Archibald entrant

At the same time as I am doing the thailand portrait below I am also working on an entry to the Archibald with this distingished Australian physicist. I have tried to capture the very different qualities of the man in each of the drawings. he is an excellent sitter so no need for photographs, except perhaps for the final stages of the painting.

The plan is to put him up on a 1 metre by one and a half metre canvas that will convey the range of this man's personality and abilities. I will add developments in this one as they happen in the lead up to next year's or the year after's competition.





It's clear from the two color pencil drawings that this is a man with two dominant aspects - strong analytical and clearly announced yet, behind that a sense of tenderness, retreat, of keeping himself back, of kindness.

The two ink and pen drawings bring another colouration to those aspects - one pointed with those exquisite beak-like Gallic features in nose, lips, jaw and hands. Yet he is all tangled up like a frightenned mess in the second one. For sure as I develop the figure in paint it will loose some of this raw honesty and become a bit pretty. I notice thatsome other painters lose that freshness as the work develops from early drawings/sketches up to the final brush stroke.

The excitement of surfing the moment when its time to leave it alone, is part of working in this medium - will I bugger it up by working it any more. The maxim of one of my teachers is 'for god's sake don't ever finish a painting'.

Portrait of young woman in Thailand

A few readers have commented on their interest in watchng earlier paintings develop, so I thought I would blog this project somewhat in real time, and add the painting as it develops. I started with a photo (cropped her so you get an ieea of the colors). I know the person quite well so am in part working from memory of her vibrant personality and inner calm.





Preparatory stages;

I did a very quick ink and pen drawing outlining the shapes.










Then I did a more careful work up with pen, ink and color pencils. The distortions of neck and head matter little at this stage.



Then I traced an outline of the actual size of the canvas (18" x 24") onto paper and used charcoal to draw the persepctive lines and the figure and ceramic vases.


Then I went over that with brush and ink and finally roughly painted with gouache.

This is looking pretty good, so I felt confident enough to put it onto the canvas with a charcoal outline. About a days work so far.



























Stage 1

The painting below is at the beginning of describing the landscape with acrylic paint. It's hot in Canberra at the moment and so I am adding a drying retarder to give me a bit of time. Usually acrylic in the summer will dry within minutes of application but with a little retarder I may have 20 and with a lot or retarder hours. It then moves around the canvas like oil paint.

The sky and clouds I am happy with and the perspective is great. I will continue in the next stage down into the swimming pool behind the figure and the large ceramic pots in the water.



















Stage 2:
The next paintings begin building up the figure.

Already I have changed the roof color from warm ochre to cool grey and the area behind her face from a custard to a milky blue. I am intending to bring the figure forward by playing with warm reds and cool blues. If I had pre-planned it meticulously I may have anticipated that decision in stage 1. Or if I were to paint with a habit of playing off warm and cold like Mary Cassatt did in many of her domestic scenes, Imay have saved myself some time. But each step is a discovery for me and that is part of the excitement. If I plan too much I find that I tighten up and the figure then looks tight.

As you can see from the disproportion of her head, I am going to have to move the area of her eyes higher up toward the hair line in order to get the inflection of the head. In the full photo her head is lifted and angled back somewhat, giving an impression of a statement like, 'I'm here! Check out the pool behind me'.




















Stage 3

This is six days into the work. I have lifted her eyes, reshaped the hair and forehead and begun to create a frame using the windows behind, which have curtains drawn. I have sharpenned the focus on her features and on the area around her. I painted her swimming gear hanging on the railling in the same colors as the blue vases and was surprised how effective it was. It seems to have brought life to the picture, creating a lovely triangular foundation, which connects the vases and the swim wear, bringing the figure forward of the picture plane. Emphasising the diagonals of the building, the swimming pool edge and now the imaginary triangle of vase and costume, and playing the warm and cold colors off each other, has projected the figure forward.

I will sit and look at it for quite some time before making a decision about the water. That will probably come as I start to bring out the features of her face and make small corrections in the background. It's tempting to follow the photograph and make the water a feature, which clearly in the architecture it is intended to be. A maxim of one of my teachers comes to mind: 'never become a slave to the photograph'.













Stage 4

It was a struggle to get here late in the afternoon and on a hot day. Yesterday's work I tightened up the background and removed glaring errors but I made such a mess of the figure that I was embarrassed to put a photo of that day's work on the web.

Today I have recovered the figure and solved the problem of the dress and the water.

Only last night did I get the idea that a red skirt would do it - this is a mixture of permanent alzaran crimson, ultramarine blue and dioxine purple with titanium white. The shirt is cadmium yellow deep, titanium white and a bit of alzaran crimson. I used a lot of retarder and after nearly an hour the paint was still wet - I hope I can keep my two year olds hands off it until tomorrow. he is free towander into the studio/garage where he has his own easel.

