information about their courses and activities. 

I've been updating my website to include more recent work. Please check it out at www.myartclub.com/judith.fairwood

Designated Driver

My painting "Designated Driver", featured in my blog on April 23, was recently sold!


I have four paintings on display until mid-August at the West End Community Centre, 870 Denman St., Vancouver, as part of the Vancouver Sketch Club's show on the theme "Reflections."

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

Bathtub Voyeur

My little painting "Bathtub Voyeur" (Blog March 20) is back from Brazil, and on display until July 24 at the Ferry Building, 1414 Argyle, West Vancouver, with the Mini-Art Exchange exhibition of "Faces."  

And finally,a few examples of the photos I took in April on my trip to Death Valley and other arid bits of the USA. Eventually I hope to do a series of paintings of sand dunes, but first I have to get the opposite--reflections in water--out of my system!

 Next instalment Mid-August

Inside/Outside in France: "Country Church"

Since 2009 one of my recurring interests has been painting scenes viewed through a door or window. Examples that have featured in my blog include "The Open Door" (Feb. 14), "Hanging in the Rain" (March 13), "Designated Driver" (April 23), and, most recently, "Through a Curtain" (May 2)."Painting the Porch" and "Buying Postcards" are further examples of paintings that include an inside and an outside view.

Painting the Porch - acrylic - 14 " x 11 "

Buying Postcards - acrylic - 14  " x 11  "

The two paintings are based on a single photograph that I took inside the village church of Montaigut-le-Blanc in 2001. The photograph shows all three female figures --the woman selling postcards, the woman buying the cards, and the woman sitting outside painting. In my initial sketches I included all three in my composition, but I couldn't make it work. The figures seemed to get in each other's way and provide no clear focus for the viewer's eye. So I tried separating them, while still keeping the church interior almost identical in each panel. I found that it worked better to make the wall and rock garden look larger and nearer for the "Painting" panel, so as to frame the artist in a setting. In the "Postcards" panel, on the other hand, the scenery outside is just incidental background: all the action is inside the church.

I was in Montaigut for my first painting holiday, an eagerly anticipated event for which I'd been saving. I arrived with high energy and enthusiasm, inspired by a show of Morandi's still life paintings that I had just seen at the Tate in London. In one important respect the trip was disappointing: since the program was advertised as a "workshop" I had expected a fairly structured format, with assignments, supervised work, and critiques. This never materialized. The only instruction was a painting demonstration each day, and for the rest of the time we students were left to ourselves. Since then I have participated in several painting holidays, in England, France and Canada, and have found in each case that, without being slave drivers, the instructors have kept their charges busy and given lots of direction and feed-back, so I know now that my expectations were not unreasonable.

Determined to draw and paint anyway, since that was what we were there for, my friend and travelling companion (who is the woman painting the church porch) went off each day to find a good spot to sit and sketch. There was a wealth of subject matter only steps away, a choice of flowers, gardens, buildings, street scenes and rural landscape. Montaigut is built on a very steep hill, and all the streets are zigzags, with narrow terraces between them. At every turn there is a look-out point over the surrounding country. The park-like churchyard, with its shade trees, clumps of dahlias, warm stone walls, and Romanesque church, became a favourite sketching place.

The village is situated in the central part of France, in Auvergne. The terrain is some of the most turbulent and tormented that I have ever seen, a succession of dramatic ridges and gorges, with the occasional eroded and extinct volcano. Shortly before the end of my stay there I was able to get an aerial view of this landscape. It was my birthday--a rather special one--and I decided to treat myself to a ride in the hot air balloon that sailed by every morning and evening, its timing determined by the need for the right kind and strength of air currents. I had to leave dinner a little early, before dessert was served, which caused me a touch of regret, since the desserts were always delectable. The balloon basket held two other passengers besides myself, and the pilot. I loved the sensation of flying in near-silence, one minute soaring to dizzying heights, the next skimming the trees and hillsides. We flew until it was almost dark, our flight extended longer than expected because we were waiting for the right current to flip us across a highway. We needed a level bit of field where we could land, and where the balloon operators' van could come and pick us up. After we were safely down and the balloon was deflated and folded, the van driver produced a hamper from which the postponed dessert appeared, decorated with sparklers! The assembled company sang "Happy birthday" to me, completing a truly magical evening.

