Mona Lisa and Me. . . a new painting

Mona Lisa and Me: do I Really Wish I'd Painted It, or do I Just Wish I Owned It; Oh, Wait. . . 

My latest painting.  3' x 5'.  The figure in the chair feels life-size when standing a couple feet away.  This was inspired by thoughts of how admiration or downright envy of the 'greats' can affect one's art, but also because I've been doing a lot of reading about Leonardo for a number of years now.  There are many copies of Mona Lisa around that are also interesting in themselves.  Some are newly discovered.  This however, is emphatically not a copy of the Mona Lisa, not a reproduction but a representation.  I say that because it is necessarily in my own style in order to fit into the rest of the painting.  To imitate Leonardo's technique would have required much more time, time that people today don't generally have.  It would also have to be done on wood because the canvas weave interferes with glazes.  The color pools in the depressions between the threads and breaks and thins on them.  So a canvas-textured tiny grid appears.  I like such textures, and occasional blobs of paint, and obvious brushstrokes when you get close, and other ways which foreground the faction rather than disguise it.  Not so Leonardo.  Also Martin Kemp observed that Leonardo used thin glazes over a visible light ground for her flesh, to give it an illumined look.  I darkened the whole and then painted in highlights, the old academic technique that, ironically, stems from Leonardo's ideas even tho in the Mona Lisa it is not quite how he did things.  But then I did do some glazing over that.  There are many layers of glazing and reworking in the whole thing.  All of it was done freehand by eye without the use of any projection devices.

The objects in the painting and their arrangement are fantasy, a mixture of the real, the remembered, and the imagined.  I do not have William Morris wallpaper but wish I did.  The woodwork on the lower wall is in my dining room, the chair and lamp stand are in the study, but the lampshade is one that fell apart years ago.  The cat, named Leonardo, is real but he stubbornly refused to pose for me on the chair.  The bookcase is in my bedroom but the books are not in it, they are scattered elsewhere.  And of course I don't own the Mona Lisa.  But wait, in the imaginary world of this painting, I did paint it and now own it.

A Challenge to Zeuxis

A Challenge to Zeuxis     1989

It has been 3/4 of a year since I posted.  It has  been a difficult year.   But now I can get back to it.  I am on a sabbatical, doing research full time for a year.  And getting unfinished projects done, one of which is scanning old slides before they fade away.  This painting was among them.  Yes, it's a painting, not a box.  I did a number of boxes full of stuff for my MFA thesis show back in '83.  They are stretched canvas on box-shaped frames that I designed and built myself.  The frame is carved so the canvas has room to get out of the way and the edges down the deep sides are done in a blind appliqué stitch, so there are no lumps.  I then paint the 'box' complete with dents and tears, scribbling, stamps, tape, or whatever has been added to the box since it left the box factory.  Whatever it has endured in its supposedly ephemeral life is carefully recorded, along with, of course, the printed advertisements of its original function as a shipping box of some commodity.  By 1989 I had given up doing them, but this one attracted my eye because it came from China and I find Chinese characters interesting.  (Since then, I have done a year's course in Mandarin.)  The characters adorn the box like a traditional Chinese painting, which would also have marks added from later ownership.

I also was attracted to the colors and the fact that it was grapes.  In Pliny the Elder's Natural History from the 1st century C.E. there are anecdotes of the painter Zeuxis who painted a still-life of grapes so realistically that whenever it was set outside birds came and pecked at them.  One day his friend the painter Parrhasios challenged Zeuxis to a contest to see who could paint the best illusion. Zeuxis put out his painting of grapes and the birds came and pecked at them.  So then Zeuxis looked over at Parrhasios's painting, which had a cloth covering most of it, and said to him 'take off the cloth and let's see yours.'  Parrhasios answered to Zeuxis 'you may uncover it.'  Zeuxis walked over and reached out to remove the cloth, only to find that it was a painted illusion of a cloth.  So, the ancient story goes, Parrhasios won because Zeuxis fooled the birds but Parrhasios fooled a person who should know better.

