sunday, painting Dad

I've been meaning to do a painting of my Dad ever since I finished the one of Mom several months ago. As a couple they were inseparable, and I just know that somewhere out there in the vastness of an uncomprehending universe they are sitting around, drinking coffee, enjoying a nice piece of Entenmann's crumb cake or maybe a honey bun or two and wondering why their daughter hasn't yet made them a matched set. The truth is, I wasn't sure if I could catch a likeness. My father was a handsome, funny, charming man, and a Sunday painter like me. His portrait has to be just-so. So I keep putting it off.

But the rains and my own lack of ambition have kept me from painting outdoors for the last couple of weekends, outdoors being the only place I can deal with the smell and mess of the oils, and yesterday was still a little too cool. So I dragged the watercolors down from the guestroom closet and tried a tiny (4x4") sketch at the dining room table, based on a photo I took on a long-ago trip back home. The plan is to make a 12 X12" canvas to compliment Mom's in style and intent. I'm pretty awful with watercolor, always using too much water and mushing up the color, but I'm actually pretty pleased with this first attempt.

It's not perfect, and I need to adapt on the canvas in order to show his casually crossed arms and the WWII era tattoo that was such a part of who he was. But it looks like him. It feels like him. I may be able to come up with a matched set after all.

Oh, and the New Orleans Saints came marching in too ~ Laissez les bon temps roulez! Hip hip hooray!

A very happy Sunday overall.

last of the summer tomatoes

There's a group of Daily Painters whose widget appears somewhere on this page and whose work ethic I much admire. It's astounding to me how quickly and effectively they can produce such lively small scale paintings in such a short amount of time.

Me, I tend to plod, over-think and obsess with even the simplest subjects, resulting in canvases of overwrought mushiness and confusion. Much of this is no doubt due to a lack of training on my part, since I have no idea what I'm doing and am making it up as I go along. But quite a bit is probably due to essential personality flaws as well, as I tend to plod and over-think and obsess about everything, resulting in a brain and life of overwrought mushiness and confusion. Maybe because I'm still making that up as I go along, too. Funny, you'd think I'd have it down by now.

So when my husband came home and plopped some tomatoes down in the basket on the counter, I popped some blue hydrangeas in a vase and thought, hmn, I bet I could do this in a few hours(!) and quickly set out to try, you know, to loosen up my brain a little. When, to the surprise of no one I didn't finish that day, the canvas sat for a week, the tomatoes were eaten and the hydrangeas started turning green.

Hmn, I thought, I like that much better! More color, better contrast. Turk was promptly dispensed to the farmers' market for more fruit and I added some green to the blue.

Later that afternoon, as I noted that the flowers had started turning brown around the edges and imagined the tomatoes in a nice insalata calabrese for dinner that night, I threw a little sienna into the petals and finally called it a day. Before my bright little Still Life with Tomatoes turned into a picture of an empty basket and a couple of dry sticks in fetid water: Stilled Life: Study of a Too Literal Mind.

And I wonder why no one wants to sit for my portraits.

my blue kitchen

Poor Mom. I spent an unexpectedly cool and overcast Sunday last week working on her portrait. We've been having a bit of a go at each other for months now.

The problem is that I can't seem to capture a particular quality in her smile. Most (real) artists tend to avoid overt, opened mouthed grins, the kind best left captured in photographs, and for good reason ~ that split second of joy so easily caught by pixel or film can, in the hands of the wrong person, become a frozen, deadened grimace on canvas.

These are the hands of the wrong person.

Working from a recent photograph and determined to preserve a certain sweetness in her countenance (there was more there, but I started the picture in the first throws of grief, and must be forgiven an element of sentimentality) I painted her at first beaming broadly. Too broadly, I'm afraid, because the longer I worked the more her expression took on a somewhat demented aspect. By which I mean she looked crazy.

So I painted her mouth a little softer. Too softly, because in time I came to realize that she looked a little wistful. By which I mean she looked depressed. And who wants to go through that for eternity?

And on it went ~ loony laugh/woeful pout. Smooshy paint. And I began to wonder if this is less about me as an unskilled painter (although it is certainly that) and more about me trying to create a form of everlasting life for my mother. I want to paint her into an eternity of smiling bliss; to guarantee her happiness with gay dashes of red and yellow, banishing forever all the subtler hues of indigo and grey that too were a part of her life; all of our lives, in fact, and that need to be acknowledged, with all their implied whispers of mourning and regret.

I know that to deny this is neither sensible nor desired. I know that this is what makes makes portraits devoid of life and passion; it is what separates the kitsch from the real. And she would want it all out there. But I seem to want to make it prettier. Better. For me.

Then again, maybe this is just how I choose to remember her. Pink. Bright. Happy.

And so it goes ~ week after week of painting mom's smile in and out until, somewhere in this alternative universe, she doesn't know whether to laugh or cry. Somewhere, I have finally managed to make my mother bipolar.

At last I put Mom aside and finished a little picture I'd started well over a year ago (2? 3?) ~ meant to be a quick, cheerful study of the kitchen table where an old friend and I had once sat on a cool gray winter afternoon, drinking wine and nibbling bits of fruit and cheese. Catching up on lives once close, but now lived 3000 miles apart.

So much for quick. But it is cheerful. A little cartoon-y. I don't mind. It will always remind me of my friend and how warm we felt sharing that cozy winter day. Mercifully, the smiles need only be implied.