As well as sketching and painting in and around the village, I took photographs, and in 2009 dug out the one of the church. I painted the two versions on wood panels, each 14 " x 11 ". It was only after completing them that I discovered that if I placed them side by side as a diptych, they seemed to complement each other and make a single work. Now I would not want to separate them: I think they look best hung an inch or so apart.

Country Church (diptych)

 
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Dealing with Ambiguity: "Through a Curtain"

Through a Curtain --original version

Last time I ended with a riddle: spot the difference between two images of the painting "Through a Curtain" and see if you can guess why I changed it. This was a tough question to answer considering the quality of my images. Having just spent a week in the company of some real experts in photography and digital manipulation, I'm especially conscious of my shortcomings, and more determined to improve, but for now will have to make do with the images I have, with their misleading faults. Some of the minor differences between the before-and-after images of "Through a Curtain" have nothing to do with the painting and are just indications of my photographic deficiencies. For example, I didn't change the stripes at the sides--the frame of the sliding door. The way they curve and change width is simply a result of photographing a tall, narrow canvas without knowing how to correct the resulting distortion.

Through a Curtain - acrylic - 2011 - 36" x 22"

In spite of the difficulties, one reader took on the challenge, and was on the right track when she wrote: "The back of the chair was making too solid a barrier in the 'first' version. You've lightened it up and this allows the viewer to go past the chair. Also for some reason it becomes easier to actually see the person in the chair." There was in fact a problem with the figure in the chair, who could be seen in two different ways. This ambiguity placed my painting in the company of trick images, which usually depend on how the positive and negative space are perceived, and of those unfortunate snapshots we've all seen where a tree sprouts out of someone's head. For some glaring--though possibly contrived rather than accidental--examples of this, go to http://ronilai.blogspot.com/2011/04/perfect-angles.html  You'll see that the problem (or the joke) usually arises when the photographer doesn't allow for things being in different planes, so that it isn't clear what is in front and what behind. This kind of problem occurs much less frequently in painting than in photography because painting is a slow-moving medium with lots of time to think and make adjustments, but as I've discovered, some mistakes slip through undetected.

The woman in "Through a Curtain" is the same friend who appeared, in a very similar pose, in "Foreign Hotel" (Easel Talk, Feb. 14, 2011.) The more recent painting is based on a photo I took during our 2010 trip to Sicily. My friend was sitting on the balcony of our hotel in Taormina. I liked the contrast between the straight lines of the door frame and the curves of the railing and the organic shapes of the vegetation outside. I also thought it would be an interesting challenge to paint a scene and figure veiled by a nylon curtain. The curtain, in fact, seemed to be the main player in this little drama, and determined the title.

The painting was completed, or so I thought, early this year, and was on my living-room wall when my travelling companion came to visit. To my surprise she did not at first recognize either the setting or herself. When I gave her a hint, she stared at the painting for some time and then asked in bewilderment, "But why did you paint me with a beard?"


I was as mystified as she was, but eventually realized that what she what she was seeing was something like this:

 whereas what I intended was more like this:

For me it remained hard to see the bearded lady (who also seems to have a black face but a white arm) without squinting and contorting myself, but obviously I had to take the painting back to the studio and try to eliminate the ambiguity. I modified the outline of the dark foliage that seemed to be causing the confusion. Then I had to fiddle with the folds of the curtain and touch up other parts of the scene. My friend hasn't yet seen the revised version, but I hope when she does she'll recognize her beardless self!