 Of course we now know that it is much easier to fool a person than an animal.  Our brains are set up to be fooled.  Most animals, birds included, cannot read flat images, including reflections, and that's why they fly into windows and break their little necks.  My boxes fooled a lot of people, who would then ask why I wasted time painting on a cardboard box when it will just disintegrate after a while.  I would then pick up the box and show them that it was a stretched canvas.  Some would scream at the sight, because they had been fooled right up to then even a few inches away.  The real surprise is that up close they are quite painterly.  Once when some were in a group show an irate viewer chewed the gallery director out for ruining the show by leaving boxes of junk in the middle of the floor. (They were on low stands about four inches off the floor.) The director had to pick some up and show the visitor the underside to convince them the boxes were part of the exhibit.   People kick them, and poke them, and peak beneath.  I had to give up painting them, however, because they take up space like sculpture, and the cats insist they are cat hammocks, which isn't good for the painting.

One of My Favorite Spots on van Gogh's Starry Night

One of My Favorite Spots on van Gogh's Starry Night

Here is one of my latest paintings in a somewhat low resolution image.  It is hanging in our Faculty exhibit that will be up in the Plunkett Gallery of Hardman Hall until sometime in mid-September.  I call it a P'Art Object, because it's a part of a work of art.  As the title lets you know, this is to be found on van Gogh's Starry Night.  It's a tiny spot blown up big (original about an inch across; painting five feet).  I won't say where it is in case you would like to try to spot it.  The photo works like a distant view; depending on your eyes several feet away or more you see what appears to be big gigantic gobs of impasto brushstrokes made by huge brushes with spots of bare canvas catching paint where the weave lifts the crossings of huge threads.  You walk up close and find it is pretty much flat and covered with thousands of brush strokes, layers of glaze peeking out from around and under them and enlivened with streaks of scumbling.  (Darned autocorrect doesn't believe scumbling is a real word.)  Of course the low resolution of the image causes the subtleties of surface texture, color, and details to disappear when you zoom in.  So here is a close-up.  We can call it "One of my favorite spots on one of my favorite spots on van Gogh's Starry Night".

So you can see how painterly the whole is.  It works in a similar way as the painting in an earlier post called Buddha of the Ten-Thousand Colors.  I like to play with people's perceptions.  And I like what paint can do. Just trompe l'oeil (fooling the eye) isn't enough.   It's more interesting when it is obviously paint and then turns into something else.  Or rather the other way around.  The viewers become very aware of the shift in their perceptions as they approach the painting.  When I did old-fashioned trompe l'oeil paintings they tended to get poked and kicked as people tested their suspicions that the object wasn't what they were seeing, and some got angry when they realized they'd been fooled.  When you get to looking at the real brush strokes in this you can see the real canvas weave made visible by the glazes pooling in the spaces between the threads.  The scumbling resembles the gaps in van Gogh's giant strokes.  What tickles my fancy about this painting most is that it is a painted representation of paint.

The Temptation of St. Anthony (still life painting)

This is another older painting (someday soon I'll have newer stuff), from the 1990's.  The francs were usable cash at the time.   It is in the tradition of old trompe l'oeil collections of scraps, like Peto's and Harnett's letter racks, or bulletin board paintings.  You put into them whatever you want, so they are sometimes called a quod libet. The theme of this one is of the foolishness of desires and takes its title (The Temptation of St. Anthony) from the paperback book in the lower left, Flaubert's Tentation de Saint'Antoine.  So in a way it is also a Vanitas.  But when I started it began with the wish that I could paint or have painted the Temptation of St. Anthony panel of the Issenheim Altarpiece.  There it was on the cover of the book, so I built a still life around it.  Some of the things on the table top are real things and some are painted illusions.  In person you can't tell which is real and which painted, but in a photo I think it starts to be more obvious.  The surface itself is an old drafting table top complete with cuts, scratches, and paint spots from decades of real use.  The table fell apart so I used the top as a painting panel.

Flaubert wrote the book because he was torn inside from two sets of values.  Part of him loved art and beautiful things and other such worldly pleasures.  Part of him had a rather Puritan urge to forgo all the foolishness of desires and live a life of what we would call voluntary simplicity.  These two characters fight also within me, and probably in a good number of us.  

