Subtlety suggesting the sensuous

When it comes to subtlety suggesting the sensuous, the rapidly drawn line comes close to a watercolour wash that is thrown down in the heat of the moment. Both allow viewers to enter the creative process and draw their own interpretation.

The opening sketch was drawn on a postcard and posted to my brother in England. As I remember it was meant to test a Post Office ruling on sending "obscene" material through the mail. Fortunately it was delivered with no bother at all. Tumblr please take note.

I wish the watercolour below was mine, but it's not. 

Andrei Sharov is a Russian artist - as are many followers of my blog. For his sensuous figures he works spontaneously beyond the boundaries of the know, the familiar and the ordinary.

A gauge to measure beauty by

In his introduction to Walter Rose's classic book The Village Carpenter Frank Kendon quotes the following poem:

No gas light ever lit his shop;
He has no wheels to start or stop;
No hot, metallic engines there
Disturb the shaving-scented air;
His hands were engines, and his eye
His gauge to measure beauty by...

The book and poem came to my mind this weekend as I was preparing drawings for a Sedan Chair to carry one of Dominica's Carnival Beauty Queen contenders. The chair will be made by a couple of young carpenters and it will test their skill in terms of workmanship.

These days carpenters rely on machines rather than hand tools. To guide them on their way I took the opening photograph of a small number of hand tools from my own collection, tools that they will need to produce the mortise and tenons and stopped chamfers. Most of my tools are almost as old as I am and some date back to my grandfather's time. The mortise saw and handsaw in the picture I bought with money that was given to me on my fourteenth birthday. They have served me faithfully ever since. 

I wonder who will care for them and work with them after my time. Will they one day build another boat, a house or a handcart like the one pictured below...or will craftsmanship and beauty go a begging?

What might, or might not have been

Forgrove Machinery Co, Leeds. Apprentice Intake 1957

Leeds College of Art Students 1952

Regardless for my flair for art, on leaving Secondary Modern school at the age of fifteen and coming from a family of engineers, going to art school was not an option. Instead, I was indentured to a six year apprenticeship in mechanical engineering. Each day between work and night school I passed the Leeds College of Art, where I wished I might have been.

The first photograph shows me (circled) and my fellow apprentices on our first day at work: a dejected bunch to say the least. The second photograph shows Leeds College of Art students of the same era, looking considerably more cheerful.

Over the years I've kept tabs on my fellow apprentices and they all did well. By my mid twenties I also was doing well and working in the drawing and design office of one of England's major machine tool manufactures. But then I decided it was now or never. I gave up my job and, with a wife and young daughter in tow, declared myself as an artist on the pavements of France. 

Since that day I have never looked back but I sometimes wonder how my envied Leeds College Art Students fared as artists. Moreover, I wonder....would I have fared any better as an artist had I been able to join their ranks.  

Tumblr's Flawed Recognition

I can understand Tumblr's automated algorithms mistaking a painting for a photograph but on appeal I am assured that a "real live human" will review the post. Alas, it seems that Tumblr's real live humans would not know a painting if one feel on their heads. Their flagging of posts that they claim contain adult content, and hence violates Tumblr's Community Guidelines is seriously flawed.

My post dated October 25th and titled "What a Community" delves deeper into this anomaly. The photograph that illustrated the post was flagged by Tumblr and their decision upheld when viewed by a real live human on appeal. Here is the offending picture.

I tried re-posting the above but to no avail. However, the picture below has been accepted, the only difference being that the photograph was taken after I had added the brass shims in readiness for taking a mould from the clay.

In my previous post I drew your attention to three paintings by Edouard Danton that were also were flagged and the decision upheld when viewed by a real live human on appeal. 

To further illustrate Tumblr's flawed recognition I posted the following: 

• A Life Cast that I made of breast and nipple.
• A painting by Renoir titled, Nude before the Bath.
• A painting by Egon Schiele titled, Reclining Female Nude with Legs Spread Apart.
• A fragment of one of my water-colours. 

Not one of the above were flagged by Tumblr's automated algorithms and hence they did not come before the eyes of their "real live human"! 

Understandably, Tumblr's algorithmic checks have difficulty differentiating between a work of art and a photograph, as with Edouard Danton's paintings and likewise when differentiating sculpture from real life. But it's a sorry state of affairs when real live humans can't tell one from the other.

What defeats automatic algorithms are nipples with a difference, as in my life cast close-up; indistinct nipples, as in Renoir's painting; and paintings that are impressionistic or expressionistic, as with Egon Schiele and myself. 

As a matter of fact

BE WARNED!

The post that follows has been recently banned by the Keeper's of Public Decency at Tumblr. 