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Please note: from now on I will be adding posts to this blog about once a month. Look out for the next instalment in early June. I'll email the people on my "Notify" list--let me know if you'd like your name added--and will also announce it at www.twitter.com/EaselChirps.  Meanwhile, if you're in the Vancouver area and would like to see the real thing, please come and see paintings at the annual art fair Art in the City this weekend (May 6 - 8) at the West End Community Centre. I'll be sharing a booth with Suzan Marczak (www.suzanmarczak.yolasite.com ) who will be showing ceramic sculpture. Hours and address at www.westendcc.ca . Admission free! 

Serious Humour: Designated Driver

Designated Driver - acrylic - 22" x 22" - 2010

When I spotted the bulldog behind the wheel of the red pick-up I burst out laughing. I was returning to my car in the parking lot of a neighbourhood supermarket. I grabbed my camera from the car and hurried back to the pick-up, hoping that the dog wouldn't move and that its owner wouldn't return before I'd snapped a couple of photos.

A dog in the front seat of a vehicle is a common enough sight, but this was unusual because of the dog's size. It looked as large as a human driver, and was taking its responsibilities so seriously that the title "Designated Driver" suggested itself to me right away. If the boss had come back to his truck the worse for wear, the dog looked perfectly capable of driving home safely.

Sometimes what I think will be the hardest part of a painting turns out to be easy, and vice versa. I assumed that painting the dog's portrait would be extremely challenging, but in fact it came together without much effort. The vehicles, on the other hand, were horribly difficult to get right, especially the vents of the pick-up's radiator grille. I often seem to struggle with perspective issues. Some artists seem to manage perfectly well with wonky lines and tipsy buildings. Others go to extremes of mathematical plotting to ensure accuracy. Personally I don't much care whether it's exactly "right", but in a painting that's otherwise realistic it seems to me that the scene should look convincing and the buildings stand solidly on their foundations. I don't even like those new-fangled real sky-scrapers that twist and lurch and project outwards: they make me feel a bit seasick. So I work away at the perspective in my paintings until things feel stable and grounded.

When working on a painting I inevitably spend a lot of time thinking about my subject. In the case of "Designated Driver" I put myself in the place of the bulldog, and soon I didn't find its situation so funny. Dogs are animals that live to a great extent ruled by the instincts of the wolves from which they are descended. What must it feel like to be left all alone in a completely artificial and inorganic capsule in the barren wastes of a car park? Does the dog regard the vehicle as a sort of extension of the pack's den, which it is obliged to defend on behalf of its human boss? What can it be thinking about as it sits there waiting, surrounded by the incomprehensible nonsense of human strangers coming and going, entering and leaving their metal boxes, creating ghastly noises and fumes as they drive away? With questions like these running through my mind, my amusement at my subject gave way to sympathy and admiration for the dog's patience and tolerance. Living in our mechanized urban world is frustrating enough at times for us humans who invented it. How must it feel to have to live in it without having a clue why it's the way it is, or what's the point of it all?


One thing I really enjoy about showing my work is that sometimes it reminds people of stories or experiences that they share with me. I heard several dog-in-car stories at the 2010 Eastside Culture Crawl, but my favourite was one about a big, fierce-looking dog whose owner didn't bother to take the keys out of the ignition or lock the car, confident that no one would try to break into such a well guarded vehicle. No one did . . . but on more than one occasion the owner got locked out, by his dog! Presumably the dog heaved himself around in the seat and pressed down the lever that locked the car from the inside. Or did he perhaps have a mischievous sense of humour?

www.MyArtClub.com/judith.fairwood

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Next time (around May 1): Spot the Difference: "Through a Curtain" as it was and as it is

Through a Curtain -  refinished 

Through a Curtain - as first painted

If you can figure out why I changed it you have very sharp eyes . . . or maybe a strange way of seeing things!

Spotlight on Gastropods: "Van Huysum's Snails"

Van Huysum's Snail I - acrylic - 2007 - 16" x 20"

Van Huysum's Snail II - acrylic - 2007 - 16" x 20"

I have always been a fan of still life painting, and some of my favourite artists are practitioners of the genre--Cezanne's apples, Morandi's dusty old bottles, Jim Dine's tools, and Wayne Thiebaud's cakes come immediately to mind. But I had never been very excited by the big floral arrangements painted by some of the famous Dutch painters until I learned to look for the creepy-crawlies that lurk in the corners and chomp their way through the leaves.