Finally today I have begun to deal with the weight of grey on the roof by putting a glaze of ochre, pthalo blue with titanium white. The next step will complete the face.

Canberra landscape diptych

This is a variation on the larger triptych discussed in October.

Each panel 12" x 16" and originally it was to be a triptych in those smaller panels, but I knicked one of the panels for the portrait of the 4 year old. As it turned out the two panels were exactly right for what I had in mind and quick to do. They took about three hours, and without preparatory drawings, only a rough charcoal outline on the canvas. Whereas the larger triptych seems to have taken months of planning - photos, the working drawings and draft paintings and finally to paint over maybe over a four weeks period. Probably took two months over all.

Given the ease of this I think I will produce a few more Canberra landscapes on this theme and experiment with paint application. In this one it is not clear to someone unfamiliar with the landscape that Lake Burley Griffin is in the middle ground, Lake George in the background and Black Mountain Tower on the little hill at the far top left of the first panel.

Portrait of 4 year old

Another family christmas present. This one began as a photo, then to ink drawings, then ink and colored pencils and finally into acrylics. Titled 'The Entrance' but really it should be 'red shoes', since that was her comment abut the painting when she openned it befpore christmas - I like the shoes'.

The photo was taken at the front entrance to their house and this girl is making a large entrance into life. Dimensions:12" X 16".

Portrait of our 2 year old and the aunt

The final product is 18" x 18".



I found this one difficult to finish knowing that it was to go to a member of the family for Xmas present. The aunt is also not well at the moment, her rich olive skin looks a bit pale. I intially put too much white on her skin, and recoloured after her sister noticed she looked sickly in the portrait. I figure I could go on forever trying to make it look right, so eventually made myself stop.

She has that billowing armchair look when at home in her dressing gown and our lad is snuggled into her looking at his green truck (in fact a white truck, but I didn't want it to stand out in his hands).

I found this one more challenging than the landscape below, which I did entirely for my own satisfaction. Commissioned portraits must be hell. A sitter can be very vain - not so in this case as I worked from a photograph.

Landscape complete & interpreted

Each panel 2 foot wide by 3 foot high.

Can you see the shadow of a bicyclist in the middle panel on the bottom left of the bike path, behind the prominent cyclist. This symbolic element can be read as the shadow of our journeyman-skywalker. The shadow appears black and I wanted that to reflect the haunting of our solo Canberran braving the elements, having stolen this land from the traditional owners and also give the main bike rider a sense of running from his personal, psychological shadow. Over the whole of this manufactured, beautiful landscape there are no people but for our head down rider and the others looking out of their apartment windows. As if each is afraid to put foot on the land. The little picnic area behind him is empty.

Above our journeyman flies his spirit symbol a bird, which in close up looks like the local grey and pink bird called a gallah. The word is used as an insult in Australia meaning a real idiot. And here that can be read as the Fool who steps out on the spirit journey; in the Tarot pack's journey and in Shakespeare's plays. The Fool who is redeemed by his child like innocence.

In silent witness is a stand of four ancient olive trees in the middle panel, bottom right hand corner. This appears to be part of an olive grove, with one of the trees incomplete as it meets the third panel. I intentionally created a chrisitan reference with the two crosses formed by the shadow of street lamps accross a path - taking a leaf out of Kandinsky's painting 'Old Town II' of 1902 - a lady on a path crossed by the shadow of a fence. I didn't realise the symbolism of the olive grove until I saw Andrew Denton's critical documentary, 'God On Our Side' about chrisitan broadcasters in the USA.



There is the remains of a morning mist hugging the mountain in the first panel. The time line is left to right, from mornng to late afternoon in the last panel.

In the second, a gallah floats beside a naked tree below, a skeleton of limbs or a burnt out hulk or is it the last tree to come into spring bloom, still with traces of frost or snow on its limbs - like the Oscar Wilde story of the giant's garden. In that story, a little boy befriends a fierce giant in a garden that seems perpetually in winter until the giant's heart melts in caring for the boy who turns out to be terminally ill, leaving our giant transformed and his garden open to all the children around. In my personal psychology all three elements connect - the skeleton of our body from which our spirit soars like a fool on its soul journey. The burnt out hulk of a body, still standing like a eucalypt tree, like a phoenix that regenerates after a fire storm. And the late bloomer. All speak about my view of my own life, soul and body.



How about the ghostly figures walking the plank. I wanted to tell the story of the traditional owners and leave it ambiguous enough for the white folk to be the ones walking the plank into a lake of their own creation. How about people at those 3 windows of the building at far right of this third panel. Inside they appear to live with a structural disconnect from the landscape. This is emphasized by that big swathe of flat cobalt green; by the surreal street light and the avenue seen from above that leads to it, completely out of perspective yet somehow believable. On the top far left corner of the far left panel is a suggestion of a telecom tower on its green hill that we call Black Mountain. The tower appears through the arch on the same panel. It is from the top of the tower that the view of the tree lined avenue in the far right panel derives.



