My friend Phil

Jerry and I married about 11 years ago. and his tremendous love and support since we retired, is how I am now able to devote myself to painting.  I too, am one lucky sunofabitch.

I stopped dancing long enough to listen to the news.  Iraq, Egypt. Syria. Libya.  A barrage of images of revolt and turmoil.  My painting of Baghdad focuses on the delicate mosque and minaret in the square where Saddam Hussein’s statue was toppled. Oil fires burn in the distance: his retort to the American invasion.  This is an image of a part of the world that has seen conflict, glory, devastation and rebirth since the beginning of written history.

My paintings were exhibited in conjunction with the New West Symphony performances of Scheherzade at the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Center, the Oxnard Performing Arts Center and at Barnum Hall in Santa Monica, April 29 – May 1, 2011.

Oil on Canv

I love this painting. It was a big breakthrough for me in learning to create my own style of abstraction. AND THEN..TA DA.. this painting won the 1st Place Scholarship at Buenaventura Artists Assoc. Last semester I almost gave up classes because of lack of funds. Now, with this scholarship and continued encouragement, I’m free to enjoy another semester at CSUCI — The most beautiful light-filled studio space and a gorgeous campus.  I love it there and now it’s all paid for!!!

Chief Sitting Bull – Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux Chief and Holy Man

36″ x 60″ Oil on canvas

At this point, my painting says as much as I can, or want to say. I hope my deep respect for this man is evident.  Most of the well known black and white photos of him were taken while he was in the Buffalo Bill Wild West show. Afterwards he will be murdered by Indians working for the government. He foretold his death.  His gaze is steady. His smile, yes he is smiling, is almost beatific.

He knows.

18"x48" Oil on Canvas

For the past 2 months, I’ve been painting from models and somehow the images turn out as tortured, expressionistic portraits.  Ghosts?

Cal State Channel Islands is a truly beautiful campus with old 2-story tile-roofed Spanish buildings sprawling between the hills and  fertile farms of Camarillo. The sunsets are glorious .. and in the morning I love when the fog gently floats over the hills out to the ocean. Driving down the hill to the campus through a narrow rustic canyon is a trip to Heaven.

There is just a bit of weirdness knowing that the buildings were formerly the home of a great many mentally disturbed adults and children when it was Camarillo State Hospital.  I can’t help it: sometimes  I  imagine Munch’s “Scream” figure in the middle of the quad.

What a pleasure to come home and play with this portrait. Make no mistake, my granddaughter Taytem has the world at her command.

FINALLY!… I’ve come to an exhilerating point where I realize there’s something about how I draw a Line that is uniquely me. I’ve spent a year listening to a classroom of kids and teachers telling me “your line is …”  Nan’s Line is …yadda yadda.”  I think I always thought anyone could do this just as well. It really didn’t seem very special, pretty easy and like writing my signature.  And the breakthrough is that now I can begin to really explore where my Line will take me…. Like Harold’s Purple Crayon

I usually avoid explaining my paintings. People always read their own meanings into them anyway.  But after reading “Stranger” by Gabriela Mistral, I couldn’t keep her passionate words and images out of my head. (16″ x 19″ Acrylic)

Here’s the poem translated by Langston Hughes. Enjoy!

Stranger  by Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957)

She speaks in a slight accent about her wild seas
with God knows what seaweeds and God knows what sands;
so old it’s as if she herself were dying, she prays to a god with no volume and no weight.
She has sown cactus and claw-like grasses
in gardens of ours that she makes strange.
She draws her breath from the panting of the desert
and loves with a passion all that it whitens,
all that never says anything and if it should it would be like the map of another planet.
Were she to live in our midst for eight years
it would be always as though she had just come,
speaking in a language that pants and moans and that is understood only by beasts.
And some night when her suffering is greatest
from a death both silent and strange,
she is going to die right here among us
with nothing but her fate for a pillow.”

Chopin is at the piano, quite oblivious of the fact that anyone is listening. He embarks on a sort of casual improvisation, then stops.

‘Go on, go on,’ exclaims Delacroix, ‘That’s not the end!’

‘It’s not even a beginning.  Nothing will come … nothing but reflections, shadows, shapes that won’t stay fixed. I’m trying to find the right colour, but I can’t even get the form .

‘You won’t find the one without the other,’ says Delacroix, ‘and both will come together.’

‘What if I find nothing but moonlight?’

‘Then you will have found the reflection of a reflection.’

The idea seems to please the divine artist. He begins again, without seeming to, so uncertain is the shape.

Gradually quiet colours begin to show, corresponding to the suave modulations sounding in our ears.

Suddenly the note of blue sings out, and the night is all around us, azure and transparent. Light clouds take on fantastic shapes and fill the sky. They gather about the moon which casts upon them great opalescent discs, and wakes the sleeping colours.

We dream of a summer night, and sit there waiting for the song of the nightingale.  “

NOW listen to The Piano Concertos in their entirety played beautifully by 20-year old Rafal Blechacz:  http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123604975&sc=fb&cc=fp

Raven II and III are 6″ x 8″ and printed on your choice of handmade Japanese Mulberry (white) and Kitikata (cream colored) acid-free  paper.  For sale unframed. $85.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird   by Wallace Stevens

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

Renoir in the 20^th Century at Los Angeles County Museum of Art  Feb. 12, 2010

Why bother with Renoir?

