Fiddling Fails To Calm The Waters Or Extinguish The Flames

Fiddling fails to calm the waters or extinguish the flames, pastel, 34×32 in,originally uploaded by ahtravis.

I have had a difficult time birthing this third expression of my rage against the violence of man toward his fellow man, as individual and/or his environment.  I had originally conceived the interior of a car, with children and parents about to be overcome by water and hurtling toward fire seen through the windshield, “Armageddon, are we there yet?”

That image evolved to become suited fiddlers inside an impressive, elegant building that is breaking apart in water, fire and smoke and an obvious reference to the Emperor Nero, who reputedly fiddled while Rome burned.

I like this latest version but it too, has had its own evolution.  Of course the building is the U.S. Congressional Building in Washington, D.C. with its tiers of windows and dome on top.  I had to make myself relinquish its recognizable detail and instead work to identify its essential features.  I also had planned to collage front pages of the New York Times to create the building shape, another sign of U.S. politics but in the end, that too, became an distracting detail and I have opted to use pastel as in the rest of the painting.

Another large decision concerned the “scale“ of the shapes.  I began making the fiddlers in close scale to the building but too many were required so that they became inconsequential, silly, instead of one of the three main images that make up the whole. The fiddlers are not silly; they are powerful players in an inadequate response to the problems of the country and the world!  The fiddler on the roof is unable to keep straddling the top, loses his balance and tumbles into the water.  Their size had to reflect their influence.

In changing the scale of the fiddlers I lost some of the abstract appeal of the smoke against a red sky, as one can see in the Study, no. 2 (Flickr photos) but that route would have made an entirely different painting–maybe later.

With those two big solutions revealed I was faced with how to actually construct the painting. Anyone who knows me or has watched me painting knows I am messy; I fling my mediums around the room walls, floors, and on myself.  I do a lot of revising as I go along.  I am using pastel in this series and it will tolerate a minimum of “erasing” or layering and also stay clean.  I even considered masking the shapes but I hate the hard lines and rigid shape frisket produces. In the end I have, as usual, drawn the entire thing freehanded.  The thinking and thinking ahead of time did help me draw just the sizes and shapes I wanted.

Turkeys in back yard

Turkeys in back yard, pastel on paper, 22inx5ft., originally uploaded by ahtravis.

Turkeys; sketches to painting

I’m in Massachusetts.  A flock of 20 or more wild turkeys roam the yard and neighborhood.  We hear them gobbling before daylight.  They are seldom visible as the dawn is breaking but when the sun is fully on the yard and house, about mid morning, they are there, slowly, jerkily wading through the 6 inches of snow that covers the ground.

Several weeks ago, while taking a nighttime walk, we noticed that they were roosting high in the trees that overhang the street, in the back yard and the woods up the hill.  One to each tree, and higher than I have ever seen them fly.  As we walked underneath their hulking shapes they craned their necks to peer down at us.

On first impression wild turkeys are dark and colorless.  I know this is not so because on our Ohio farm I used to collect their dropped feathers and could see that they have a colorful iridescence.  When a student at The Cleveland Institute of Art I did a report on “iridescence” using their feathers as an example.  The other day I was walking in the sun and met about 10 of the birds slowing picking their way across the lawns lining the street.  The sun was shining brightly and as they moved I could see green and red glinting from the feathers.  I suddenly understood why the cartoon illustrations of Thanksgiving turkeys always show them in brilliant color.

I have been sketching them from our windows and I used a turkey sketch in my “Madonna, horrified” as well as in the pastel of a group above.

Such interesting shapes.  It is a challenge to capture their movements and attitudes.  Many sketches produce only several good ones.  I sketch in pen and ink; I prefer Uniball micro pens because they slide so effortlessly across the page of my small sketch book.  In most of the sketches I am not concerned with detail.  A few sketches of particulars can always be used to flesh out a basic bird.

South African poet, Dennis Brutus

I have added a link ( below Flickr photos) to the rebroadcast of an interview of Dennis Brutus, conducted by Terry Gross, “In Memoriam:  Activist Poet, Dennis Brutus”, Freshair”, National Public Radio, Dec. 30, 2009,  on the occasion of Brutus’ death. 

Poet and blog visitor, Ann Zerkel, suggested these words and his experiences were appropriate commentary on my painting, “Spilt Milk”.  I am moved that my painting might be considered in his company.

More protesting violence

Spilt Milk, pastel, 30×22 in., originally uploaded by ahtravis.

Teaching; using paint cans as a lesson in dark and light shapes

Paint cans, no. 2, originally uploaded by ahtravis.

                           “Alix, I am very pleased when I look at the paint cans.  I think the exercise of looking at and painting the shadows first is a really good one. It results in something different that I cannot explain. Thanks, I will try more of this.“  Carol

“Saving the whites” is a difficult maneuver for the student of watercolor to comprehend and master. One must think of the white of the paper as another “color” available to the painter. The painter must “paint” with the white. Once the white of the paper is covered with paint it can NEVER be recovered. So, it must be saved.

