So Cute

One of the best things about living in a small village, in the countryside, is the abundance of animal life. I’ve gotten a lot of pleasure watching the cows, sheep and birds around here. From time to time I’ve been blessed to have either the cows or the sheep grazing in a field in what amounts to the backyard here. It’s lambing season, so having a few little lambs romping around is endlessly entertaining. Better than tv, by a long stretch. I mean, when they aren’t actually up to mischief or joyfully chasing each other around, they are usually snuggling up together or otherwise napping. And when at rest they are the epitome of cuteness.

I’ve been itching for some more plein-air painting since my last go at it. Time and overall cruddy weather has opposed me on most of the few occasions I might’ve had to do it, though.

So a few days ago I sat to work, indoors. I was laying out my paint to do some work on another landscape I had started outdoors but am finishing indoors, when I noticed a few of the lambs sleeping, easily visible from my 2^nd-story studio window. I figured I might not have another opportunity like this so I grabbed a blank board I’d prepared earlier and painted like mad, hoping the lamb would stick around long enough. Thankfully he was enjoying his rest and did indeed stay put for a very fast painting session. This was 90 minutes, tops, oils on extremely heavy watercolor paper, 8x10”.

Now isn’t that just precious?

It should be noted that since I painted this piece entirely indoors, it hardly qualifies as plein-air. Really I guess it’s simply a life-study.

Museum Stroll: National Portrait, London

The National Portrait Gallery shares walls with the National Museum, but you can’t enter one through the other. I looked forward to seeing it but perhaps a bit less-so than the other museums. Certainly I think portraiture is a great form of painting, and certainly I like the focused nature of the gallery. However, given who portraits were typically painted of, it can get a little wearing looking at so many people in powdered wigs.

I did this gallery in reverse order, starting with ultra-contemporary and going back from there. Laziness factored into this since the newest was on the bottom floor and each higher floor got older by a couple of centuries. But also since a large portion of the gallery was dedicated to the last 100 years, I was not prepared to get through the golden years and then make it to the bottom to be deflated. But it was a no-win situation since now I’d end the tour in this direction with all the powdered wigs on the top floor. Powdered wigs…modern art…powdered wigs…modern art….Yep, laziness won the day.

The National Portrait Gallery holds an annual portrait competition that is actually fairly impressive. Portrait art, even in modern times, is one of the saner fine arts as far as painting goes. The reason is quite simple: if you are painting a person, you can’t simply present your client with poo dried onto canvas and expect satisfaction. So, while modern ideas of composition and narrative have continued to transform even portraiture, it seems to maintain a larger amount of…craft…than other painting forms. So the ground floor which had this work was interesting in many places while being predictably disappointing in others.

It was a bit strange, however, to happen upon a painting by Phil Hale in this hallowed national space. some of you may know his work: I first came across it years ago when Stephen King’s “The Drawing of the Three” was published in trade paperback. between then and about 1996 or so he evolved considerably as a painter and is one of the more exciting “modern” painters around, in my estimation. He’s only tangentially speaking in the genre I work in; his dynamic compositions have enabled him occasional commissions in gaming and comics (he illustrated the first issue cover of the Halo comic book, for instance). Yet his work is rarely what one would categorize as fantasy. His world is really figurative fine art, and in that realm there are few people who have taken many of the philosophies of modern art, added a prodigious talent for actual painting and turned them into something worthwhile.

From there the usual cast of characters that have been mentioned in this series of blog entries made outstanding appearances, and they were portraits. So I won’t go much further into them this time.

Thus ends this series of museum reviews, as they turned out to be. back to our normally scheduled nonsense.

museum stroll: the royal academy

knowing that many of the great british artists i admire were associated with the royal academy in one way or another, and given that their website has records of all kinds of interesting artworks in their collection, it seemed worthwhile to make a trip out to see it. it’s fairly centrally located, anyway.

there were two temporary exhibitions going on, including a van ruisdael landscape show which is all well and good, though not what i was after. i was hoping to catch a bit of what would be the permanent collection. after some delay we joined up with a free tour that went through those rooms. when we saw on the map what portion of the showing space was dedicated to the permanent gallery, we were disheartened. yet i remained optimistic, since even a small handful of great pieces would be satisfying.

ends up the tour is mainly about those rooms, themselves, and the manor that eventually grew, tetsuo-style, into what is now the r.a.. that was very disappointing. to go with the landscape exhibition, the pieces that were up were mainly other landscapes. sigh. a couple of decent reynolds portraits were around, and a large leighton bronze, but nothing else that i had hoped to see. an absolute bust.

questions were asked of the guide, including the state of the r.a. as an actual academy these days. apparently they still have about 20 students at a time, who once chosen get free education (and a stipend!). this was an academy whose first 4 presidents were reynolds, leighton, millais, and poynter, and which once turned out fantastically talented artists with a rigorous education. so certainly the drawing and painting instruction of the current students is also keeping standards high?

the actual answer, “oh i don’t think so. does anyone even know how to draw anymore?”

so i left the royal academy not only disappointed with the showing, but completely disillusioned with it as an institution, as well.

Museum Stroll: National Gallery, London

Having visited many great galleries on my last London trip, and this being an illustrator’s blog, I figured it’d be good grist for a few posts so bear with me. You can’t complain, I’m even posting twice in under a week!

Though pigeons were fed in front of them in ’98, I didn’t get to The National Gallery or the National Portrait Gallery, both of which are right on Trafalgar Square. I rectified that situation this time.

National galleries (like the Louvre) tend to have an overview of western art, so you’re likely to get italians, flemish and the like. These types of galleries are not my favorite: I prefer more tightly focused places. but I’m not going to exactly pass on a museum just because they have Velasquez, Rembrandt, and Constable all under the same roof!

