The effects I'm searching for

 

Continuing yesterday's theme, today's picture shows another variation. This time dye and pastel as mix media. I have found pastel to be amazingly permanent when applied to fabric and it can be added with speed. And speed is of the essence in the effects I'm searching for.

The semi-sheer quality of cotton voile is a important contributing factor in that it allows the passage of light. 

Variations in subject and technique

The above images were painted with the same dyes, on the same fabric and for the same dress design but with extreme variations in subject and technique. 

   

I feel that I am only at the beginning of exploring the creative potential of my foray into fashion.    

A Mad Scientist

A recent message from a friend here in Dominica, whose specialty is natural fibers and pigments, reads: "My experiments with natural pigments is obsessive and a bit like being a mad scientist with jars and bottles everywhere..." 

I know how it feels because my experiments with painting on fabric with dye have resulted in hundreds of test samples. The variables are endless and I keep loosing track of which combination works best in terms of colour and permanence. In applying the dye there are many similarities to my technique of painting with watercolour. It hinges between freedom and control. The freedom being daring to throw down colour and the control being split-second time between one brushful and the next.

The frustration is the time spent between one experiment and the next. Dye needs a couple of days to settle into the fabric before it can be washed. Only then do I know if the colours have held fast. 

The time on my hands is spent on the never ending task of keeping clear the path that leads down to the river, dealing with engineering emergencies and making a start on a retrospective collection of my paintings. Below is a foretaste from the collection: a watercolour that dates from 1969.

Social Media's Horror of Nakedness

The Judgement of Paris by Peter Paul Rubens (1577/1640)

 

The video "Social Media doesn't want you to see Rubens' Paintings" is a brilliant piece of satirical art.

As regular followers of my blog know, many of my paintings and sculptures have suffered the same fate as Ruben together with countless other artists, past and present. When an item is "flagged" by the "experts" employed to police Social Media sites appeals are invariably fruitless. In terms of nudity, their Community Guidelines are also fruitless in that they call to attention the very things that they seek to hide.

My book Notes on the Nude suffered the same fate with Amazon/KDP. After weeks of technically adjusting page layouts to meet their requirements I received the following message:

During our review process, we found that this content is in violation of our content guidelines. As a result, we cannot offer this book for sale. If we identify additional submissions with similar content that violates our guidelines you may lose access to optional KDP services and/or face account level actions up to and including termination.

The picture below, which shows work in progress on one of my sculptures, is a typical example of social media's horror of nakedness. It has been "flagged" time and time again. Thank goodness for Blogger!

Life is too short to wear boring clothes

The above applicable quote and graphic illustration I found on the internet. I'm not sure who it is attributed it to. 

Anne Hollander in her book The Fabric of Visions - The Role of Drapery in Art has this to say about the creative potential of fabrics:

Representative art has always dwelt on the fascinating capacity of cloth to bunch, stretch, hang or flutter, to be smooth and unsmooth under different circumstances, to be wrought upon and then restored, and wrought upon differently another time.

If you add to the above texture and colour you may well ask: why, for the most part, is today's fashion so boring.  

My foray into fashion design has giving me the ultimate creative challenge. In all other visual art forms I have found role models, in the world of fashion I cannot find a single source that inspires me. Today’s designers appear to be more concerned about the style of their dresses rather than in revealing the beauty of what lies beneath. I am visualizing from square one and creating from scratch. 

My experiments explore the theme of Robert Herrick's poem which dates from the 16th century:

A sweet disorder in the dress

Kindles in clothes a wantonness;

A lawn about the shoulders thrown

Into a fine distraction;

An erring lace, which here and there

Enthrals the crimson stomacher;

A cuff neglectful, and thereby

Ribands to flow confusedly;

A winning wave, deserving note,

In the tempestuous petticoat;

A careless shoe-string, in whose tie

I see a wild civility:

Do more bewitch me, than when art

Is too precise in every part.

  A lawn about her shoulders thrown...

In case you missed it

America’s first-ever National Youth Poet Laureate, Amanda Gorman, reads “The Hill We Climb” at the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Gorman has become the youngest poet ever to perform at a presidential inauguration, calling for “unity and togetherness” in her self-penned poem.

Amanda Gorman's poem and her flawless presentation is a credit to us all. She radiates the natural beauty of her race: no bleached skin, no straightened or false hair and no disguised facial features. 

To paint like a child

 

"It took me two years to paint like Raphael but a lifetime to paint like a child"

The quote is attributed to Pablo Picasso and the child in the picture is my grandson Enoch framed by one of his own masterpieces. His rapped attention is directed to me on my sewing machine, not I hasten to add at work on the latest addition to my range of fashion designs but making bean bags for himself.