Dutch realism was a Calvinist reaction against the religious iconography of pre-Reformation art and its continuation in the Catholic countries during the Counter-Reformation. The Dutch painters depicted the real people, places and objects of their world, not saints, angels and cherubs swirling around the heavens. Nevertheless, theology is still implicit in their 17th century art, even in a painting of a vase of flowers. At first glance the viewer sees something beautiful--a floral arrangement at the peak of perfection--but needs to be reminded that in this material world everything passes, fades and dies, and only the spiritual world endures. Apparent perfection is mere vanity, unreliable and transitory, subject to being destroyed or consumed. Some painters included elements such as clocks and skulls to jolt the viewer back to reality. Others were more subtle: they implied the passing of time and the vanity of this world by slipping flies and beetles into their compositions, along with bits of dead leaf and fallen petals.

Detail of Hollyhocks etc. painting by Jan van Huysum

Jan van Huysum lived from1682 to1749, so by the time he painted his floral compositions he probably included his animal elements more for decorative than moral purposes, but he still followed the convention of his predecessors. Leafing through one of my art books one day I paused to have a closer look at a painting by van Huysum called "Hollyhocks and Other Flowers in a Vase." Towards the bottom of the composition, as a sort of visual footnote, there are two snails, a small one crawling up a hollyhock leaf, and a larger, very perky one, advancing purposefully along the shelf. The idea came to me of blowing up two small sections of van Huysum's painting and placing each snail centre-stage.

When an original painting has been photographed and reproduced in print there's no way of telling how accurate the colour is. I may have seen the Hollyhocks painting in the National Gallery at some time, but if so I don't really remember it. Judging by an Internet image I found recently:  www.artunframed.com/images/artmis15/huysum88.jpg  the colours are more vibrant than the ones in my book. For my purposes it didn't matter; I just stayed as close as I could to the book illustration. (Dutch Painting by Christopher Brown, Phaidon, 1993, p. 125.)


Singling out the snails to star in the show is another way of honouring the humble and easily overlooked, a theme that recurs in my work. To a gardener slugs and snails are the animal equivalent of nasty weeds--things that need to be eliminated because they threaten the more desirable plants. But any true depiction of nature acknowledges that everything has its season and eventually dies, and that every living thing has to eat at the expense of something else. Flowers, especially cut ones, may be seen as a metaphor for human youth and beauty, and the snails as a symbol of time, which relentlessly gnaws away at our lifespan. Snails are also often seen as the epitome of ugliness, as expressed in the disparaging nursery rhyme:

Slugs and snails and puppy dogs' tails,

That's what little boys are made of.

Yet a snail's shell is a beautiful object, no less so than the mollusc shells that children of all ages like to pick up on the beach. It seems to me that van Huysum loved his snails. His treatment of the larger one in "Hollyhocks," with its eyes and antennae tips highlighted, shows a marked degree of respect for the despised creature. So perhaps he would understand why someone painting 400 years later might want to present a close-up view of the hungry little crawlers.

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Next time (around April 24): Serious Humour: "Designated Driver"

Designated Driver - acrylic - 2010 - 22" x 22"

 

