In the 1970's we converted a two classroom village school in Southern Ireland into a studio and living accommodation. The ''we'' being my first wife Norma and our daughter Diana. To eke out the little income I made from the sale of my paintings, we sold our vehicle and shopped by bicycle. With a desire to see more of the country we set off on a two-hundred-mile walking tour, pushing our camping gear and my sketching bag before us on a cart made from an old pram. Our wanderings took us along by-roads where we seldom met anything other than donkeys and fellow travelers.
You can learn more about those happy days in my blog post And I had but a single shirt and not a single care
The diaries of Michelangelo, together with those of many artists from the past, range - as did their work - from one thing to another. My days are the same, and I struggle to keep the subject of these blog post to painting and sculpture. Over the last few weeks my time has been spent writing engineering recommendations for a company in China and creating Part 1 of a 5 part biographical documentary. The screen shot of which has at least some artistic merit.
Ever since Pope Paul IV initiated the banning of lasciviousness in religious art in 1557, paintings and sculptures that depict the beauty and innocence of the nude figure have been subjected to the obnoxious practice of obfuscation. In the words of D H Lawrence:
A fig leaf, or if you can't find it, a wreath of mist with nothing behind it.
With the advent of social media censorship, obfuscation reached new heights, but with the irony that in sanitising the image, they teasingly sexualise it.
Academy by the French painter Alexis Axillette (first image below) shows how nudity loses much of its sexual connotation when the eye is free to accept the beauty of the body as a whole, rather than being drawn to its supposedly private parts.
The second image shows how the model's breasts would appear after being subjected to social media's brutal surgery.
At least artists from five hundred years ago carried out the operation with greater delicacy and flair, as shown in the third image.
Academy by the French painter Alexis Axillette (1860-1931)
When painting the nude figure in the studio I tell my models to twist and turn as they please. In the fleeting second that they move from this way to that, I see a position that would otherwise have eluded me. But even giving the model that freedom, the pose is to some extent concocted. The studio isn't the real work-a-day world. It's better that the model is doing something; and better still, if she has to contort her body in doing it. Those unseemly positions are what Degas was also after. But other than when bathing, the movements seldom reveal the nude.
To that end, an opportunity presented itself when my wife took a break from painting the studio balcony rail in order to model for me. The session came about on the spur of the moment and I needed ten minutes to prepare my materials. In the meantime Denise, with her working clothes cast already cast aside in readiness for modelling, returned to painting. By the time I was ready she was upside down painting a hard to reach section of the rail. What was to have been a session painting the reclining nude in the studio became an inspirational session painting and sketching the nude working at all angles in the sunshine.
In that impromptu half-hour, the rail benefitted from a coat of paint. Denise benefitted from accomplishing two tasks in one, and I benefitted from capturing the nude figure unabashed and unrestrained.
Madonna and Child by Michelangelo di Pietro (active 1490–1520)
I have taken the liberty of modifying Michelangelo di Pietro's painting of Madonna and Child to make it acceptable for social media.
My rash action was prompted due to YouTube blocking a family video made over twenty years ago of my wife bathing and dressing our son in readiness for his first birthday party. I submitted the video as "unlisted'', hence not for public viewing.
YouTube's response reads:
This video is age restricted. Viewers must be signed in and at least 18 years old to watch it. Our age restrictions are in place to help viewers avoid watching content that they may not feel is acceptable for themselves or for their children.
YouTube's reasoning: anyone over 18 years old can watch it but my 4 year old grandson can't. Either way it was blocked.
What began as social media's reasonable concern about phonographic images of the nude has now made the innocence and beauty of the nude from birth onwards immoral.
In recent weeks I have been searching through diaries and images that go back to my far beginnings. In terms of my work with the nude this pencil sketch of my first wife Norma sleeping represents one of my earliest attempts in that genre. It dates from over fifty years ago.
It has been said that the artist has no enemy but time. Life is too short for learning the skills and putting them into effect. I have spent a lifetime learning those skills and I have yet to say all I have to say.
Below is a more recent attempt to get the message across. Given time, I hope to say more.
Ironically, the adds are made possible courtesy of Google, the very same Google that is censorious of innocent paintings and sculptures of nude. If that doesn't smack of double standards, I dread to think what else may qualify.
Once again I bring this video to your attention. It beautifully reveals the anomaly.
The vexation that prompts the request, tell me about it, can answered by the artist by way of music, painting, poetry or prose, providing the recipient isn't necessarily expecting to hear something nice. And therein lies the problem, for as artists, more often than not, we are expected to say something nice.
To fulfill that expectation, my book Caribbean Sketches would have had to contain sanitized drawings of palm fringed beaches, rather than an uncensored record of life as it was lived in the islands.
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In a last ditch attempt to buy a boat we rented a camper and toured the boat yards in the South East of England. On our journey through the Suffolk countryside we drove past a cottage displaying a For Sale sign. We were weary of looking at boats and out of curiosity stopped to take a closer look. From the call box in the village I telephoned the estate agent. The asking price was within our means and the agent offered to be there in an hour’s time with the keys. He couldn’t find the keys but brought along a gentleman whose skill at opening locks had earlier earned him the pleasure of serving time at one of Her Majesty’s prisons. After viewing the one room downstairs and the one room upstairs, we agreed to buy and secured the deal there and then with a cash deposit. We didn’t need a survey. Years of renovating boats and houses, told me that all was sound. The agent said it was the fastest sale he’d ever made.
An internet search for one thing, very often leads to another. In my post When the natural becomes stilted I questioned an art critic's interpretation of William Stott's painting Wild Flower and his model's credentials. My search for similar misinterpretations led me to this video by the Gammell Lack Institute of American Art. The video delves into the scandal caused by Paul Émile Chabas's innocent painting September Morn and the assumptions made about his model.
It brings me back to what painters of the nude - and their models - are up against, and serves to illustrate the adage: He who thinks evil, sees evil.
Today's image is of work in progress on the largest sculpture I have ever created. It weighed 16 tons, measured 37 feet long x 12 feet wide x 48 feet high, and was made between 1978 and 1980 on the banks of England's River Stour, just a couple of mile away from where Constable painted his Hay Wain. The model that inspired my creation first saw the light of day 1924 and has since attracted those of my beloved that came in her wake.
In the eighteen years that the sculpture remained in my possession it was exhibited on both sides of the Atlantic.
It was only this morning, in correspondence with an art gallery assistant in England, that we were bemoaning the absence of such records. And my models are of no help. After the passage of time, they cannot with certainty identify themselves in my work. Sometimes, a bracelet or necklace gives them a clue, or for me, the paper the sketch was made on.
But the omittance does not lesson the value of my unknown model's contribution to the creative process.
