The First of August...how did that happen?
I guess I haven't been paying attention, for now the calendar is already flipping to August.
A friend is in Paris today for her birthday and we wish her a great celebration.
Thinking of Paris offers me a chance to post a rogue Jurney painting. It's wee (ca. 6"x8", 15x20cm).
I know it's of a gallery in the Louvre, but I don't remember when I painted it (or why). One can still see some pencil lines that were possibly an attempt to straighten out cockeyed paintings.
Below is a study that I'm working on (16" x 6 5/8", 40 x 17.5 cm). The outside scene is not complete--- the building will likely have a window and a door based on this section of a 1994 French drawing.
I'm most concerned at this point with getting the inside/outside difference correct, and with figuring out just the right amount of contrast and haziness to tell the story of a bright, sun-filled day.
Much time was spent on the tile floor. Ultimately I resorted to a book on perspective. The correct method turned out to be both dry and mechanical, but I managed to start softening its starchiness before I left the studio today. Do forgive, please, all the wavering lines of the doorways. It's just a plaything.
There's something about the light in this sketch at the moment which is, to me at least, quite evocative of the Macchiaioli.
My sketch is certainly as tall and skinny as many Macchiaioli paintings are short and horizontal. But I think it's a hint of Italian warmth that's doing it.
Doesn't it seem strange that a nondescript doorway, looking out onto a drawing made in Normandy almost twenty years ago, should combine in my mind to suggest Italy?
Cheers.
Along the Hudson
When I first began to paint, I was much in thrall to the Hudson River School painters, a loose group of American painters active from about 1840-1875.
In 1982, I cajoled some of my artist friends to attend a meeting I'd called for the purpose of organizing a camping trip to the Adirondacks. Here's my invitation to the meeting, complete with a couple of DJ pen scratchings.
Off we went, enjoying a great, four-day break. We camped at Huntley pond, the site of the cooking watercolor from the other day.
Here's a Winslow Homer watercolor from the Blue Ledge.
And mine from upriver a bit.
And a couple of others of mine from the Adirondacks.
Here's a rather brooding, early oil of Huntley Pond.
Rather a somber concoction, isn't it? I expect it was 24x30" (60x74cm). I don't remember it being so full of Sturm-und-Drang.
This photo finds me perched on a rock, next to the Hudson River where it's narrow enough to throw a stone across it.
Here's a painting from about the same time. It's a view of the Hudson much closer to New York.
At the same time, I was exploring different ways to apply the paint. Here's a Hudson painting (it's way in the distance) in which I've done extensive charcoal drawing and then left a good bit of it exposed.
Here's another, of Buttermilk Falls in the Adirondacks, in which I really let the charcoal drawing be a part of the final painting.
There are some other Hudson paintings for which I haven't found the photos (if, indeed, they exist). I was exploring not only ways of applying paint but also spending much time thinking about what I might want to say about the places I painted.
Here's a quite large painting of a view much-painted by the Hudson River School painters. Far in the distance is the river itself. Unfortunately the photo is quite blurry, but here it is.
All of this was more than a quarter of a century ago. My ideas, and my paint handling, have changed a lot. Still, as I look at these images, I can almost recall the fellow who made them.