The painting won best in show in a regional juried exhibit, and is now owned by the Macon Museum of Art and Science.  They had a conservator treat the match heads, lest a mouse scratch them and set the museum on fire.  They aren't a museum that exhibits their own collection permanently, but every once in a while it gets selected to join other works in a curated exhibit.  I can't resist saying that one time it was in with a show that included some quite famous names.  See what I mean about temptation?

No, you can't see any credit card numbers on it.

A Sierpinski Mandala

This was painted in 2006.  Like the Buddha of 10,000 colors that I posted a while ago, it consists of squares of color, this time in a variety of sizes.  The whole is 20" x 20".

A Sierpinski carpet is a two-dimensional surface that has no surface.  Theoretically, that is. You take a square and divide it into nine squares.  Then you remove the middle.  Take each of the eight squares left and divide them into nine.  Remove the middle.  Continue until infinity.

It was rather difficult to get to infinity.  Awfully small squares and infinite time.  

When I decided it was close enough, the similarity to cosmic diagrams of esoteric Buddhism struck me, and also the one and the eight repeating.  In Hindu-Buddhism the numbers one and eight are special.  The Buddha is one, and then there is the eight-fold path.  So I painted a faint image of a meditating Buddha in the center square.  In the real painting it is much harder to see.  The camera sees more than the eye in this case, and adjusting the color didn't help.  The eight-spoked wheels on the eight green squares are printed on and are also more hidden than in the photo.  

Every once in a while I get an irrational urge to paint something like this, even though this is not how I usually work.  Some day it may make sense.

Merejkowski's Leonardo and other distractions

It is much harder than I thought to keep up a blog.  Especially when you are in the habit of saying yes to too many things.  This is the most exhausted I have ever been at the end of a semester.  There were six talks at conferences, symposia, colloquia, other people's classes, all within three and a half weeks, and in the middle of it I took a test in Mandarin.  And all the talks (I also ran a session at a conference) were on completely different topics.  I made it hard on myself by deciding to do the Chinese class. In spite of all that I am going to try to keep up with the second semester.  In the photo above, alongside the title page of the novel is a sheet of my attempts to practice characters with a brush pen.  The larger characters are my Chinese name, 史北思 (Shi Bei Si).  The Bei Si sort of sounds like Beth in Chinese (about as close as you can get) and means northern thinker (or scholar) , which is funny because I am from the north and a professor.  Shi also has an appropriate meaning ('tho I forget it at the moment) and is a common last name in China.  It was selected for its meaning and because my family name begins with S.

But in spite of all the work I did manage to read the Merejkowski.  Now I can cross off the to-do list the idea of writing a novel on Leonardo's life to parallel the Agony and the Ecstasy for Michelangelo.  That was a bit of a stretch anyway.  This book, written in 1899 in Russian (the translation was from 1928), does that.  It seems to start in the middle of his life but manages to go back to his childhood through cleverly inserted sections of Leonardo's reminiscences.  This works well because the evidence for his early years is much fainter in detail and a bit unclear, like memories.  For much of the book, nearly the first 2/3s of it, we don't get much of a view of Leonardo and certainly are not privy to his thoughts.  As a character, he is seen in the background.  Other people are the narrators and we see him glimpsed through their eyes and thoughts.  One whole chapter was supposedly pages from Beltraffio's diary, which reports things he has been told by Leonardo.  They are straight out of Leonardo's notebooks!  Alongside such nearly non-fictional chapters are people experiencing drug induced hallucinogenic parties with pagan deities.  I kept thinking how clever it all was, keeping Leonardo himself at a distance so that his character and story are as mysterious as the historical Leonardo.  Then, slowly, we see him closer and closer, through the door of his studio, then in conversations with his employers and others, then we are with him in the studio, and finally we hear his thoughts.  I don't think I'm giving anything away by this description.  It's such an old book, and anyone who would read it certainly is already aware of Leonardo's life and work.  It ends of course with his death, not the mythologized dying in the king's arms but a scene that is much more plausible and in its own way poetic.

