...and a little more...

I've done about 6 more hours of work on the portrait of Kathleen as Demeter, mostly focusing on the skirt, feet, hands, and flowers. Here's a peak...more pictures to come.

Last week:       This week:

Portrait of Kathleen as Demeter

After rather a long hiatus from painting, I got back to work today and it felt wonderful. I picked up work on the portrait of Kathleen as Demeter that I began back in the Spring, and made progress on the background and face today. The wallpaper is, again, one of William Morris's, and the dress is a gorgeous vintage piece lent by a friend.

Here are a closeup (with obnoxious shine from the wet paint), and one of the whole painting (with studio clutter in the back, of course) as well:

Tomorrow, I'm looking forward to getting to work on a second layer on my favorite part of the image:

The light on the hands and the front of the dress was so gorgeous the morning I shot the photos, and all the colors & the transparency of the dress will be a fun challenge. Still trying to decide whether to add more flowers to the two poppy stems she's holding. 

More tomorrow...

Work continues in my Mythography series, and new images, as well as a new statement, will be posted over the coming weeks. Currently four are finished, three are in progress, and two more are planned but, although conversations have been had and ideas have been swirling and taking root for months now, I've not yet done the photography or visual planning for them. 

In the meantime, several friends and fellow students have asked me about the origin of the wallpaper-patterned backgrounds in the Mythography images, and here is the answer that I have to give:

As usual, it all comes back to history. 

The topic of both my undergraduate thesis and my Master's dissertation was a delightfuly odd 17th Century alchemist/philosopher by the name of Robert Fludd. He took it upon himself, in his middle-age, to write a massive, two-volume history of the universe and everything in it (some brave soul has archived the entire thing here). One of the topics he took up was the art of memory, and in reading about his thoughts on 'The Art of Memory,' I came across the idea of the "Mental Palace" for the first time. 

Basically, the mental palace is a memory technique in which various items or ideas you'd like to remember are systematically visualized within and linked with rooms in an imagined 'palace,' which could be an actual palace, a house, a garden, or some other architectural space with different rooms. (The general concept was recently used in an episode of the BBC's {fantastic} series Sherlock, though there it was called a 'Mind Palace,' and there were no specific architectural visuals associated with the memories...) The image at left is one that Fludd's engraver made of his conception of a Memory Palace for recalling various musical theories.

In thinking about what would tie the images in this series together - beyond the common theme of fairytales and mythology - I came to think of all the figures as existing within a sort of collective Memory Palace. Though we all have our own responses to certain stories, what is immensely powerful about myth and fairytale is that they are the stories that we have in common - the stories we all know. I loved the idea that all of these rich and varied characters could exist within a single architectural space, brought together within the mind of the mythographer. I was delighted to imagine that Beauty could wander down the hall and up a spiral staircase to converse with Psyche, or that two versions of myself, drawn from different stories, could meet each other and trade secrets in some quiet alcove. 

And if I had a mental palace to furnish, with uncountable rooms all waiting to yield up their stories, it would certainly be wallpapered all in William Morris's designs. 

The use of his patterns across all the pieces in this series serves, I hope, to unify them visually, as well as to tie them back to a historical tradition in which it was essential for art to be both beautiful and useful. 

On the Giving of Titles

In which I tell you more than you may ever have wanted to know about how my titles are chosen, and rhapsodize briefly about the joys of watercolor pencils...

Filment & Firmament III (detail): Before and after adding water.

O, the lovely watercolor pencil - is there anything more wonderful than the moment when a thin, muddy-brown line blooms into a fluid cascade of scarlet? I love painting, and I love drawing, and I love that watercolor pencils allow me to have the best of both worlds: the rapidity of drawing, and the lushness of paint. 

Three watercolor pencil drawings will be up on the work page soon, and I've been musing for the past few hours on what title to give them. I rarely have a title in mind when I begin a piece, though sometimes it will come to me during the making. Most often, however, a drawing or painting will sit in my home for weeks or even months, unidentified & nameless.

Titles only became important to me, in a logistical sense, once I began posting images on my website and submitting pieces to shows. Never before had I found it necessary to label my work in this way; when I thought about it, if ever, I felt that paintings spoke for themselves in a visual language that didn't need any words to supplement it. But with the cursor blinking at me in the 'Title' box on a juried show submission form, I couldn't face the prospect of writing 'Untitled' (some interesting thoughts on that subject can be found here), and so I was forced to think a little more deeply.