After seeing a lot of original art (and being a painter doesn’t hurt), I’ve taken to being a lot more focused in my viewings. I’ve seen enough medieval wooden altarpieces to last me a lifetime and don’t find much interest in them so I’ll walk past entire rooms of them now. This wasn’t an issue here as there weren’t any. However I’ve also seen enough pre- and early renaissance works by third-tier artists to last me a lifetime, so I’m able to walk through more rooms now. there are occasions where I will stand in front of a large, generally italian, religious work and think to myself that the painting is on display basically because it survived all these centuries. In some cases there is nothing to recommend the piece when there is a Leonardo and some Raphael pieces in the next room over. The anatomy might be bad, the paint sloppily handled, the subject matter poorly presented. The first time this thought appeared in my head it was quite the shock: I am poo-pooing an artwork by an Old Master, for God’s sake! But not all old masters are equals, and survival is quite important in their being in a museum: if a large estate was filled with paintings and that family was important, it was quite likely that all the art there would go down in history simply by association. It’s not like every piece was weighted for historical or artistic significance. Their significance in many cases was simply that the wealthy patron bought the painting, but it will now hang with a promoted importance due to its sheer existence 500 years later. Many equal-quality pieces lost through the centuries, in antique shops unattributed or damaged beyond repair never get the honor.

So anyway, I skipped quite a few rooms and lingered over others. I took the museum in chronological order. This is because to see it in reverse order would be too painful. All artists have stood on the shoulders of giants and so it’s best to see the art get better and better than to go top-down and end your museum viewing by staring at the feet of the first giant, corns and all. If you get my drift. The most pleasant surprise was a beautiful large canvas by Paul Delaroche I’d only known from his monograph, which image I got to near the end of my visit, in the late 1800s at the split between academy painting and modernism.

"But...but, I was only queen for 9 freakin' days!"

In the next room the realists and the impressionists followed. A couple of pieces held me but let’s just say I had other places to be. Like the special exhibition: Americans in Paris. I’d read about it in the papers but had forgotten about it. Here were a bunch of Sergeants and even Whistler’s mom (larger than I thought—the painting, not his mom), some Childe Hassam, and other great works. as many of the pieces came from the USA’s east coast and I’ve never been there, it was like having an extra helping of awesome after a full dinner.

Museum Stroll: Tate Britain

I’ve made mention of some of the great art I’ve seen in the past year or so since heading to Europe. It’s been one of the best aspects of this whole living abroad thing. Between Rome, Florence, Munich, Birmingham and London I have greatly added to my exposure of the world’s greatest art. In prior years I had visited a number of other of the world’s great galleries and such. But never have I had such a concentration of exposure than the last year. I also got to see a solo show by John Jude Palencar in Southern California and *just* missed the Maxfield Parrish show in San Diego by a few days last summer. Darn.

Seeing original art, as an artist, is utterly mindblowing. you see, over the years I’ve carried with me mental images from the books I own and have learned greatly from them, often having certain pages from art books open next to me as I work, for inspiration. But nothing prepares you for viewing the real deal, especially when in the grand manner the paintings were done very large. But even when small, nothing beats an original painting.

I had the pleasure of visiting London again last weekend, my first time since 1998. At the time I saw the Tate (now known as Tate Britain), Leighton House, and other museums around England. but as I was there for other purposes, shall we say, I couldn’t indulge quite as freely as I might have. This trip was basically all about the museums.

It started again at the Tate. How can you pass up the chance of paying homage to the Lady of Shalott? Well, I couldn’t, though I’d seen her 8 years ago. And though there were tons of great things to see there, she remains a highlight. Millais’ Ophelia was also on view and it made for an interesting debate as to which was better.

I swear he used a 1-2" brush for most of it. of course it's 6.5' long

Waterhouse’s work (above) has fantastic atmosphere, sheer size and vigorous brushwork on its side. Stand any closer than 4 feet from it and it begins to fall apart, the very loose brushwork is revealed and it can be a little disappointing in places. but it was painted to be viewed at a normal distance and at about 5 feet away instantly the painting snaps together in a most remarkable way and you’d think every detail was labored at endlessly. Truly stunning.

Actual overheard quote: "It's so beautiful I can't believe it," and that wasn't even me.
Sometimes humans make me proud.

Millais’ painting (above) is almost the opposite in handling. It’s smaller (though by no means small), and the handling is remarkable at any distance. You can get so close that you’re about to leave noseprints on the glass and still the piece is tightly handled and gorgeous. All the foliage that is indicated in a few masterful strokes by Waterhouse is painstakingly rendered in Millais’ work, but not in a way that it detracts or draws attention to itself at all. I read somewhere that Millais spent 4 months working on the head and hands here, floating his model in a warmed bath while studies were made and then the final work. Given that I often have all of three days to do a full painting, it makes me sigh. The colors are jewel-like and more vibrant overall. The question remains unanswered in my mind. I went in thinking Shalott but I can't say now. One advantage Waterhouse's work has, at any size, is that his value structure holds up better at a distance, with the white dress clearly making the image readable. Had Millais' Ophelia worn a similarly bright dress, it may have sealed the deal, but her dress gets a little muddled at a distance.

One piece in particular was quite the gem. I’d never seen it nor heard of the artist before but Herbert James Draper’s Lament for Icarus was a stunner.

Why had I never heard of this artist before, but Blue Dog is everywhere?

The Tate Modern has opened up elsewhere and I hoped that this meant that the half of what is now Tate Britain that once housed the modern collection would have moved, leaving room for more of the excellent work that is in their warehouse. No such luck, unfortunately, although Lucian Freud’s work is always interesting to see.