In the middle distance of the middle and right panel is Lake George, a natural lake carved out by glaciers and once an inland sea, which stands on the outskirts of Canberra. Driving in from Sydney and out from Canberra, one has to cross the edge of this lake, completely dry from years of local drought. In the middle of the highway along its dry shore is a toilet convenience and rest area, which marks a memorial of a soldier who won the Victoria Military Cross in WW II. We are not afraid as the desert encroaches Canberra?

And in the far distance of the middle and right panel, faintly held on the horizon are snow covered hills. I'm pointing to the Snowy Mountains about three hours drive from Canberra. They are covered in snow gum and alpinbe heath, and beautiful white crisp snow for a few months of winter. But mountains? I've painted them as gentle hills.

The afternoon light casts a long shadow from the street lamp, suggesting west is to the left and that our cyclist is heading north, the direction of the warm winter sun in the southern hemisphere. He is about to leave the second panel and in the time line suggested by the first panel's early mornng, he is about to enter the last third of his life.

Canberra landscape triptych - first look

A couple of days work and it is looking ready to start the sky. Given the range of elements to unite, the best look will unite the top of the 3.

Canberra landscape triptych - work up

My idea of canberra's edges as a disconnect in this triptych. First begun with a set of photographs taken around the Curtin storm water drain and the southern end of the lake.



Then worked up in color pencil.




And then a first paint up in gouache.



Finally a decision of the triptych divisions.

Canberra's edgy extremes - city without a soul?

This picture is not a Canberra landscape but perhaps how I imagine it. Canberra was conceived by decree. As a town it lacks the activity of a spontaneous history in its colonial origins. It lacks chaos. The traditional owners who celebrate the wild, were moved aside, their lands stolen to make way for white settlement. Canberrans live on stolen property. I wonder how that seeps into our consciousness and how to paint that figuratively rather than a figure of Ngunnawal pointing the bone. We try to hide and to hide from the spirit of the land, but it is here, perhaps haunting our footsteps.

Most of the edges to water are managed by concrete to prevent anything flowing its own way. This is in a dry arid land, with little annual rainfall. Man made 'lakes' are circled by clearly marked paths, which even the birds seem to respect. They are shallow and only exist because of concrete damn walls down stream. Each suburb has a show piece of one of these large ponds.

In any other place I would expect to see the ebb and flow of white settlement. Those that rise and flow with the rainfall and climate, with economic expansion and contraction over many decades. Allotments at the edges of the suburbs where people were free to grow anything and to build what they liked. Alley ways between buildings where traders eke out a living rent free. Coffee stands greeting the football crowd all along the route to the stadium. And everywhere the aboriginal community squeezed into an existence in shanty towns at the edges of town. None of this is permitted. The image of African Americans living in the alley ways between beautiful Victorian buildings in Hollins Street, Baltimore before the great fire of 1914, described in "Mencken - the American iconoclast. The life and times of the bad boy of Baltimore", was nowhere to be seen ever in Canberra.

Everywhere the edge is imposed and innovation subject to fiat and decree. As a consequence, Canberrans seem to me at times frightened of edges. As one visitor put it to me, overseas travel for Canberrans is crossing the bridge that divides northern from southern suburbs. It can takes weeks of preparation and a number of phone calls on the day - by the traveler to make sure the person is at home and is expecting them and by the person at home to make sure the fool hardy visitors are safely on their way.

God forbid that we should find ourselves in a strange suburb without a house to scurry into or that our 'overseas' travelers may be abandoned to their fate having gone to the wrong street,or perhaps worse, the wrong house in the right street. This would be somewhat understandable if it were the landscape pictured above. But the place is on an almost flat plain with gentle suburban slopes and sometimes snow capped hills beyond its perimeter that we call mountains.

We appear cautious about the unmapped areas of life. Quickly retreating behind our suburban or career screens. It is a place where many short stay inhabitant describe isolation as the reason for their leaving. It is like a city of bits that has the illusion of unity welded onto it. No-one quite believes it's a city.

Those of us who stay have somehow accommodated the isolation behind sculptured suburbs, by extremes of interests and activities. We proclaim Canberra has a soul and that you don't have to scratch the surface much to find it. I have found it in the bush surrounding the place and among the warm and welcoming people I hang out with.

It is de rigeur to proclaim Canberra lacks a soul, usually by the very people who make Canberra, per capita the greatest contributer of volunteers Australia wide. For example, Canberrans give as much blood to the Red Cross blood bank as half the population of NSW. Population Canberra 340,00. Population NSW 6.73 million.

