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| 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.
