Les fleurs de l'amour

Les fleurs de l'amour

The opening image is from my video My Fling With Flowers and the closing image is from my video Variations on a Theme. Both are on the theme but the subject is different. 

Les fleurs de l'amour

I consider the videos to be two of my best, but audience ratings differ. Maybe viewers can't cotton on to what I am portraying. Either that, or the beauty that is inherent in both alludes them. Many artists with a passion for the nude have, like myself, an attraction to the flowers of love in whichever form they take. Both subjects unashamedly reveal their charms.   

The creative potential of a child

 

My Christmas present from Enoch, my six-year-old grandson, brings me back to the theme of the creative potential of a child. Over the years I've featured my own children, my grandchildren and my friend's children. The secret is to catch them young for they soon loose the ability to see the world through the eyes of a child. As Picasso said:

It took me two years to paint like Raphael but a lifetime to paint like a child...What might be taken for a precocious genius is the genius of childhood. When the child grows up, it disappears without a trace.

Enoch's creative signature indicates that for the time being all is well. 

But there's more to come. My brother's Christmas message warns me that one of his grandchildren has been given a box of paints for Christmas and he fears he may grow up like me!

Celebrating one-thousand posts

 
Work in progress on the sculpture You Must Believe In Spring 

This week marks my one-thousandths post from my Caribbean Island of Dominica. Over the last fifteen years these diary pages have been viewed by over half-a-million artists and art students in over 90 countries. What began with thirty hits per day, now has a daily audience of over 300.

You can add to the above score, the hundreds of posts I made thirty years ago from my studio in England. That was in the days before before blogs were invented. My brother laboriously posted my work each evening by way of a website. The opening image is from those early days.

I thank my followers from around the world for being an essential part of my work. 

A different way of seeing

Click on the image to view video

My latest video invites the viewer to join me in a feverish search in lines and paint. As with my video Variations on a Theme the images are illusive. Collectively they form a moving collage that invites you to explore the detailed contents of a painting.

The opening image is taken from the video and was last featured eight years ago in a post titled A Different Way of Seeing. What I said then remains relevant.

My paintings of the nude favour the bare minimum, both in setting and technique. I offer no distractions and I do not patronise the viewer with detailed finish. What I do offer, through my paintings and these diary pages, is an invitation to enter into the creative process. If I’m repetitive; so be it: if I bore you; hard lines. I know of no other way of finding what I’m searching for. And if per chance – usually by accident rather than intent – I succeed, there is then the difficulty of seducing you, the recipient, by way of a language that you can learn to understand.

A comment on that post shows that I'm getting the message across. It reads:

What a fantastic take on nude art! I fell in love with this at first sight.

In recent years I have extended that language by way of videos that invite the viewer to delve deeper into my paintings, and find within them, secrets that are not revealed at first glance.

Below are the fingers of the model's right hand.

I'll fling 'til my fling is all flung

A frame from my forthcoming video.

Nothing puts the back up of today's watercolourists more than my way of working in watercolour. They tell me that I am doing it all wrong: I should use a smaller brush, add less water, take my time and paint more carefully. In other words, they claim I make a mess of things. Be that as it may, I don't intend to change. In my remaining years, I'll continue flinging down watercolours until my fling is all flung.

Just as I encourage my models to twist and turn as they please - and catch them before they roll off the modelling stand - I allow my watercolours to run amok. Sometimes I catch them in the nick of time, but more often than not I allow them the freedom to add their contribution to the creative process. 

Incidentally, the No. 14 sable brush that threw down the thunderous washes, is the same brush with which I signed my name. It's been working in my favour for over fifty years.

The video I'm working on will doubtless send my critics all the more into a tither. It continues the theme of my video My Fling With Flowers, but as with my videos, The Art Of Suggestiveness and Variations On A Theme, it's the nude that I'm deflowering.

In the words of Betty Hutton Don't Preach To Me.

From her shoulders down

My bathing figure is gradually immerging from its waste mould, from her shoulders down. You last saw her over a month ago as a clay sketch in my posts If it were any easier and Can you guess. 

The process of making the mould and revealing what lies beneath has been thwart with difficulties, all of my own making. It serves to prove the maxim: If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong, and at the worst possible moment. 

My first mistake was omitting to reinforce the mould in the vicinity of the figure's waist. This resulted in the mould breaking when separated. My second mistake was to brush too much clay wash on the flick coat, thus causing insufficient adhesion to the outer plaster casing. The sections broke away had to be delicately glued back in place. My third mistake was to miscalculate the amount of plaster needed for the pour. Not filling the mould in one go may have created voids and weakness in the cast. These will become apparent as I carefully break away more of the mould.

 The broken rear cap of the waste mould.

An appeal for models, paintings and photographs from the past

For a catalogue of my life's work as a painter and sculptor I am trying to trace models, paintings and photographs from the past. 

I have kept in touch with Alice, my model and assistant who worked with me in the 1980's when my studio was located in the Virgin Islands, but I have lost touch with others, namely: Hemo, Annetta, Gretel, and the twins, Pearl and Pearline. They must all now be in late middle age, just as I am now in old age. but I would be happy to hear from them.

Hemo and Annetta

Gretel

     

                                                                 Pearl and Pearline

Almost all the hundreds of paintings I made of the Caribbean between the years 1975 and 1995 sold to eager buyers. If you own one of those paintings I would be grateful if you could send me a photograph. The same applies for the scores of sketches I made on the pavements of France and Belgium in the 1960's, and the paintings I made of the Norfolk town of Kings Lynn in the early 1970's. 

Over the years onlookers have taken thousands of photographs of me at work. Perhaps someone, somewhere, has one tucked away in an album.

Please contact me via the contact form listed on the sidebar of this blog if you can help with any of the above.