Their message reads: This post was flagged because it contains adult content which violates our Community Guidelines. THIS DECISION CANNOT BE APPEALED. 

It appears that social media in general wants us to be more comfortable with war, violence and foul language than with innocent paintings of the nude.

I trust that Edouard Danton's paintings will not shock or offend followers of this blog.

Casting from Life

The painter Edouard Danton (1848-1897) came from a family of sculptors and the paintings he made in his father's studio to my mind perfectly capture the matter of fact business of working from the nude model. I stress "to my mind" because one critic from the world of art academia - having I'm sure, never worked from the nude - considers his paintings mere titillation. 

In my book Notes on the Nude I delve deeper into the working relationship between artist and model. In particular the titillation of the dressed model as against the matter of fact undressed:

The human body is less sexually alluring nude than when it is dressed. If one of my regular models had posed in the fetching flimsy white dress she wore on arrival, I would have been lost beyond recall. But as soon as she took it off we were back to our matter of fact working relationship.

Below are two more of Edouard Danton's masterly paintings. As a sculptor I can recognise every detail, from the tools on his workbench to the temporary rail alongside the modelling stand. 

Coin d atelier

My Father's Studio

As with the model depicted in the painting, my models are likewise fascinated by the work in progress. Furthermore,at the end of a session I can sense my model's reluctance to exchange the freedom of the nude for the restrictions of being clothed.

Your clothes conceal much of your beauty...

 My 1/4 life-size sculpture of Verlena    

     Your clothes conceal much of your beauty,

yet they hide not the unbeautiful.

     And though you seek in garments the

freedom of privacy you may find in them

a harness and a chain.

     Would that you could meet the sun

and the wind with more of your skin and less

of your raiment,

     For the breath of life is in the sunlight

and the hand of life is in the wind.

     Some of you say, “It is the north wind

who has woven the clothes we wear.”

     And I say, Ay, it was the north wind,

     But shame was his loom, and the softening

of the sinews was his thread.

     And when his work was done he laughed

in the forest.

     Forget not that modesty is for a shield

against the eye of the unclean.

     And when the unclean shall be no more,

what were modesty but a fetter and a fouling

of the mind?

     And forget not that the earth delights to

feel your bare feet and the winds long to

play with your hair.

From "The Prophet" by Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931) 

First Love

One thing leads to another. 

While reading Ian McDonald's classic 1969 Caribbean novel, The Humming-bird Tree I was reminded of Sheila Hyndman's poem, Lost Love. Both beautifully touch on the theme of adolescence first love. It was my good fortune to have know Sheila from her Virgin Island High School days and up until her sudden death at the age of thirty-two. I illustrated a collection of Sheila's poems, one of which, Lost Love tells of her first love. Two of the verses read as follows:

Down by the seashore where mangroves thrive,
We visit our dream world, Peter and I.
And once when storm clouds blackened the air,
He held my hand and I didn't care.

Round Christmas time, I stole ham and tart
And we had our little feast.
Peter gave me a bat'n ball and I told no one,
For I knew they would surely tease.

I also encouraged Sheila during the early stages of her first novel, sadly unfinished at the time of her death. The novel followed four generations of Virgin Islanders and the island of Virgin Gorda, from slavery to the present day.

Recollections of the days we spent together collecting material on Virgin Gorda led me to search through past portfolios for the sketches that I made to illustrate Sheila's novel. The opening watercolour and the pen and ink sketch below are from that series - albeit that they show signs of having since weathered three major hurricanes.

Studio Retrospective

I am always searching for information on the working methods of artists from the past. Sometimes my interest is aroused by images taken in the early days of photography, as those taken in Roden's studio over a hundred years ago. More rarely I find a painting or sketch made by a student at one of the 19th century French teaching ateliers.  

The painting that opens today's post was made by Henri Matisse (1869-1954) when he was a student at Gustave Morean's atelier in 1895. Gustave Morean was a painter of biblical and classical subjects in the academic tradition. Henri Matisse turned out to be the opposite. Until the advent of Cubism he was one of the most innovative painters in Paris. Although radically different in technique, the arrangement of his 1899 painting, Study of a Nude has a resemblance to the the painting of his student days. 

In the atelier painting my eye is drawn to the prop that leads to the model's elbow. It is a devise that enables the model to return to the same pose. I use similar props when my model has to repeat a pose, week in week out, for a piece of sculpture.

These days art students go to college to study for BA's and MA's. They no longer hone their skills working from the live model on the studio floor. 

Improvising in paradise

Living on a small idyllic island in the Caribbean has its limitations, not least that you can't pop into town and buy the tools and materials you need. Both as an artist and engineer I have to improvise. Making a lino cut to print the cover for a collection of my hand-made papers is a case in point.