Picasso went on to say:

What might be taken for a precocious genius is the genius of childhood. When the child grows up, it disappears without a trace.

This ties in with the theory that a child is born with 98% the creative potential of genius but by adulthood peer pressure and conformity has reduced it to less than 2%.

Unforseen creative potential

Today's picture is a detail from a painting I made of one of my models five years ago. It is related to the text, but in a roundabout way. I haven't shown the entire painting because it would give the game away: the secret being, finding unforeseen creative potential.

My lifetime's search for creative potential in others has always taken unexpected turns. I seldom find it where you might expect. For the most part art college graduates fall on unproductive ground. On the other hand, I am sometimes surprised to find unforeseen talents in my models. 

The young lady who modelled for today's picture is a case in point. During our painting sessions conversation was limited to a few words. Her emails were even briefer. But I always suspected that something lurked beneath her reserved demeaner and that one day it would be revealed. 

She went away to another land, as did many of my models after the hurricane, and we lost touch. A few days ago a brief email linked me to a YouTube series of unrehearsed and unscripted conversational videos she has made. In each episode she displays a rare ability of talking naturally and intimately face to face with the camera. 

I stress "camera" rather than by the microphone alone. During the war years Billy Holt, an acquaintance that I featured in an earlier post, won the BBC's broadcaster of the year award by virtue of a long pregnant pause in one of this talks. If truth be know, he had fallen asleep at the microphone. 

My protegee manages to do this on camera! One day soon I'll link you to the secret.

Don't Stop the Carnival

 

"Carnival" my latest Bare Minimum design.

The critics went overboard in praise of Herman Wouk's 1965 Caribbean masterpiece "Don't Stop the Carnival"...An exuberant comedy spiced with sex and tragedy...compulsively, clock racingly readable, etc. etc. What the critics would not have known is how accurately the novel portrayed real life in the Caribbean half a century ago. I know - I was there!

My latest Bare Minimum design is based on a painting I made years ago of the Dominica carnival. In contrast to the restrained colours on many of my earlier designs, this time around I let rip and threw dye down left, right and center. The material is semi-shear cotton voile and the design is hand painted with fabric dyes.

Deceased: Return to Sender

The settlement of Seymour, Long Island, Bahamas

Our voyage through the Bahamas met all the requirements of sailing on a preverbal shoe string that I mentioned in my last post. In those days the islands to the south were sparsely populated and the chances of selling paintings were few and far between. Even when sailing the islands to the north, we shared anchorages with only a few other boats and met only a smattering tourists. 

At Hopetown things seemed to take a turn for the better when a family from the States expressed lukewarm interest in one of my paintings. The sale was touch and go but it carried my usual rash guarantee that if ever they decided to part with the painting I would buy it back.

For a few weeks we lived comfortably on the proceeds of the sale. Then a letter arrived saying they had changed their mind and would like to return the painting for a refund. In dismay I rowed across to my good friend, author and fellow sailor, Fritz Seyfarth. Fritz re-sealed the envelop and went searching for what he called his "Termination Stamp". The next day I dropped the letter back in post with the envelop clearly marked front and back "Deceased: Return to Sender".

101 Different Ways

The author's thirty-foot ketch Sarah Hannah sailing the Bahamas in 1978

Those of us who sailed small boats across oceans fifty years ago did so on a shoestring. When the shoestring got to an end we earned our way as best we could. As most of us had built or restored the boat we sailed, we were not without skills. 

We sailed our thirty-foot ketch Sarah Hannah from the Caribbean to the Bahamas in 1978 and spent the hurricane season anchored in Man-O-War Key. We shared our anchorage with only four other boats. Just a short walk away was a deserted coral sand beach that stretched as far as the eye could see. It was on that beach, under a makeshift palm fond shelter, that I wrote a little book titled 101 Ways to Earn a Living Afloat.

The content was a collection from all the various trades that my fellow small boat sailors plied in order to survive. I wrote the text by hand. I had no lap-top or Word Document to turn to. Below is the index page.

Included in the contents was the trade of one young man who funded his sailing by making custom bikinis in the cabin his small boat using a hand-crank sewing machine . He told me it was a pleasant task that brought him into contact with countless attractive young ladies and material costs were negligible.

I can vouch for the negligible materials costs, if not the young ladies, because I can make eight bikini bottoms out of one yard of material!

I'm not sure what guarantee I can give with bikini bottoms but my little book ended with these words.

Just Friends

Just Friends. A painting by Egon Schiele (1890-1918)

Egon Schiele's painting Just Friends is not one of his best known works, or perhaps his best, but it is one that I can relate to. A few years ago I was unexpectedly faced with the same subject. Keeping true to the innocence of the title - friends rather than lovers - is a difficult balancing act, as is also spontaneously capturing two figures entwined. 