Life-Classes with a Difference

My wife Denise models for a life-class held along the river that flows by my studio. 

The life-classes that I occasionally teach from my studio are different to the structured life-class taught in art schools. My students are more likely to find the model bathing in the river than posing on the modelling stand. Furthermore, the model remains nude from the beginning to the end of the session, including breaks for rest and refreshments. Thus, the nude figure becomes the comfortable norm rather than the disconcerting exception. And the nude is nude. The model is not sexualised with the distraction of a bikini.

The images below, with Denise again as the model, show the steps from the model, to the preliminary sketch, to the sculpture of my life-size reclining figure. 

My book Notes on the Nude and the related video delves deeper into the challenges of working from the live model. 

Mans obsession with fakes

Leonardo's painting of Mona Lisa isn't a fake, but the background behind the sitter is. 

Man's obsession with fake backgrounds was carried over from painting to photography, as evidenced in the studio portraits of the 19th and 20th century. The image below is from my brother's collection of vintage studio photographs.

The obsession continues today with virtual off-the-shelf backgrounds for videos. The presenter of a Caribbean podcast on the theme of the region's culture, is shown in the virtual surroundings of a wealthy western world study. By contrast, the distinguished guest speaker contributes from his unpretentious West Indian home environment.

To Hell With Culture

Next Tuesday, over 3000 guests are expected to visit Tortola as part of the Ubersoca Cruise’s inaugural visit to the British Virgin Islands. The Premier and Minister of Tourism described the event as a milestone for the territory’s tourism and cultural industries. The island's Junior Minister for Culture and Tourism said the event would provide an opportunity for visitors to experience the authenticity of Virgin Islands culture.

To put the visit in perspective, one must bear in mind that the total population of the British Virgin Islands is less than 40,000, and up to the advent of mass tourism, the island's cultural industry was fishing and farming.

If the Ubersoca visit reflects the authenticity of Virgin Island culture, times have certainly changed since the early 1980’s when I published my book Virgin Island Sketches, a page from which is shown below. In those days the islands proudly boasted, ''Yes, Were Different''. More recently, they have become intent on being the same as everywhere else.

When will Caribbean leaders realize that culture is not a commodity to be flaunted and sold. Its true worth lies deep in the hearts of the people.

My recent video has more to say about the changes brought about by mass tourism in the Caribbean.  

I have taken the title for this post from Herbert Read's book To Hell With Culture.

Delving into the archives

Detail of the finished clay beneath the dramatic roof of my studio.

These images are of work in progress on my sculpture, ''Ýou Must Believe In Spring''. They are from a collection of over 600 that date from the 1990's to the early years of this century that record work in progress for my original website diary. As that was before the convenience of blogger, I depended on my computer savvy brother posting the pages daily by way of a ''sculpturestudio'' website. In those days computer hard drives had limited capacity and to save space the images were later saved in low resolution. I am now delving into those images and the pages of text that went with them. The content warrants reissuing in one form or another for my present day followers worldwide.

The armature for the clay and Denise applying the flick coat of plaster for the waste mold.

Lifting the waste mold and the completed plaster cast 

of my model Geneen emerging from the mold.

The story behind this sculpture, and sculptures in my series ''Daughters of the Caribbean Sun'', can be found in the book Notes On The Nude.

Can you guess?

The opening image is not the face of the moon.  What you are seeing is the finished clay figure below after I've thrown wet plaster at it. In other words, the first stage of taking a waste mold. 

 

The process of making a waste mold is described in detail in a series of posts that date from March 2017, and in my video that follows work in progress on sculptures in my series Daughters of the Caribbean Sun.

If it were any easier...

Work in progress on a 1/3rd life-size clay sketch of a bathing figure. 

If it were any easier, everyone would be doing it...If it were any more difficult, no one would.

The above maxim I've found to be true for feats as diverse as sailing small boats across oceans and modelling a 1/3rd life-size clay sketch of a bathing figure. My present task being made all the more difficult as I am minus the live model. I don't need a model for detail, but for capturing life. To suggest rather than to define; to resist finish, so as to leave room for you to enter the creative process.

The sculpture is based on this pastel sketch of islanders bathing in the rivers of Grenada forty years ago. Those scenes are now a thing of the past. They are however permanently etched in my memory and hence, model or no, my attempt to recreate the vision of those halcyon days.

Bathing Figure

The French have a word for it.

The Crouching Woman. A painting by the Belgian artist Adrien de Witte (1850-1935)  

Déshabillé: The state of being carelessly or partially clothed.

In figurative art, one could extend the meaning by adding: A glimpse of the body unintentionally revealed.

For the artist, this is easier said than done. The unintended glimpse is not one that can be staged in the studio. It invariably happens when the sketch book isn't at hand. Attempts to recreate that illusive moment, from memory or the posed model, are rarely successful. However, the opening painting by Adrien de Witte of a kneeling woman is a masterly exception. 

My own contribution to the genre is of a model at her first sitting. The sarong was meant to be tied above her breasts, but as she turned it slipped, and the unintentional won preference over what was meant to be.

The unintended glimpse is easier to achieve in the moving image, as in this 1968 live recording of Eartha Kitt singing, If you go away.

The permanence of a fleeting glance

I doubt that you'll be able to make head nor tail of today's image, but I can. It is one of my sketches of villagers bathing in the rivers of the Caribbean. 

Those fleeting glances are permanently etched in my mind, and the information they contain is worth more than scores of studies from a statically posed model. As years go by these sketches have become all the more precious to me because bathing alfresco is a thing of the past. Bathing is now done unseen within the seclusion of the shower curtain. What was once seen as innocence is now deemed as improper.

Those sketches, and my memories of villagers bathing in the Caribbean rivers, resulted in my life-size sculpture, Bathing Figure.