The lino I used fifty years ago for similar projects is a thing of the past. So too are vinyl floor tiles that could be used as a substitute. As an alternative I resorted to cutting the leg off a pair of old wellington boots. And that is what I used to make the block you see in the above picture. The turntable upon which the block is mounted for carving is made from a heavy brass search light that I salvaged from the Maude L, a wrecked inter-island trading boat.The cutting tools date from my teenage years and I begged the ink from the island's printer.

Below is the first impression. I now need to fine-tune the lettering. Due to the texture of hand-made paper, I have to keep the entire design bold and simple.

My day began sedately carving the above block and ended, bruised and battered, in an attempt to restore the inlet to our water pump that was damaged when the river was in full flood a few days ago. Welcome to the paradise!

In search of gold

My search for gold takes me in two different directions: the first in search of inspirational models and the second in search for present day inspirational artists working with the nude figure.

For the first my eyes are constantly on the look out for future contenders in my series Daughters of the Caribbean. This morning as I entered a supermarket (or as super as it's likely to get in a small Caribbean island) I glanced a face and figure that ideally fulfills my needs. In my book Notes on the Nude under the heading "Faint Heart Never Won Fair Lady" I refer to approaching likely candidates in the streets. After the initial shook has worn off I am usually well received. I now keep my fingers crossed that my new found gold will accept the challenge of modelling.

My search for inspirational artists involves trolling the internet for hours on end. One thing leads to another and once in a while I strike gold, as with the sketches below. It is the work of a young Russian artist by the name of Igor Krapar. They are sketches to which I can honestly say, I wish I'd have drawn them!

Igor Krapar's paintings display the same intensity and originality, as shown in the one below. The repertoire of the nude is limited. Since the fourth century the same postures have been used time and time again. Igor Kraper deserves credit for seeing the nude from a new angle. It is easy for the split second photographer but more difficult for the painter no matter how adept at capturing the fleeting moment.

Interestingly, many followers of this blog are from Russia where at present there seems to be a revival of interest in the figurative.

What a community!

The picture that opens this post earned the following response from Tumblr when, following the lead of Face Book, they banned "Adult Content". 

This post was flagged because it contains adult content that violates our Community Guidelines. It has been reviewed by one of our trained experts and cannot be appealed.

The relevant Tumblr guideline reads as follows:

Banned content includes photos, videos, and GIFs of human genitalia, female-presenting nipples, and any media involving sex acts, including illustrations. The exceptions include nude classical statues and political protests that feature nudity. The new guidelines exclude text, so erotica remains permitted. Illustrations and art that feature nudity are still okay — so long as sex acts aren’t depicted — and so are breastfeeding and after-birth photos.

Whilst my clay sketch of the reclining figure is not a "classical nude statue" it nevertheless qualifies as "art". Tumblr's ban went into effect in December 2018. Since that date they may have re-trained their experts for when I re-submitted the picture a few weeks ago it sneaked through. Thank goodness that the Blogger Community has a more mature approach to nudity.

Below, without fear of being flagged, is one of three paintings from yesterday's painting session with Collean. 

Without shame or wantonness

"A girl stood before him in midstream...her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane's...her thighs, fuller and soft hued as ivory were bared almost to the hips...She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes, her eyes turned to him in quite sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness.

The above passage from "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" By James Joyce (1882-1941) reminded me of a similar experience of my own from almost fifty years ago.

Safely at anchor after five solitary weeks at sea, I dived overboard. The warm tropical sea caressed every inch of my body and with leisurely stokes I swam towards a beach where four girls in their late teens were laughing and splashing in shallow water. Oblivious to my presence, they playfully wrestled and grabbed at the ties of each other’s bikinis. As they struggled I caught glimpses of dark areolas and the beguiling contours of their pudendas. Three of the girls waded ashore and the girl that remained told her friends that she’d follow after rinsing the sand out of her bikini. They shouted back, “White man will see your pussy.” Unabashed she replied, “See if I care!”

I watched as my solitary Venus bared her breasts and deftly stepped out of her bikini. She flung the flimsy triangles over her shoulder and nonchalantly washed the grains of sand from her body. There was no trace of shyness or shame, only innocent delight in the wonder of her sexuality.

If only more people could accept the beauty of the nude and our sexuality without shame or wantonness.

The sketches below are from hundreds that I made on Caribbean beaches in the 1970's and 1980's.

  

After I'm Gone

As with many artists that received limited recognition in their lifetime, I consider the chance - slender though it may be - that it could come along after my death.