With portrait paintings, it is always temptingly simple to use the subject's name as a title, but then it seems to me that the work becomes more about the portrayed than the portrayal - more about object than intention. In some cases (as in a commissioned portrait primarily meant to record a likeness) this is appropriate, but in others, I want the figure to say more than simply "I am who I am." The first piece I ever titled, "Pear & Magnolia," referred not only to the flowers the two girls were holding, but to their in the Victorian Language of Flowers. Friendship, affection, dignity, and perseverance were all a part of the story that I wanted these two girls to help me tell, and calling the piece by their two names would, I think, have distracted from those qualities. "Warmth" is not only the sunlight on the woman's face, but a part her character that I value, and "I Wear My Movement" was a fragment of a sentence, spoken by a friend, that gave me a glimpse what it was like to be in a dancer's body. 

Giving a title to a whole series of paintings or drawings requires a different sort of consideration. I have no set method for titling individual pieces, but for my last three series I have followed the same process. It begins with making a list of words that come to mind when I think about all of the pieces together, although I'll occasionally include a word or phrase that is suggested by a single image from within the group (for example, 'key' appeared on my list for the "Studies & Daydreams" series, though a key only appears in one of the paintings). Sometimes I do this on paper, and sometimes I try to hold them all in my head. 

For the latest series of drawings, of which three are completed with more to come, my list went something like this: 

hair, hands, muscle, fluid, lines, planes, motion, holding, care, protection, pilus, pileated, Rapunzel, Delilah, flow, drip, tension, tensile, strand, filament, growth, warp & weft, heartstrings, nerves, veins, vein-braider, spare, quiet, light, white, warm & cool, vanity, vanitas, pride, inchoate, reverent, familiar, calming, benediction

When I get serious about a word, I look it up in a thesaurus, a dictionary, and at etymology online (I spend a probably unhealthy amount of time on this website, but it's just so interesting!) to see whether the definition or derivation spark any more thoughts. From this list, I drew out:

Rapunzel, inchoate, filament, vein-braider, fluid, lines & planes

I tried out "Rapunzel inchoate" for a little while, but decided that 1. inchoate causes pronunciation difficulties if you haven't heard the word before, and 2. it applied to one of the images more than the others. "Vein-braider" I decided against because it comes from a song, and I'm never sure what copyright laws apply in these cases, and anything to do with "planes" had to go, because although I do love the planes created by the different surfaces of the hand and how they contrast with the fluid lines of the hair, I dislike the mental image of airplanes that necessarily (for me, at least) comes along with the word. 

Somewhere in the process I looked up 'hair' in the thesaurus and found 'filament,' a word that I've always loved the sound of. As I looked more deeply into the word, I found that it comes from the Latin filare, 'to draw out in a long line,' which seemed well-suited to the medium of the series. Beyond that, it suggests the filament of a light bulb, and 'light' had appeared on my initial list. From 'filament' my mind jumped to 'firmament,' which connected to light, and sky, and a sense of otherworldliness or ethereality, which is often at the center of my work. And, as the etymology dictionary then told me, 'firmament' comes from words meaning 'a support or strengthening,' and 'a firm or solid structure,' which fell right into place with the hands in my drawing, which act as support and scaffolding for the falling lines of the hair.

So there I had it: "Filament & Firmament" - the hair and the hands, the fluid and the solid, the lines and the planes, the light and the ethereal, all wrapped up in one nice alliterative package. 

Now, off to add more drawings to the series...

New Series Images

In order to end 2011 on a productive note, I've just added all of my series paintings to a new 'small studies' section over on the work page. I'm quite pleased with how these eight have turned out, and I have one left to complete. I abandoned two along the way that I decided didn't fit in with the tone of the others, but I may try to rework them at some point. 

I also added a profile & portfolio at Saatchi Online this week - there won't be any work there that isn't here as well, but I'm offering prints and several originals for sale through their site. Please visit and have a look! 

Coming Soon: In the next week I'll be adding images of several watercolor pencil drawings I've been working on when painting time is limited...drawing is such a nice change of pace. 

Here's to all the new adventures waiting to happen in 2012...