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.

       

   

Words of advice on making art and making love...

Making art, like making love, is 99% passion.  Tie it down to a set formula and you screw up. 

I was reminded of this today when reading an art syllabus for college students.  Heavily couched in the language of academia, it read like a gobbledegook script for the comedian Professor Stanley Unwin.  

When it comes to talking gibberish, many art writers and elite art institutions can leave the rest standing.  A recently launched magazine is focused towards “a converging nexus of artists” and offers “the articulation of a contemporary space, and of a place that lies within coordinates that have become scattered and nebulous, without bounderies”........Eh?

In simpler terms, here are two quotes that speak of the similarities between love and art.

The artist's experience lies so unbelievably close to the sexual, to its pain and its pleasure, that the two phenomena are really just different forms of one and the same longing and bliss. (Rainer Maria Rilke)

If you bring your sexual impulses to your creative work, you'll be working from deep in the genetic code, down where life wants to make new life and feel good in the process. (Eric Maisel)

And just to prove that my passion does not dwell solely in painting the nude figure,  today’s illustration shows how I can work myself into rapturous water colour washes over a clutter of  fishermen’s huts, nets and boats on a tropical beach.

Oh what a pity...

To continue from last week, here is the finished 1/12^th scale maquette of my bathing figure.  In the final life-size sculpture, water will pour from the calabash shell she holds from outstretched arms.

D H Lawrence’s poem, “Innocent England” laments a court decision to destroy his nude paintings.  It begins:

Oh what a pity, Oh! don’t you agree,

That figs aren’t found in the land of the free!

Fig trees don’t grow in my native land;

There’s never a fig-leaf near at hand

When you want one; so I did without;

And that is what the row’s about…

Likewise, fig-leafs are not easily found in Caribbean and I too did without.   

A haunting vision from long ago...

A subject that I saw at a glance twenty-three years ago, has haunted my memory ever since.  The place is a secluded riverside on the island of Grenada and the subject is women washing and bathing. 

I alluded to the scene in my book “Caribbean Sketches” and noted that I have learnt more about drawing the figure at the riverside than I have before the artificially posed model in a life class.   To sketch the figure in real life, be it at the market place or the riverside, one has to take time to become familiar with the subject and accept ribald comments with good humour.  The befriending stage can take days or weeks, but finally the subject relaxes and accepts the artist as part of the natural scheme of things.

Such was my patience rewarded when one day, a young woman, undeterred by the teasing of her mates, planted down her basket of washing on a boulder close to my chosen spot.  I rapidly made sketch after sketch until she had scrubbed, beaten, and rinsed her last item.   But her day’s wash didn’t end there, for she next deftly took off her dress and added that to the wash.  Then, unabashed, she soaped herself down and - using a calabash bowl as a ladle - knelt and poured the cooling river water over her naked body. 

Who says that idyllic scenes of nymphs bathing are restricted to past mythology!

That cherished memory is the subject for my next piece of sculpture and today’s picture shows one of my preliminary sketches with the beginning of a 1/12^th scale plaster maquette. 

The same old thing

Creativity, by its very nature, brings into the world something different to what has gone before.  It demands breaking down barriers and daring the unknown.  The process is thwart with danger, for by-and-large the public prefer a repetitive diet of the same old thing.  Even minor changes can create a backlash from those who have grown accustomed to a particular style or subject matter and anything major can create a revolt. 

On the minor scale of change, today’s picture shows two of my sketches.  The one on the right is from my book “Virgin Island Sketches” and dates from 1980.  In contrast, the one on the left is from my book “Caribbean Sketches” and dates from 1990.  The later sketch is bolder and freer, but buyers prefer the tighter and more precise earlier style of things. 

If I were to publish my more recent sketches - for yes, I’m still moving on - I’m sure the collection would be blacklisted!

   

Mr Roger, don’t you remember me!

Thirty-five years ago, my studio was a shack alongside an idyllic cove in the British Virgin Islands.  The children in nearest village knew that on their birthday I’d make them a present of their portrait. 

On my last visit to Tortola, I was accosted by a large lady with three children in tow.  “Mr Roger, don’t you remember me?”   I had to confess that I could not for the moment place her.  Then she reminded me, I had painted her portrait when she was seven!

A couple of days ago I did a session for a children’s summer programme that was the initiative of Dionne, an entrepreneurial young lady who, in addition to running children’s workshops, works on the family farm and occasionally models for my paintings and sculptures.    

For my portrait, I choose the child with the nearest birthday.  Apart from a day’s difference, Adia shares the same birth date as me - except that we are sixty years apart. 

Perhaps, when I’m a hundred and five, Adia will test my memory by calling out, “Mr Roger, don’t you remember me!”

Body and Soul

I am forever searching for different ways of presenting my work in the belief that there has to be more to exhibiting paintings than static pictures on walls. 

One variation that I have been experimenting with is a fast-moving audio-visual presentation of images for the large screen.  The theme is fifty paintings from my series Daughter of the Caribbean Sun fine tuned to a recording of Duke Ellington’s Body and Soul.

A watercolour no larger than a page from a telephone directory takes on a completely new visual experience when projected to the size of a house wall.   One image follows other within seconds.  Sometimes the screen is filled with the fleeting fragment of a painting.  One such fragment illustrates this entry.

The presentation will be premiered this coming Saturday as part of an evening of music and poetry titled Lyrics Under the Stars.    