Because of our high average education and income, we are also on average, the healthiest and most longest lived in Australia, which we tend to put back into communities around the world through volunteering, donations and gifts. So the soulless claim is not about heart - I think it's a victim statement, such as, 'poor us don;t blame us for Federal Governement actions and inactions, we're without a soul.'

I am working on a landscape, painting it as a triptych. I am discovering that landscape is a medium of ideas. Canberra is an idea sculptured into its plan. This pervades the social life of the town and I want to put that into my painting. I wonder who and what is marginalia by the process? How to paint that cultural landscape?

'Rhetorics of Space, Place, Mobility, Situation: Some sources' at http://wrt-howard.syr.edu/Bibs/Space&Place.htm
The lure of sacred sites http://www.saskworld.com/bodymindspirit/edition17/05_article_martin.htm

The longing of flesh for metal

"Lieber and colleagues built a chip with 20-nanometer-thick silicon wires running across its surface (Science, vol 313, p 1100). On top of the chip the researchers grew rat neurons, which stretched out their axons (the long projections that transmit signals to other cells) and the shorter extensions called dendrites, which receive signals. The axons and dendrites formed more than 50 connections per neuron with the nanowires, each about the size of a natural synapse" 02 September 2006 New Scientist. They reported that it went better than they had expected.

I imagine as the flesh grew toward and into the metal there was this lusty cry of 'at last we are as one'. My sense is that this marriage is the beginning of the next stage of work toward Singularity. A convincing artificial intelligence is only required to make human experience of meeting an android believable to sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. Our willingness to fall in love with our cars, to anthropomorphize our pets, to long for gadgets and for extensions of ourselves like shoes and photograph albums, will guarantee that this embodiment of flesh's lust for metal will not be perceived as alien or other - well at least no more than we do each other already.

This longing of flesh for metal is different from the passion that artists and sculptors exhibit in forming human flesh out of paint of marble. I think of Chaim Soutine who in a kind of wild frenzy would build up layers of oil paint, throw swollen brushes at the canvas, until the form almost filled with a palpable life of its own. Like Rembrandt and Michelangelo, Soutine learned from cadavers. Michelangelo even thrashed human corpses in order to observe the deformations that occurred so as to better sculpt the body of Christ. This kind of passion is of flesh for flesh.

I think the longing of flesh for metal must have something to do with the lust for life too, but of immortal life - maybe a hope that in marrying metal we can live forever, always able to self-repair or upgade the broken bits to the new model. "Metal is neither a thing nor an organism, but a body without organs." G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Nomadology

A gender theory provocation about human-metal fusion begins: "The Artificial Intelligence cyborg has its own gender." More at http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=384

Intimacy and healing

Can there be intimacy without healing?

I have tendered this theme before in the title link above, and having just re-read that article I find that all the nuances of that question are not yet tapped. The whole of my peter fox website is in fact an exploration of that singular question.

Simultaneously, I am reading 'Michelangelo and The Reinvention of the Human body' by James Hall. He explores the ice maiden theme in Michelangelo's sculptures of the Madonna. It reprises the same pattern found in Dante's relationship with his Beatrice - whose rejection could turned him into ice. Hall asks how could a mother, herself divine and 'knowing' her child's fate, allow him to go to his destiny on the cross. There is no evidence in the exquisite marble of Michelangelo's sculture that Mary doubted her role in bringing to life a child, later a Rabbi who would die horribly after only a four year ministry.

Michelangelo challenged the sweetness and light of the then and now prevailing Madonna icons (reflected today in a construction of marriage - wife a Madonna, lover a whore) by presenting her as having held herself at a distance with a self-sacrificing nobility. Her tenderness is unavailable to the viewer. Could you imagine that Madonna indulging in baby talk?

Her vulnerability only begins to show in the moment captured by the Pieter of 1498-9 pictured above, as if an iceberg had just begun to melt. It seems Michelangelo's Madonna must have had a source of self-sustaining intimacy from the outset. No doubts about her value as 'The Mother' nor any disconnection from that knowing in her self. Nor any passionate relationship with her man - a virgin (which, of course in contemporary translations of the Aramaic reads as an unmarried pregnant woman not an immaculate conception).

The utter exposure and vulnerability of her child collapsed in her arms in the Pieter points to a heart opening truth for those who have kept themselves at a distance from intimacy - you only know what you've got when you lost it. It is also a moment that is available in marriage - a healing without that burden of messiah, crucifixion or gender.

However, it is not safe to be so utterly exposed and vulnerable to a person who holds themselves at that kind of distance until you're dead. But guess what, it happens in marriages, especially those with this as a model of intimacy.