Teamwork

Between sessions, my most recent model is studying Business Management.  Last week, as part of her course work, she had to make a presentation on the subject of teamwork.  For her topic, she cited the artist and model as one of her examples.

Her choice speaks volumes about her understanding of the crucial role of the model.  Furthermore, it set me thinking about a host of others who have contributed their skills to the sculptor’s work.  

Not least on the list are those master craftsmen who for centuries have made the tools for the job.  This link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvr2nZeAfNc will give you glimpse of what’s involved.  Then comes the moulders, who job is to take the initial waste-mould and then the intricate piece-mould.  And finally, the multiple skills of the foundry workers. 

Over the years I have been privileged to share the work of these incredibly accomplished artisans.  Sadly their numbers are in decline and there is an urgent need to train future generations before their skills are lost forever. 

To make full-circle, let me come back to the contribution of the model.  From a life-time’s practice I’ve learnt to make my own tools and take my own moulds.  Given a furnace, I can cast in bronze.  But without a model, sympathetic to the work at hand, I can’t even begin.

Today’s sketch shows one of my models relaxing between sessions and I dedicate it to all of those who have worked behind the scenes to make my work possible.

Work in progress

I hate the finality of finish but favor work in progress. 

The portrait bust shown in today’s picture was started just over a week ago.  As a work in progress, it will continue to evolve over the next couple of weeks.  The day will then arrive when the end result has to be cast, once and for all time.  

I found my model, not in some halcyon Athenian bower, but selling mangoes by the road side.  Had I have grabbed her there and then, she’d have come with her hair plaited in cane-rows.  Alas, by the time I arranged for her to sit for me she had straightened out her God-given hair.  Why oh why do so many West Indian women fall for a foreign concept of beauty at the ruination of their own?

Never mind, by the end of this week, I’ll see that her clay image reflects the the race to which she was born.

How long has this been going on?

Being cast away on a tropical island has its disadvantages.  Other than local fare, the world of concerts, plays and exhibitions is thousands of miles away.  It is difficult to keep pace with developments in the arts and until the advent of the internet, well-nigh impossible. 

These days, thanks to the world-wide-web, I can make the virtual best of it.  When I sketched the Northern and English Ballet fifteen years ago, the inspirational Ballet Black http://balletblack.co.uk/ didn’t exist.  My next visit to the UK will be timed to tie in with one of their performances. 

In similar vein, nowhere in my fifty-year old collection of LP’s will you find recordings of the virtuoso jazz violinist Regina Carter.  In those days, she didn’t exist.  If you hear of a painter and sculptor walking on water it’s me, determined to get to one of her concerts.  In the meantime, here she is at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAU5QSYmUsk

I can even search and find a rare and lost Stan Kenton and June Christy 10” LP that includes the song that I’ve used for my title.  I suspect I’ll find it on my brother’s shelf of LP’s.

Today’s sketch is one of a series that I made of the Northern Ballet at rehearsals.

He died from too much living

When I am finally called upon to embellish the gates of heaven with angles, kindly remember to chip on my grave stone, “He died from too much living”.   In the hereafter, rather than resting in peace, I hope to be up to as many tricks as I have been in this world.

One of my daughters once screamed at me to, “Get a life!”  Well, if I haven’t had a life, I don’t know who has.  Set against your average eighteen year old, I’m living life as if there's no tomorrow. 

It is therefore refreshing to occasionally meet an eighteen year old who is likewise, bubbling with life like crazy.  Such was my good fortune when I was recently booked to give a talk to students at the Dominica State College.  Regardless of the arrangements made beforehand, there was no one to meet me or set up the auditorium. 

To my rescue came an unforgettable biology student by the name of Umarie, henceforward known as “Frazzy” on account of her zany hair style.  With the words, “leave it to me”, she literally dragged her fellow students in by the scruff of the neck. 

She afterwards volunteered to sit for one of my portrait classes.  Thank you Frazzy,  you’ll take pride of place amongst the my angles.  In the meantime, here’s the five-minute demonstration sketch that I made of her.

PS. Come back again, you kept my students awake!

If anyone else tells me to .... .. !!!!

I am not insured, I do not have a pension, I have nothing put aside for a rainy day, I have never paid into a funeral fund and I've never “backed-up”.

Since my computer crashed five days ago, I've lost count of the number of times I've been told to “back-up”.  I'm getting sorely tempted to tell them to .... ... !!!! 

The same people that tell me to “back-up” laugh at my cell phone. It's twelve years old and still going strong. Unlike the slim new models, it has a battery powerful enough to jump start my pick-up. My flash-drive is of the same vintage and it's been twice through the washing machine. The clock on the wall has been ticking away for a hundred years and at seventy I can give most eighteen-year-olds a run for their money.  Why, oh why, did my trusted Windows XP lap-top give up the ghost so soon?

 

While someone tries to salvage what's on my old hard drive, I'm trying to find my way around the new-fangled lap-top on the right.

A delicate balancing act

Commissions are a mixed blessing and I normally avoid them like the plague.  Inevitably, they involve a delicate balancing act between satisfying myself and pleasing the sitter.  It was therefore with trepidation that I responded to the request for a commissioned painting of the nude, with the commissioner herself being the subject.

In this case, the task was made all the more difficult as my subject could only manage one half-day session.  On the positive side, I had for my sitter a poet and student of psychology.  From past experience, I have found this combination to be an interesting one to work with.

My subject’s ecstatic response to the finished painting "wow.....I love it" went a long way towards convincing me of that I had kept my balance – even though the end result is more restrained than my usual way of working.

