The joy of being poor

Kilkenny, Southern Ireland. A pencil sketch dated 1972

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 

From one thing to another

 Michelangelo's drawing of architecture and figure 

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.

The obnoxious practice of obfuscation

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)

Detail as it would appear after social media's surgery

A detail from Perseus Freeing Andromeda by Joachim Wtewael (1566-1638)

Unabashed and unrestrained

Denise painting the balcony rail

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.

Sketches of Denise painting the balcony rail