These were my thoughts driving into LA last Friday. After all, Pierre-Auguste Renoir was like an old friend, but someone I’d left behind over fifty years ago.  Even before kindergarten, I could recognize his chubby pink women and pink-faced children as they lolled joyfully in their perennial April-in-Paris sunshine. My mother took me to the nearby Metropolitan Museum of Art frequently and those rooms filled with Impressionist color and light were my Disneyland. Over the years my art education became more “sophisticated.”  I rigorously studied the more challenging avant garde: Picasso’s daring line and confusing cubist vision, Matisse and his flattened reduction of forms. Then Pollack and the rest.  It was too naive to stay in love with Renoir; he was just too easy!

The first thing the exhibit catalog pointed out, was their intention to feature Renoir’s later work –from 1913 when, at the age of 72 he declared “I am just learning how to paint.” Well, they had me now. I could once again identify with him… and therefore take interest!

Entering the show, the first paintings are the familiar portraits of young girls playing piano, guitar, reading, quietly self-absorbed. You can tell he’s done these compositions for rich patrons because they include a background filled with the patron’s art collections and furnishings (i.e. Degas’ pastels on the wall behind The Lerolle Sisters 1897).  A beautiful self-portrait, done in 1899 shows his own soft features with a straight even gaze.  In sharp contrast, the black and white photos of him in his studio taken 10 years later show his features shrunken, eyes in hollowed sockets as the ravages of age and rheumatoid arthritis have taken their toll.  (And I want to draw and sculpt that face!)

This period of paintings shows his departure from the style of the Impressionists with whom he had been identified during the mid- to late 1800’s.  Plein air landscapes are gone as he poses all his models in the studio, adding indistinct backgrounds that look like theater scenery, sketching in perspective and detail. Artists since the Renaissance and earlier had gone to great pains to describe the geology, plants and animals in their backgrounds even as the paintings focused on a monumental figure.  Renoir’s lack of detail gives an abstract and timeless quality to his paintings.

The backgrounds are secondary to his involvement with the figures which remind you of classical statuary in their solidity and presence.  Everyday women in ordinary gestures are imbued with the gravitas of classical figures. A meditative atmosphere is created with blended pastel colors and soft edged brushwork caressing their placid expressions.  Far-off gazes, relaxed, near somnambulistic expressions, and yet the women powerfully occupy the canvas because of his composition and use of color.  He creates a meditative atmosphere – perhaps like his own at 70+ years of age.

Renoir’s classical gravitas comes lightly~ his weightless forms, soft curves and colors remind me of Boucher’s luscious nudes floating on clouds—without evoking a leer! The U-turn Renoir takes, away from Impressionism, leads some to say his paintings are in the spirit of Raphael…without the mythology.  These two differences might bring his art into the 20^th Century. But there’s more.

Those rubber arms! The lack of visible bone structure is a bit disturbing. You see none of the musculature of, for instance, Rodin’s heaviest figures (a contemporary born in 1840). Is this curved line a foretaste of modern abstraction or just part of Renoir’s refusal to interrupt his soft dreamy atmosphere?  Then you see this soft line in Matisse’s lounging women, and you realize that those lines plus Renoir’s new ability to include simultaneous views are what give Renoir entree into the world of 20^th Century Modern Art  (on exhibit a rare view of “Nude on Cushions” 1905).

Looking at the six or seven Renoir drawings in the show, I began to see how his monumental figures and his ability to detach from direct observation, influenced Picasso’s paintings and drawings. Picasso added exaggerated flattening to the forms and volumes but he derives his compositional strength from Renoir’s monumental proportions and layout.  In another example “The Saone turns herself into the Arms of the Rhone,” I saw how Renoir’s reference to mythology became a fundamental part of Picasso’s allegorical Minotaurs –and generally all his women with their mythological powers in his life!  In fact, as I realized this, I heard or saw a museum note that Picasso owned some of Renoir’s drawings, and there were other references to the two artists having known each other.

Renoir’s explorations of the female body in bronze sculptures (mostly executed by Richard Guino) also influenced Maillol’s (1861-1944) sculptures, some of which were shown in the exhibit. I personally felt Maillol more fully realized those beautifully attenuated and distorted forms in the elegant torso shown in this exhibit.

(From the NY Times, February 14, 2010)  RENOIR dallied with sculpture early in his career, but the bronzes for which he is famous were not modeled until just before his death in 1919, at the age of 78. Nudes, mainly, they are as recognizably the master’s work as his canvases – the models and poses are the same, the surfaces even evoke his brushwork as it was in the late years. At the same time, the figures – Aphrodites all, even when posing as washerwomen – are very like Maillol’s, having similar proportions and the same heavy, tubular limbs. The likeness isn’t exactly a matter of influence, for while Renoir admired Maillol, and the sculptor, 20 years his junior, saw himself as the painter’s spiritual son, each in his own medium had long been pursuing the classical ideal.)

Before this exhibit, I hadn’t made the connection between Renoir’s artistic vision and that of modern artists such as Picasso, Matisse and Maillol.  Since the exhibit, I’ve once again made contact with a very dear old friend and am truly thankful to have found many new reasons to acknowledge his genius.

The last painting I saw in the show was “The Bathers” dated somewhere between 1895 and 1919.  Matisse called this painting Renoir’s masterpiece.  By this time, Renoir was confined to a wheelchair and painting with his brushes tied to his arthritic fingers.  It’s a large canvas and he is said to have told another artist that it was his best work yet!   He’s painting.  Painting.  Painting.  Looking back on the whole exhibit, I can feel the abundance of life in his work. I emerged from this exhibit with the happiest feeling, passionately warmed by Renoir’s unquenchable love of paint.