The translation is beautifully written except for one thing.  The upper-class and educated characters and the artists all speak in a quasi-Elizabethan dialect with lots of thou's and doth's and such.  It bothered me at first, but then the stiffness and oddness of it began to fade.  Then I noticed tradespeople and peasants spoke in a country English dialect.  So I fully expected when Salai showed up he would speak Cockney or something.  But no, he spoke the gentlemanly Elizabethan too, and was not referred to as Salai but by his first name.  He did not play a significant part except at one point he saves the day… no, I won't give that surprise away.

Most odd was the realization as I read it that nearly everything that scholars of the 20th and 21st centuries have found to say about Leonardo is in this novel, at least implied in it, including the attempt to characterize Mona Lisa as Leonardo in drag.  This is refuted in the novel nearly 80 years before that idea was proposed and a believable explanation for the similarity of Leonardo's self portrait (if that is indeed his self portrait) and Mona Lisa is offered.  I can't believe my luck to have this copy of the book fall into my hands by chance.  Ands thanks, Carey, for recommending it.

Edinburgh at 5 am.

High Street and the castle and Prince's Street Gardens from Waverly Bridge at 5:30 am

A rare quiet moment in the very center of Edinburgh in early August, taken on the way to the airport bus to head home.  If I had known how wonderful the city is before people are out, I would have extended the nine or ten hour hikes endured every day by an occasional pre-breakfast stroll in the mist.  In this photo the old buildings below High Street fade and the even older castle almost disappears in the fog, like the way things seem to rapidly withdraw into the past.  The silhouette of the iron fence and nearby tree create a frame on three sides and its U shape is then repeated in the mauve-colored paths turned 90 degrees in both the picture plane and the perpendicular plane of depth.  You can see the National Gallery in the center just below the castle.  This was taken at the last moments of a trip mostly focused on the museums, galleries, and visual-art Fringe events.  I thought visiting before the Festival days would avoid the crowds, but Edinburgh in August is as crowded as Florence in July!  Maybe more.  There were times when I couldn't move, the streets were so full of people.

One photo I would have like to get but couldn't because it went by too quickly was of a street sign seen on the bus ride into town.  Large rectangle, white letters on red, it said "Changing Priorities Ahead."  !  You know you're in another world seeing something like that.  I'm sure it means something about the arrangement of the roads, but it seems to be some kind of prophesy and sets me to thinking of all sorts of messages one could put on such signs.

There are a few things I didn't get to do.  I didn't get out to Little Sparta, the studio estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay (he called it a poem).  That was actually the first thing that had motivated me to visit, and I wasn't there the right time, didn't plan carefully enough.  A few hours earlier arrival or two days longer stay, and I could have taken a minibus trip that was only offered on Fridays in August.  It's virtually impossible to get there any other way, since the nearest bus stop is over four miles away.  Traveling lesson learned: plan carefully before reserving hotel room or purchasing air tickets.  I walked down Candlemaker's Row from Greyfriars, but couldn't find the sculpture of the little dog.  And I couldn't see much of the National Museum of Scotland because the Mary Queen of Scot's special exhibit ate up most of the afternoon. Half the National Gallery was closed for renovations.  But I'm not disappointed; I've excuses to return some day.

Getting there and getting around is very easy.  The Scots are very friendly and eager to be helpful.  The airport is tiny and easy to find your way through, and the bus takes you right to the center of town in just half an hour.  They run every 10 minutes in the first week of August.  You don't need exact change.  You can walk to anywhere in Old Town, New Town, or several neighborhoods surrounding them in a reasonable amount of time. I felt safe everywhere.  For weeks before going I was anxious and wondering if I was foolish to travel alone. It's been many years since I've traveled till I began again last summer.  I got a pin number for my Visa card and thought I was ready to get a good exchange rate, but then it turned out there had to be something in the card and the atm's wouldn't work. So I had to go to an exchange.  Surprise, the fees were much lower than getting Euro's with traveller's checks last year.  So I did ok anyway.  Rick Steve's advice was right.  Just go and trust that things will work out.  I will add more to this from my travel journal in days to come, including an experience of a possible haunting, thoughts on the art seen, sketches and photos. . . .