For this reason I am reluctant to part with the hundreds of paintings in my series Daughters of the Caribbean Sun. The paintings span a period of over thirty years and they form a single entity. Very few have suffered what the artist James Whistler described as the indignity of being sold.

I can count on my hand the number of artists, past and present, who have allowed watercolour the freedom to suggest the beauty of the female form. I stress freedom as against as against contrived restraint. My method of working direct and rapidly from the model is unpredictable. A painting that I might perceive as a failure nevertheless contains an element of truth. Today’s painting is a case in point.

One reason for my book Notes on the Nude is that after I am gone, I can still have a say as to what my work has been all about. I hope that my models will also have their say, as they have done in the closing pages of my book. They have shared my struggles and celebrated our occasional success. I would much sooner that my models have their say rather than some art academic that wouldn't know a painting if one fell on his - or more likely her - head. 

A Woman Undressing

A Woman Undressing

Egon Schiele (1890-1918)

A woman undressing is like the sun breaking through the clouds. (Auguste Rodin 1840-1917)

Degas, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Egon Schiele all worked around the theme of a woman undressing. My own contribution to undressing as against undressed, is limited to these sketches from ten years ago.

At a pinch, this more recent watercolour from my book Notes on the Nude may also qualify.

I wouldn't give tuppence for it

The first picture is from a recent experiment in paper making. On a left-over batch of cotton rag pulp I threw some petals and slender strands of stamen. The surround is a paper made from banana stems. Nine out of ten visitors to my studio are attracted to it.

The second picture is one of the hundreds of studies that I have painted for my series Daughters of the Caribbean Sun. It does not adhere to the common concept of beauty. Nine out of ten visitors to my studio wouldn't give tuppence for it. 

I am not the first painter to be out of tune with the perceptions of the public at large. Towards the end of his lifetime's work Michelangelo declared that he'd have been better off selling matches. 

Likewise, the landscape painter John Constable wrote: 

There is no finish in nature. My art flatters nobody by imitation; it courts nobody by smoothness and tickles nobody by petiteness...how then can I hope to be popular!

I have not seen as others saw

As a painter it is necessary for me to have a different way of seeing. My task is to see beauty where it has not been seen before. But in doing so, I make life difficult for myself and difficult for others to patronise what I create.

Artists have to create their own following and very often recognition comes long after their time on earth. In the process of seeking for the unknown I am rarely sure of the value of what I have created at the time of creation. As with public recognition, it comes in retrospect. 

Today's painting is a case in point. It was painted four years ago and at the time I doubted that I had put down on paper what I was searching for. I now realise that I had come close to my objective. It's not a painting that will attract "how sweet" comments from the Face Book Community but it might appeal to the cognoscenti in search of the endless beauty of the nude. 

I have taken the title of today's post from a poem by Edgar Allan Poe. It is a poem that I choose for the Memorial Service of Virgin Island poet Sheila Hyndman Wheatley (1958-1991). It could be equally fitting for mine.

From childhood’s hour I have not been

As others were; I have not seen

As others saw; I could not bring

My passions from a common spring.

From the same source I have not taken

My sorrow; nor could I awaken

My heart to joy at the same tone;

And all I loved, I loved alone.          

State of the Art (Part Two: Photocopies)

When photography came along in the mid-nineteenth century one would have assumed that it would have freed the artist of the need to exactly copy the subject. The camera can better define individual strands of hair and every leaf on a tree. But one hundred and fifty years on it has ironically worked the other way around. In reviewing the current state of the art I find that most aspiring artists copy from photographs down to the last hair follicle and blade of grass. Furthermore, whereas once it was the artist that worked from the live model, it is now the photographer and the artist is content to minutely copy from the photograph. How boring can life get!

Granted, working from life can be an difficult business: the wind blows, the rain falls and the model wilts. Once, when I had set up my stall for painting a market scene on the Caribbean island of Grenada, a dog came along and drank the water from my containers. At least on that occasion, my onlookers were friendly enough to replenish my supply. But the same support wasn't forthcoming when I was painting the dark satanic mills in my native industrial north of England. On that bleak winter afternoon, a group of young boys took delight in raining stones down on me. In comparison, painting from the nude figure in the warmth of a tropical afternoon sounds idyllic, and it is - until ants and mosquitoes begin eating my model.

Nevertheless, against all those set backs, the only way that I can convincingly capture life is to work from life. Although life-classes have begun to proliferate, the lessons learnt appear to go no further than the classroom door. To find out how different are the life-classes that I teach from my studio from the normal run of things, turn to page 26 in my book Notes on the Nude.

The opening and closing sketches are demonstrations that I did for my life class students. Both were made in less than a minute and the first is on a 16" x 20" sheet of newsprint.