On the spur of the moment

Leinster Bay, St John, USVI

My recently rekindled passion for jazz has made me again realise the similarities that exist between that art form and my paintings. Both rely on spur of the moment spontaneity and for both the end result can be fleeting. For the jazz musician it is the unrecorded impromptu improvisation and for me, the hundreds of past paintings that were made within the timeframe of a passionate fifteen minutes and then whisked away by an equally passionate buyer. 

In those days there were no cellphones or digital cameras by which the memory of a painting could be quickly saved. Luckily the for above painting my 35mm camera had one frame left on a roll of colour slide film. The image is less than perfect: film deteriorates quickly in the tropics.

Over the years jazz has benefitted from the perceptive writing of its reviewers and critics, the best of which verges on prose and reads as an art form in itself. Good examples being James Lincoln Collier's definitive The Making Of Jazz and Philip Larkin's All What Jazz. 

NB. My copy of All What Jazz has been out on loan for almost forty years. Perhaps a closely related regular reader of this blog could look to see if by chance it can be found languishing on his bookshelf.  

Unfortunately, writers and reviewers of the visual arts run a poor second. A rare exception being how Camille Lemonnier (1844-1913), Belgian, writer, poet and journalist, described one of Rodin’s sculptures:

At the Maison d’Art there is a torso that seems to have been spewed out from the furnaces of Gomorrah. It has been savagely torn and splayed the way a fissure in the earth cracks open, as though a crucible were exploding in its depths...

 

How can I hope to be popular?

Bermuda 1992. Water Colour 15" x 20"

My art flatters nobody by imitation, it courts nobody by smoothness, nobody by petitelieness, it is without either fal-de-lal or fiddle-de-dee; how then can I hope to be popular?   

(John Constable. English Landscape Painter. 1776-1837)

My landscape painting of a Bermuda might have won popular approval had I followed the advice that was once given to me:

"You need to work more carefully...use a smaller brush...avoid getting your colours too wet."

In the 1970's, while building my boat in a Suffolk farmyard, I lived in a house that is included in one of Constable's paintings. My eighty year old neighbour lived in an18th century timber-framed thatched cottage. The entrance passage was dark and Harry wanted to put a glass pane in the front door to let in some light. But like many buildings in "Constable Country" his house was listed by English Heritage and as such he was not even allowed to paint his door a different colour. 

Harry's carping comment was: Bloody Constable. I wish he'd been born in Liverpool!

One splash leads to another

The secret of painting in water colour is to allow accidents to happen: a painting can't go right until it has gone wrong. And the same holds true for fabric designs. 

Today's opening picture of a recent design for my Bare Minimum fashion label. The first splash of dye was accidental and I was cursing myself for having ruined a length of my precious cotton lawn fabric. But one splash led to another. Perhaps this is how Jackson Pollock's abstract impressionist paintings first came about. 

Jackson Pollock (1912-1956)

Cotton lawn is semi-sheer but with a closer weave than cotton voile. Its smoother texture helps to prevent the dye from bleeding and hence allows for crisper outlines. The picture below shows the same length of splashed fabric hurriedly thrown around my mannequin as a wrap-round skirt. Oh for the return of my real life models when one day this pandemic comes to an end.

The sensuous suggestiveness of draperie mouillée

One of Jan Sandek's works on the theme of draperie mouillée

Over a year ago my post titled, Weird or not weird featured the work of Jan Saudek, a Czechoslovakia  born artist whose work represents a unique technique of combining photography and painting.  No other artist or photographer comes close to Jan Saudek's ability to daringly capture the human form in all its moods and changes. 

Rarely has the sensuous suggestiveness of draperie mouillée been explored since sculptors used the device in the 2nd century BC. For photographers it has the potential of adding an extra dimension to the limited repertoire of the nude. My own interest was aroused through using semi- sheer cotton viole for items in my Bare Minimum fashion designs. The material fulfills my objective of allowing a fleeting glance of the figure beneath.

 Cotton voile hand painted with fabric dyes allows a tantalizing glance of what lies beneath.

How it all began: Venus Genetrix (2nd Century BC)