My painting came about when a first-time model brought her friend along for company. The prospective model had reservations and it was her friend, who had not come with the intention of modelling that suggested, perhaps it would help if she modelled alongside her. First sessions can be nerve raking for both artist and model and suddenly I was faced with not one model but two. 

I had fifteen minutes to attempt the impossible. I failed but within a hair's breadth of success, as can be seen in the detail and the thumb-nail image of shown below. Egon Schiele wisely avoided faces whereas I needlessly complicated the task by inclusion.

Incidentally, both the prospective model and her friend have since become regular subjects for my paintings.   

I wish my hundreds of regular follows scattered throughout the world a Happy and Creative New Year. I leave you with Sarah Vaughan appropriately singing Just Friends.

Subtleties

In this evening's fading light I captured today's image. It expresses better than words the subtlety I am searching for in my Bare Minimum designs: a fleeting veiled glance of the figure complimented with a touch of spontaneous decoration. 

The material is cotton voile and the design is hand painted with fabric dyes. No polyesters, no computerized printing techniques or graphics are involved. It's all natural, all original and non-repetitive.

“The nude alone is well dressed.”

 

Photograph by surrealistic photographer Josef Breitenbach (1896 - 1984)

The sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840 - 1917) claimed that the nude alone is well dressed. After trolling through thousands of images of the work of today's fashion designers, I could not agree more. Today’s designers appear to be more concerned about the style of their dresses rather than in revealing the beauty that lies beneath. No wonder that their models look so miserable.

Snow, ice, fog, floods and storm force winds.

 Photo Credit innews

The naming of storms and hurricanes used to be limited to the tropical Atlantic but more recently England has taken up the device. Storm Caroline is expected to hurdle across England this weekend bringing with it snow, ice, flooding and storm force winds.

Although there are many who perhaps feel envious of my tropical location I doubt that there are many who would relocate if given the chance. One winter, many years ago, I put this to the test. My 16 ton gaff cutter was securely anchored in an idyllic cove in the Virgin Islands. I needed to spend two months in England and came up with the idea of a swap: my boat for your house. But you know what... my advertisements in the UK press didn't bring in a single solitary response!

While my UK followers have been battling with adverse weather, I've been adding the barest minimum to my Bare Minimum fashion label. This includes more designs in hand-tied cotton net and more...or should I say less!  My experiments in one-off painted dye decorations have extended to designs for bikini bottoms in cotton voile. I consider tops superfluous. 

Remember, my designs are for keeping cool in the tropics, rather than keeping warm in colder climates

A blank canvas

My recent purchase of a full bolt of 100% cotton voile has enabled me to add more designs to my Bare Minimum fashion label. I have also perfected a technique of painting with dye that ensures the colours stay subtle and permanent.

The three quarter sleeve cropped top in the opening picture began as a blank canvas. I then added designs to the front and back. Being reversible, you can alternate between the two. 

The semi-sheer nature of cotton voile allows the beauty of the female form to be subtlety revealed rather than shamefully concealed.  If given freedom, painting with dye has the suggestive qualities of painting with watercolour. 

I was about to give up

After the disastrous Tropical Storm Erica five years ago, and then Maria, the worst Caribbean hurricane on record, three years ago, and now the Corona Pandemic, I was about to give up.

One way or the other these trials and tribulations have done their upmost to put a stop to my work. First, they deprived me of models and now, due to suppliers and shipping companies grinding to a halt, I am deprived of the fabrics I need for my fashion designs. 

But yesterday, amidst the ruined and overgrown pavilion that once was the teaching studio for my life classes, a white hibiscus blossomed alongside an abandoned sculpture. I took it as a good omen. And low and behold, this morning when I begged my local fabric shop to search their warehouse yet again for white cotton voile the assistant returned clutching an entire bolt of the material. I can now go back to my sewing machine and continue my foray into fashion. 

This evening, while re-reading D. H. Lawrence's novel The Rainbow, I came across this reference to a sewing machine:

She was triumphant and happy as the darting needle danced ecstatically down a hem, drawing the stuff along under its vivid stabbing...

Surely the guardians of morality cannot have had that sentence in mind when they ordered all copies of the one of the most beautiful books in the English language to be seized and burnt at the 1915 obscenity trial.

A small act of resistance

Focusing on the parts of women's bodies that are supposed to be hidden feels like a small act of resistance. It is part of this strange dichotomy that culture has been created for women: reveal and conceal. On one hand we are supposed to reveal enough of ourselves to be sexually attractive, but simultaneously we're expected to conceal our bodies. 