Two figures embraced

In my seventieth year, I am attempting subjects that I dare not contemplate in my youth.  Those who toil upon the forge of art are fortunate: as the body grows older, the spirit gets younger.  Creativity, by its very definition, is something different to what has gone before.  I now want to give my sculpture the accidental freedom of my watercolours and to explore the interaction of two figures embraced.  

Working from the nude figure demands passion tempered with integrity and daring tempered with restraint.   These demands become even more challenging when two figures are interlocked in an embrace, for then the element of sex enters the picture.

The following quotations are relevant to the problem at hand.

Sex somewhat remains a forbidden theme, a kind of barrier that provokes sheer hesitation when it comes to represent it and most artists do not have the will or the courage to go beyond was is acceptable in the eyes of the public and even in theirs. (Adrian Darmon)

No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling....The desire to grasp and be united with another human is so fundamental a part of our nature that our judgement of what is known as 'pure form' is inevitably influenced by it, and one of the difficulties of the nude as a subject for art is that these instincts cannot be hidden. (Sir Kenneth Clark)

The picture shows one of my preliminary sketches for a sculpture of two figures embraced.



In the beginning…

As God didn’t have a please a patron or satisfy a board of trustees, I doubt if he made a preliminary sketch or marquette before he created the world.  Sculptors seldom have the same creative freedom. 

Usually commissioners need visible evidence of what’s in the sculptor’s mind’s eye.  When the evidence is to their liking, they want the work to follow suit and the creative process stops there and then.  For this reason, I have grown wary of presenting preliminary sketches and maquettes.  I have learnt that the creative spark ignites all the better when the work is in progress.  Sometimes the model relaxes into a more convincing pose or a group of figures fall into a better arrangement. 

On the other hand, a small maquette occasionally has more life than the finished figure.  I believe this to be the case with my maquette of a Frenchman playing boules - one of a group of figures that I made for the city of Leeds.

Today’s pictures show the 7-inch high plaster maquette and the clay life-size figure. And that’s me in the process of making the waste moulds. 

The artist as reporter

In years to come, whoever makes the final tally of my paintings and sketches, will find that a significant percentage of my work falls under the heading of reportage.  I have attempted to follow the lead of Feliks Topolski, one of the masters of this genre. Editions of his 1950’s broadsheet Topolski’s Chronicle set an enviable benchmark.

My books Virgin Island Sketches and Caribbean Sketches fall under the heading of reportage and my portfolios are crammed with more of the same. 

Fifteen years ago, I gathered material on the nightclub scene in the North of England.  It was an assignment that tested my commitment for working from life to the limits!  To catch my subject, I had to set up my stall at two in the morning on the edge of a crowded dance floor, beneath strobe lights and with decibels beyond measure shaking me to bits.   Today’s sketch is from that series.



The creative potential of genius

It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child. Pablo Picasso

Research has shown that children are born with 98% the creative potential of genius.  At eight years, their potential is 32% and by the age of thirteen, it is down to 10%.  On average, an adult’s creative potential is 2%. 

While I resist teaching children how to draw and paint, I welcome opportunities to introduce them to art.  Over the years, I have occasionally shared my work with schoolchildren.  I painted today’s picture – with running commentary – before a class of primary school children in the UK seventeen years ago.

The painting was brought to my attention a couple of days ago when a teacher at the school tracked me down to Dominica via a roundabout series of e-mails, to which the painting was attached.  In a similar roundabout way, here I am back in the Caribbean remembering the winter’s day in England when I showed a class of ten year olds, what a West Indian Market is all about. 

Stretching a watercolour to its limits…

 As a watercolourist, I am most comfortable working to a paper size of 20” x 16”.  Anything less feels restrictive, anything larger can be daunting.  I might not always fill the sheet, but at least it gives me the freedom to manoeuvre.  Without that freedom, I find myself constricting an arm or leg to fit the page.

To work larger than 20” x 16” means pulling out more stops than there are stops.  The washes have to be thrown down at twice the speed and with an unnerving confidence.  Moreover, there is the fear of spoiling a very expensive 100% all rag of watercolour board.  When the page size is increased to 40” x 30”, I really have reached my limit. 

Recently a long admirer of my work requested the impossible.  Well, the impossible took a little time, but here it is.

Incidentally, I find that photographic reproductions enhance small paintings but diminish large ones.  This is true of all media but especially so with watercolour.  In the photograph, the eye takes in the reduced image at a glance and the interplay of suggestive brush strokes is lost.  On the large original, the eye wanders and selects passages as it may.  

For the technically minded, I used was a No14 pure sable brush and that is as big as a sable watercolour brush gets!



Practicing what I preach…

This week I have had to keep reminding myself to practice what I preach.  It is easy to say forget about defining detail but difficult to loosen up – especially when there is the temptation to flatter the face and figure of a new model. 

Fortunately, my models soon enter into the lyrical scheme of things and, more often than not, loosen up before I do. 

Here are a couple of sketches that came about towards the end of a first session, when freedom and synergy between artist and model makes refinement superfluous. 



Loose ends...

I made today’s sketches at the beginning and end of this afternoon’s modelling session. 

The first, as my model stood wondering whether she should stand, sit, kneel or recline.  The second, as she rocked back and loosened up after an uncomfortable pose that might have resulted in a good painting, had not the large sheet of expensive watercolour paper made me nervous. 

As is often the case, it was the loose ends of the session, jotted down on scraps of paper, rather than the intended finished painting on 100% all-rag, that made my day.