From bosun's chair to milking stool

 

Thirty-three years ago you would have found my wife Denise swinging from a bosun's chair, 30 feet aloft, tarring the rigging of our gaff cuter Born Free. Today, you'll find her somewhere between my studio and the river milking her goats. For the latter task I recently made her a three legged milking stool from timber grown on our land.

Between tarring and milking, Denise has modelled for hundreds of my paintings and scores of my sculptures. As one of my life-class students once remarked: She's a hard act to follow!

A complicated jigsaw puzzle

 

A torn calf muscle has forced me into doing a sedately job that's been on my list for ages: that being, cataloguing my lifetimes work as a painter and sculptor. It's proving to be a Herculin task, the mental equivalent of moving my 150lb blacksmith's anvil that caused of my torn muscle in the first place. I'm beginning to learn there are limitations on what you can do in your eighties!

For the hundreds of paintings in my series "Daughters of the Caribbean Sun", work on my catalogue raisonné has the additional difficulty of matching models to paintings. With paintings of the nude, items of dress can't be used as an identifying factor. But having said that, Naomi's distinctive double-coil woven string bracelet has solved a few of my problems. 

Another complication is that many of the jigsaw pieces are two sided: recto and verso. Large sheets of watercolour paper are hard to come by in the Caribbean. Hence, one painting painted on the back of another. The images below are a case in point.

Unknown model - recto

Unknown model - verso

Capturing life in a matter of seconds

        

A laboured painting has nothing on a sketch that captures the subject in a matter of seconds. The value of the sketch is something that I've stressed many time over in my blog posts: In the Time it Takes and Rapid Response being examples. And also in my books Notes on the Nude and Notes for Life-class Students and Models.  

If my followers haven't got the message by now, they never will. Other than bashing the delinquents over the head with a length of 2 x 4, there's nothing more I can do. 

A pose that the model can only hold for a few seconds, has to be captured in a few seconds. In life, nothing stays still.

A hundred years from today

One thing is for certain, I won't be around in a hundred years time, but there's a chance that some of my sketches, paintings and sculptures will be. Of the three afore mentioned categories, the hundreds of sketches I made in the Caribbean more than thirty years ago, may finally get the recognition they deserve. What is least appreciated now might be sought after two or three generations hence. All of the sketches were made from life and they record the Caribbean before the invasion of mass tourism and speculative development. 

My search for sketches of life as it was once lived in the Caribbean, led me to the Victoria Nutmeg Factory on Grenada. The gangs of women that cracked the shells with wooden mallets worked by candle light in a dramatic hammer-tapping void. They were of all ages, shapes and sizes. They welcomed me to their circle and I could not have wished for better models: Andrea, Pauline, Monica, Kenny, Ethelyn, Monica and Marva, et al. 

Grenada's historian and former Prime Minister, George Brizan, took an interest in my work and his government reserved a space on the capital's historic Carenage for a projected sculpture on the theme of the island's Nutmeg Industry. 

I had selected Marva as the central figure for the sculpture.

A selection of the sketches, together with my diary notes, are contained in my book Caribbean Sketches. 

Low key pornography?

 

My dark lady. 

The patina has developed of its own accord in the fifteen years that she's weathered the tropical climate. 

My wife Denise modelled for the sculpture. 

Recently a social media commentator classed the nude in art as low key pornography. He said that the artist could surely find creative ways to cover up the figure and still accentuate the form underneath. Coincidentally, my blog post ÔøΩ ÔøΩphanous delves into just that.

My nude dark lady is as innocent as the hibiscus that blooms in the background and as far away from pornography as you can get.