brianvds

It has been almost a year since I have last tried to do anything in oil. Withdrawal symptoms compelled me to take them up again. Only to find that I have become rather rusty, and had to relearn all manner of things. Still, in the end the thing didn't look much more or less horrid than all my previous attempts.



I keep track of how many oil paintings I do. This one is number 16. Another hundred or so and perhaps they'll start to look like something.

I stumbled upon this link the other day:

Night of a 1000 drawings

They are collecting small art works by anyone, at whatever level of skill, to sell in order to benefit some or other charity. So why not get a bit of experience while benefiting the poor and downtrodden? Here is what I came up with; it was fairly loosely done from a photo I recently took of jacarandas in bloom in a street near here. This time of year, all of Pretoria is purple with jacaranda blooms. The sketch is A5 size, as they requested, in pen and ink with watercolour:

A few recent small watercolour sketches, all turned into greeting cards...

About 15cm x 10cm:





And about 7cm x 10cm:

Decorations for a Halloween-themed barbecue, rather loosely copied from Goya's "Saturn devouring his children":



and from Arnold Böcklin's "Medusa":



Both Goya and Böcklin are probably turning in their grave, but that's precisely what Halloween is all about, not?

I have something of a love-hate relationship with Michelangelo. His genius is undisputed, but his work can be pretty weird. I'm thinking specifically of his Sistine Chapel decorations, with all those absurdly muscled figures. Including even the women! Still, they make for interesting drawing practice, so I tried my hand at the Delphic sibyl, which is one of the more normal-looking ladies he painted for Pope Julius.

Alas, halfway through the drawing I got the flu, and spent the next week or two in bed staring at the incomplete drawing. Must have been swine flu too, since I haven't had common old seasonal flu in ages. I thought I'm immune, but apparently not. Anyway, by the time I felt like myself again, I was sick of the drawing and left it somewhat incomplete.

Another one of my attempts to follow in the footsteps of the masters of old. This time, I tried out a copy of the Portrait of a gentleman, by Andy of the Chestnut, better known to art historians as Andrea del Castagno (1421-1457). It is entirely in HB mechanical pencil, so I did not get the darks quite as dark as they should be, but I think on this point I have good precedents on my side: in Castagno's time, lots of drawings were done in silverpoint, which tends to be a light, lyrical sort of medium. The original can be seen here, and here's my somewhat dubious copy; I think my drawing actually looks a bit better than this photo of it, which managed to make some dark lines look much darker than they actually are:

I decided to try my hand at a slightly more refined drawing than the quick and rough sketches that I usually do, by making a copy (or rather, trying to make a copy!) of an original by the 19th century French academic artist William Bouguereau (1825 - 1905). My drawing actually looks a bit better than the digital photo of it here, which somehow exaggerated tones and lines, and making the drawing look rougher than it is. But it is still pretty crude compared to Bouguereau's highly refined original, which can be seen here.

In short, I got almost everything wrong. For one thing, I failed to capture a likeness in the face, although I can perhaps forgive myself for that, because the head in my drawing is only 4 cm high, and it can be difficult to work on so small a scale. But I can see plenty of other problems here as well, some of which I only noticed now, and some of which I did notice while drawing but couldn't work out how to solve, or that I could solve but not without introducing new problems in the process. I do think the whole exercise was a very valuable learning experience though. As Ed Wood said of his awful movies, my next one will be better. Here is my attempt; it is about 25cm x 18cm, in pencil on cheap computer printer paper (which was of course mistake number one):



There is a perception amongst many contemporary art critics that Bouguereau and his academic colleagues were painters of kitsch for the upper middle classes, purveyors of mere polite pretty pictures. To those who hold to such views, I would suggest trying to copy some of his work, and then see whether there is anything at all "mere" about this level of technique and craftsmanship. I get the impression that much of the criticism against technically competent art is born from nothing more than simple jealousy, and that "kitsch" has become a word that means nothing more sophisticated than "highly skilled art that I somehow still don't like, and definitely couldn't produce myself."