The miraculous thing about miracles…

G. K. Chesterton said, “The miraculous thing about miracles is that they do sometimes happen”.

If my struggles as an artist were to be put on a graph, the resulting line would show a succession of peaks and troughs linked with dead-level plateaus.  Only rarely am I able to get down on paper what I see in my mind’s eye. 

Last week, you saw my first hesitant attempt to capture my latest model.  Towards the end of a second session and after many false starts, the miracle happened!  Sometimes, when I throw down washes in desperation, fate takes a hand.  My muse awakens and with the final flick of a No 12 sable brush, my daring vision becomes reality.  

First impressions

The first session with a new model is thwarted with nervous tension for both artist and model.  Arrangements are made and a mutually convenient time is agreed upon.  I set out my materials and anxiously watch the hands on the clock, having stressed the importance of arriving on time.  A couple of days ago the appointed time came and went but no sign of my model.  Just when I was about to give up on her, I picked up a frantic text message: “Sir, I’m lost!”

I’m always losing things, but this is the first time I’ve lost a model, or rather, that a model has lost me.  As I was about to drive off in search (a difficult one to put to passers by, “Excuse me, have you by any chance seen an artist’s model?”) she showed up exhausted. 

Regardless of the upset, we were both determined to save the day.  I made my first two-minute sketch on a sheet of newsprint.  It serves to illustrate a message I stress to my students:  keep all your sketches, no matter how seemingly inferior or insignificant, for within them can be found a line of truth. 

The truth, in this instance, being a breathless model and a muddled artist desperately trying to make the best if it.  But regardless of a difficult start, my model, true to the spirit of artists' models, is game for another session next week.

Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones...

When my sister-in-law was a medical student, my brother would help her memory retention for anatomy by singing, Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones.

I do a similar visual lesson for my life class students.  To illustrate the importance of working from the nude, I begin with the model fully clothed.  As such, everything below the neck and above the knee is guesswork.  The all-important linkages to the torso are hidden from view. 

As the model removes her garments, the beautiful construction of the human form is realised.  The spine traces an invaluable line from head to thighs, the navel can be seen as a central point of reference and the breasts, no longer constricted, reveal their masterly rhythmic curvature.  

These reflections on the essential study of the nude came about through leafing through past exam papers for the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate in the Visual Arts.  Option “A” reads:

“Candidates are required to draw a reclining, clothed human figure…the figure must be partially draped with a sheet leaving the head, feet and at least one arm exposed.”

If a student had submitted the drawing shown in today’s picture, he or she would very likely have failed.  Although my sketch titled Black Madonna is partially draped, as per instructions, too much of her God-given beauty is revealed to the eye of the examiner!   

The sketch dates from 1997 is included in my retrospective print portfolio.  

You can’t beat an Old Master

Sandy Wilson’s score for of “The Boy Friend”, includes the following verse from “It’s Never Too Late to Fall In Love”:

The modern artists of today

May paint their picture faster,

But when it comes to skill, I say

You can’t beat an Old Master.

Actually, when it comes to speed, the Old Masters could give modern artists a run for their money, any day of the week.

Eric Hebborn, master forger and author of “Drawn to Trouble” and “False Impressions”, reveals how he divined the speed at which the Old Master draughtsmen worked.  He then practised so that he could achieve the same seemingly unerring whip of the hand.  It is that which makes true Old Masters so convincing.

This brings me back to the benefit of working from life.  There is no way that an artist can pick up speed by copying from photographs.  It is the urgency to record what one sees at a fleeting glance that develops the unerring whip of the hand.

I made today’s sketch of a Caribbean market vendor in a matter of seconds – right there, amongst the limes, sour-sops and plantains.  

Retrospective

When an artist reaches the age of seventy, it is as good a time as any for a retrospective exhibition of his work. 

In my case, the complication is one of location.  The exhibition could be held here on Dominica, and it would be nice for the followers of my diary to take a break and visit the Caribbean.  But alas, I doubt that’s a realistic proposition.

In thinking about alternatives, my mind went back to the days when I sold my sketches on the pavements of France: the days when, “I had but a single shirt and not a single care”.  Had you been visiting Europe forty-five years ago, you could have picked up an original Roger Burnett for no more than 10FF, let’s say a couple of US dollars cash!

The best I can do now, is to put together a retrospective portfolio of 12 prints taken from rare originals in my collection.  Each print will be issued in a limited edition of 100 and priced at US$95.  Background notes from my faded page diaries will compliment the series.

My 1991 watercolour of Standing Nude with Blue Ribbon opens the collection.  The remainder will follow over the next few weeks.

Tap me on the shoulder – as my customers did long ago on the pavements of France, or e-mail sculptor@cwdom.dm if you’d like to buy!  

Backstage with Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec.

Over the last forty-five years, at rehearsals, or during an actual performance, I have spent many hours sketching symphony orchestras, jazz musicians and dance companies from the wings of the stage.  When doing so I can feel the spirits of Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec looking over my shoulder and egging me on. 

A couple of weeks ago found me in the wings of the stage of Dominica’s one and only theatre, sketching competitors at a showcase of talent titled, “Dominica Can Dance”.  Between getting tangled in microphone cables and dodging the ropes that raise the curtain, I had to work at lightening speed in semi darkness.  Dancers don’t stay still for one second!

I have to thank a young photographer by the name of Maccanie Gallaway and his company “Limitless Studio” for capturing me in the act.  Above you have me along with a selection of my sketches below.