All the Same, All Different: Pets, Pancakes, Persimmons, and other Projects

I have my children to thank for bringing to my attention a principle which underlies some of my art projects and continues to suggest new directions--the principle of "the same only different." When they reached the mid-childhood stage of clamouring for little creatures in cages, my son and daughter had a reluctant and unreceptive mother who had no desire to share her home with smelly creatures that would eat and breed prodigiously and always need cleaning. My objections, however, were overruled, and over the years we accommodated hamsters, gerbils, budgies, guinea pigs, and a deformed fish which we babysat, and which its rightful owners (very sensibly) never got around to reclaiming. I was not a total neophyte when it came to pets. I'd lived with various cats, and was well aware of each one's individuality, and accepted that dogs too had unique personalities; but the idiosyncrasies demonstrated by all the diminutive fauna (even the fish, which once jumped out of its tank and was later rescued, still alive, from the dust bunnies under the bed)) came as a complete surprise to me. The gerbils, particularly, covered a whole range of personality traits, from the bold one who teased the cat through the bars of its cage until it got its face ripped off, to the dogged perseverer who learned to run in the exercise wheel in spite of having no front feet. These mouse-sized rodents were as different from each other as you are from me.


The first time this principle cropped up in an art project was during an intensive summer course in paper-making. We made batches of pulp and were then expected to create something with it. I don't think I had any idea what I was going to do, but I started to produce, at an increasingly frenetic pace, two kinds of object. I twisted strips of nylon stockings and dipped them in the pulp, hanging them up to dry in the sun; and I slapped handfuls of the pulp on to inflated balloons, producing leaf-shaped objects. I had never worked so obsessively in my life. And what fascinated me was that I kept doing the same thing, yet the results were all different. I continued dipping and moulding until time ran short, and then I assembled my whole inventory on a frame. I remember thinking that the pieces were metaphors for human beings--all the same, all different.

Pancake 2 - white china marker - 19" x 21"

In January 2005, while casting around for a theme for my last-but-one term at Emily Carr, I happened to cook up a batch of thin pancakes (crepes.) Watching them  solidify and change colour in the pan, I was once again struck by how each one, though made in the same way, was unique. For the next two months I cooked, drew, photographed, and occasionally even ate pancakes. I began with a series of detailed drawings of the flat discs, showing their ridges, grooves and craters as accurately as possible.

Fish nor Fowl - oil sticks - 15" x 29"

Out of the Frying Pan - oil sticks - 21" x 29"

Next I concentrated on segments and edges, and as I enlarged the markings, concentrating on rendering them accurately, whimsical life forms emerged, as in the examples on the left.

After that I let some of the crepes dry out for a week or so, and documented the distorted shapes that they made as they curled up. These I did not eat. To my surprise they turned into bizarre skull- and mask-like forms.

Crepe-Mask 1 - conte crayon - 30" x 23"

Crepe-World - oil sticks on canvas on board - 36" x 42"

The last step in the Pancake Project was Crepe-World, a large drawing on canvas.

Did you guess what the images I included last week represented? I've found in the past that people's suggestions have ranged from the microscopic to the cosmic--single cells to heavenly bodies!

In 2006 I had a commission to paint something for a newly renovated kitchen. The clients wanted something about 24" x 36" and they liked some of the oversized still life subjects I'd worked on. Since the wife said she was particularly fond of persimmons, I suggested that instead of one painting I should do six small ones, 10" x 10" square, each one of a different persimmon. I discovered, as with the hamsters and gerbils, that each one was unique, with its own rosette of leaves. I also learned how to enjoy eating persimmons, avoiding the astringent fibres that come with some varieties. 

Six Persimmons - acrylic on panels, each 10" x 10"

Jan. 1

Feb. 1

I have same-only-different projects in progress now, as well. As with the paper-making enterprise, I'm assembling things without knowing what I'll do with them all. For example, a new ritual for this year is taking the same photo every morning as soon as I get up. I'm not rigid about the timing, or about exactly how much of the scene I include, and there will be times when I'm away and there will be gaps in my record; but by the end of the year I should have three hundred and something versions of the view from my living-room window. I point my camera towards the spot where on a clear day I can glimpse Mt. Baker, the 10,000 ft. volcano just over the border in Washington State. I include a bit of the magnolia tree just outside, which is just, belatedly, coming into bloom. The sun, clouds, weather and tree are all variables which ensure that I never get exactly the same picture twice. All the same, all different.

Feb.27

April 10

 

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Next time (around April 17): Spotlight on Gastropods: "Van Huysum's Snails 1 and 2"