(Jacqueline Secor) 

The anomaly is all the more applicable when it comes to dress. 

The nude figure is less sexually provocative than one that is scantily dressed. After the initial shock of the nude, the eye takes in the beauty of the body as a whole rather than being drawn to the parts tantalisingly hidden in the name of decency. If I wanted my models to look sexy, I'd dress them in a bikini and have them pose seductively, hand on hip.

Creative garb

The opening picture beats the efforts of all the world's fashion designers and catwalk models hands down. The young lady has natural poise and her garb (meaning clothing, especially of a distinctive or special kind) has texture, colour and subtlety. It puts today's lackluster fashions in the shade. 

It is what I am after for my Bare Minimum fashion label. My latest experiments along that route have involved collecting seed pods from a tree that I pass on my daily walk to the river and making netting from cotton twine.

My experiments with materials and textures include the hemp scrim that I use in sculpture for reinforcing plaster casts and allowing cotton twine to fray and tangle as it may. 

  

The picture below shows work on a similar theme that I'm envious of. Both designer and model are unknown to me so alas I cannot credit, .

I'll leave you with a 1964 live recording of the incomparable Sarah Vaughan singing Baubles, Bangles and Beads from the 1953 musical Kismet. As most of my follows were not born in 1964 is serves as an introduction to the mastery jazz we had in those days.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xc0mL1ro0W4

In the time it takes

For my followers that yearn - as I do - for my return to painting the nude, here is a sketch of one of my models tying back her hair after a painting session. For the most part it comprises of a single wash that runs from her arms and gathers intensity at her thighs. Only watercolour offers the means of capturing such a fleeting moment. In the time it took my model to tie up her hair my sixty years experience was thrown down with a number 12 brush in a matter seconds. 

Beyond my control

I spend my days in longing to get back to painting. But circumstances beyond my control - first a major hurricane and then this Corona Pandemic - have deprived me of my models, and without models my work cannot exist. 

Looking back through past work is all I can do. In doing so I find some pleasant surprises in work that I had cast aside. Today's painting is one of them. For the records I had simply titled it "Collean 4". It records the transition when a model moves from reserved to relaxed. The "4" refers to the forth modelling session and that is usually the time it takes for the model and artist to throw off restraints and begin working with one accord.  

It's a pity you've travelled Collean because I could use you right now as the model for my latest Bare Minimum dress design.

When I Goggle "Caribbean Fashion" I am told that the mix of cultures in the region and the tropical climate influence the identifying features of bright colours and natural fabrics. It also adds: The Caribbean Attitude. 

These trends may be a feature of the catwalk but they are certainly not present on the ground. For bright colours insert tartan madras and for natural fabrics beyond tartan madras, forget about it. And other than the sexual connotations of the catwalk, the decorous Caribbean attitude to dress is the more restrictive and heat retaining layers the better.

This is where my fashion label Bare Minimum comes into the picture.

Side tracked

Since my last post I've spent most of my time crawling under my fifty year old Land Rover in an attempt to replace a leaking oil seal. I stress the word "attempt" because after spending the best part of a day getting to the offending seal I found that they'd sent the wrong part from the UK. I then had to spend the best part of another day putting it back to a leaking square one. 

After that it was a pleasure to continue the work in progress on my tattered harlequin design. Below are pictures of the end result. It is a dress that will look its best when wafted by a gentle tropical breeze.

Now to continue developing my designs on the theme of poetry and calligraphy.

The human body was not designed for clothes

The Beauty of the Female Form. 

Nude study by Danish photographer Benny Rytter

No matter how I contrive to adhere to the Bare Minimum concept of my fashion label, the fact remains that the human body was not designed for clothes. Apart from keeping warm in a cold climate and protecting against insect bights in the tropics, the two other principal reasons for wearing clothes are contrary to each other: modesty and sexual attraction.

Designs are governed by what you can hook on to to prevent everything falling down. On the female figure the key anchor points are over shoulders, above the breasts, and around the waist. 

A woman's breasts are the most beautiful of God's creations and it always puzzles me why we have to truss them up and deform them into a shapeless lump. I understand that the first bikini top was fashioned from a couple of handkerchiefs tied together. A strip of cotton voile thrown down on my sewing table seemed anxious to take up the form of its own accord.

 As a watercolourist I have learnt to allow the medium to be my guide and I am finding that the same holds true for fabrics.

It was a collection of dyed off cuts that tempted me to use my last strips of my cotton voile (I've now used up all there is on the island) to create a multicoloured version of my earlier "tatters" design.

Below is a picture of the work in progress. Piecing it together is as challenging as a complicated jigsaw puzzle. As with my first "tatters" design I've placed the seams to the outside to create texture.