The beginning student has difficulty visualizing what the lightest areas of the painting should be.  I used paint cans and “drawing” with a rigger (a long, thin, flexible brush, over which the painter has little control) as a way to practice seeing the subject of a still life as dark shapes and light shapes, rather than “paint can” shapes.

Using a weak cerulean and the rigger we lightly sketched the line of the shadows, those on the cans and cast by the cans.  We used the rigger to indicate the shapes of the dark sides of the cans and the shapes of any dark spaces behind the cans.  And using the same blue and a 1 ½ in wide wash brush we filled in those shapes only. Voila!  We had a dramatic painting of paint cans with their light surfaces vividly present without our ever having “painted” them. The whites or lights were saved.

At this point the painter can begin to adjust the values, making the darkest darks more dark; consequently the less dark is made less dark by contrast with the darkest darks.  In the same manner some lights may become less light by painting them. Now, however, it is easier to see the whites that must be saved and that the darker shapes and lighter shapes fit together to make a beautiful painting.

More on similarities of painting to writing

My daughter, a poet, objects to my title “Madonna, horrified by violence“.  She thinks I am neglecting the opportunity to give information that the image alone cannot convey.  “Madonna in the twenty-first century“ or “Modern Madonna” would please her more.

To me, these titles seem to possibly indicate only that the painting was painted in the early 21^st century.  Certainly, any one with an interest in history knows that horrible violence has existed throughout the centuries.  Maybe the methods and tools in use today have greater reach but the attitudes, hatreds, and desire for power and gain are cultural and remain the same.

Madonna, horrified by violence

Madonna, horrified by violence, pastel and  gouache, 31×25in., originally uploaded by ahtravis.

Painting complete.  Issue still rages.

Violence, 2, in progress

Violence, 2, in progress, pastel on paper, 30×30 in., originally uploaded by ahtravis.

I have begun another attempt.

Violence, the artist’s eye and focus

I woke up this morning determined to cut the fire out of my painting.  

It’s interesting about that fire.  I had first envisioned a sort of Pandora’s box of evils then moved to threat as a blast.  The blast turned first into a campfire and then into a house fire.  In the meantime the fire has taken over my painting and that was not my intention.  Really I do not even need the object “threat”; I only need the responses to it.

This work in progress is on paper.  I could literally cut the fire out, paste what is left of my original painting onto a clean sheet and keep working.  I could paint white or maybe black over the fire and try again.  OR, and I think this will be my course, I can roll this painting up, put it in a corner and begin again with an entirely new composition.

Frequently for me, in painting en plein air in watercolor the first several pieces in a given location serve to focus my eye and mind on exactly what it is about the scene that really attracts me and finally to produce a painting that nails an angle, shape, or shadow. I feel this present effort, of many days, has focused my mind on exactly what I am trying to express.  It is not the threat itself; I am trying to paint the resulting revulsion, hurt, terror on the figure.  I do not need the “threat” in my painting at all.  It could never be an adequate representation of something that in reality takes so many different forms.

Violence, in progress

Violence, in progress, 50×36 in., originally uploaded by ahtravis.

The artist’s eye

I, like, most mothers, am sickened by violence–violence in my country and the violence done around the world in whatever name, who cares.  Everyday, in the media, we see figures of fleeing bodies, bodies blown into the air, children burned, the earth burned and scorched by violence inflicted on it, by governments, guns, poverty, extremism in the name of religion or taxes or government. 

 As a mother and grandmother, I grieve for the mothers and grandmothers whose children are caught up in this destructive maelstrom.  I cannot imagine that any mother really thinks violence to her children is worth any cause. Every adult effected was some mother’s child once. Stop! Stop!  And yet it goes on.  Americans love their guns, the availability of guns means that they get used.  There is incendiary violence in our speech, on TV, radio, computer, in town halls.  Intolerance is everywhere.

I am not only seeing violated bodies on the screen and television, in the newspapers but in each instance the figures in this newly begun work were were joyous when I first observed them.  A statue in the Lake country of Italy was a nymph vigorously celebrating spring.  Now when I view my sketch I see that figure as a young woman thrown into the air by the blast of a roadside bomb.  The statue of a madonna extending a hand in blessing recently viewed at the Cape Ann Museum, CAM, Glouster, MA becomes a mother trying to protect her child by throwing up her hand , her smile becomes a mouth twisted by horror.

A young man bending backward to throw or catch a basketball , also on view at the CAM, in my altered vision, is being tossed and broken by a bomb.  A strutting turkey, his tail feathers spread as a warning to the cat in my back yard becomes a pathetic, inadequate warning to the bomb blast.  Flowers die.

As a student of movement and gesture I am struck by the blurred postures of ecstasy and horror.  It seems there is not much distance between the positions of exaltation and the shocking.  The body, with its finite number of bones, muscles and sinew, is limited in its physical expression.

I began work on this piece this afternoon though it has been in my thoughts for many days and weeks.  I intend to post the development of the work as it progresses or collapses. The responsibility to Picasso’s “Guernica” feels heavy.