It is of course true that Bouguereau painted for the rich, and that his paintings are mostly on the polite side. What else was he supposed to do? It took at least several weeks to complete a painting of this level of refinement, and such a painting then had to be sold for the equivalent of several weeks' worth of salary, or no artist would be able to make a living. Only the rich could afford to pay that kind of money for paintings, and hence it was inevitable that artists had to reach compromises between what they wanted to paint and what the market wanted. This is still true today.

Now had it been a mob of desperately poor peasants that complained about the bourgeois style of the academic painters, one might understand their vehemence. But the irony is that the people who accuse Bouguereau of being a mere propagandist for bourgeois values, are for the most part themselves as blandly bourgeois as you'll find anywhere on the planet. I have yet to meet an art critic who doesn't live in upper middle class comfort. That these people have the nerve to complain about how the academic artists didn't "challenge the status quo" is pretty rich, considering that neither they nor the artists they frequently do promote do anything of the sort either. People who really do challenge society end up in poverty, prison or both. They don't live comfortable middle class lives or get paid millions for their work like, say, Damien Hirst. So if it is not a sin for a contemporary artist to produce whatever the rich (and their favourite art critics) want, in order to make a decent living from his or her work, I wonder why it should be considered to have been such a sin for 19th century artists, especially ones that went to the trouble of acquiring actual skill at something other than postmodernist pseudo-philosophy.

But enough ranting. I have to get back to the drawing board, so to speak...

Quick, small sketches in pen and watercolour, both about 10cm x 14cm. Both done from reference photos; I am very far from being able to do this sort of thing from life, seeing as animals have the annoying habit of moving around all the time...

Yesterday I watched the 1992 film Bram Stoker's Dracula, and noticed something rather cool. In Dracula's castle, there is this old portrait of him hanging on the wall:



And here's another view, of the count himself, his latest victim sitting at the table, and the portrait in the background:



So does that painting look familiar to anyone?

It is of course based on the self-portrait by Albrecht Dürer, painted around 1500:



Always nice when film makers put little touches like this one in their movies. Next project: see if I can work out whether that sculpture behind the count is also based on some famous work of art...

I visited the botanical gardens in Pretoria today, for a picnic with friends. I wonder why I don't go there more often. The place is quite delightful, and filled with enough sketchable plants to last one for years. As it turned out I was lazy, because there are very few soporifics quite as effective as a mellow winter afternoon in Pretoria. But I did get around to making two small sketches in an A6-sized sketchbook, and also made time to take a few photos until the camera's battery gave up the ghost.

Here's a type of aloe:



Quite a number of species of these spiny succulents can be found in southern Africa, and they range in size from about 30 cm tall such as the one I sketched, to sizable trees.

And then a quick sketch of a smallish Strelitzia:



Larger specimens are also common in the garden, and I took a close-up of one of their quite exotic-looking flowers:



Here's a type of Euphorbia:



The genus Euphorbia is quite large and the plants range from small herbs, to medium-sized trees such as the above one, to quite large trees. Just about all of them contain a milky latex, and in the case of these tree-sized ones, colloquially known as candelabra trees, the latex is a quite potent skin irritant that will make you break out in red welts. It has traditionally been used as a fish poison (poured into rivers or dams, it stupefies the fish so that they can be caught by hand) and also to kill maggots in open wounds on livestock. So these trees are not to be trifled with. When I was in primary school I once went on a school camping trip, and when we arrived at the camp, a bunch of kids from another school were just leaving. One of them looked like he had had an altercation with a blowtorch. Well, it was one of those junior paramilitary type camps; in those days they were more or less compulsory. I have no idea what the situation is nowadays. Anyway, one of the things you were supposed to do was to learn how to camouflage yourself. The standard way is to simply smear your face with mud. But this poor city kid got creative and made a paste of soil and Euphorbia latex for his facial camouflage assignment. Some things you only do once.

Last but not least, the dry fruit of a wild teak (Pterocarpus angolensis), found in the warmer areas of the country. This time of year the trees are quite attractive, covered with these large pods. On my screen it shows up about actual size; two match boxes would just about cover it.



The wood of the wild teak is of high quality and can be used to make furniture.

That's it. Next time I'll take new batteries for the camera, and a bigger sketchbook.