Dora Maar with green fingernails

Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar with Green Fingernails
Oil on Canvas, 1936
Museum Berrgruen, Berlin

She looks at you from the wall at the Museum Berggruen in Berlin Charlottenburg. No - not really. She doesn't look at you.

She simply looks. Observes. All around her, her eyes surveying not one direction but several at once.

She was a woman who always saw a lot - so says the commentary.

For most of Picasso's distortion of female figures I do not care all that much. In particular the double noses (as in smelling a lot???) are weird.

But Dora with green fingernails... I like her, like how her eyelid becomes part of the outline of her face. How it emphasises her eyes, beautiful eyes, matched with eyeshadow and bright green nail varnishes. How 1980s in the 1930s.

She made it into my sketchbook, next to Paul Klee's Die Zeit. With that she's only one of two of Picasso's women - alongside the wonderful melancholic Woman with a Chignon I met in Harvard.
And funnily enough - the sketch is just of her face, so when I tried to look for the painting again I got struck by that starched, stiff and downright scary dress she's wearing. Maybe that says even more than her all observing eyes?

Sketch of Dora Maar with green fingernails by Pablo Picasso
Pencil and neo ii in Moleskine, 14x21cm

And I think it's time now that Dora made it out of the sketchbook and into print - the figure tasks for the monotype projects are the difficult ones; so I'm circling around them, thinking one up, trying a bit, dismissing it again. But I think I'll stick with Dora, not sure how yet, but that'll be freestyle no 3, I think.

'Taking a photo

is like an assault, a mugging.'

That was a line of the text that accompanied Laurie Anderson's Fully Automated Nikon (Object/Objection/Objectivity) project at the Tate's Modern recent exhibition Street and Studio: An Urban History of Photography.

Anderson, in 1973, made an analogy how a photo - or rather: a camera stuck into someone's face - really does resemble an assault, when she got fed up with the chat she got off blokes on the streets of NYC. So, Fully Automated Nikon is the result of her asking for a photo, in response to any stupid/aggressive/annoying chat up. So, there's a series of guys, white guys, black guys, young guys, old guys, with other guys, with their girlfriends; and a couple of lines of how they responded to her assault of taking a photo.

It stuck - or rather linked up with a series of other things: notably, my hesitation to take pictures of strangers. Something my PhD examiner remarked on in response that photos labelled 'young skaters in the city centre' don't really have that many young skaters in them, similar 'builders during a break' requires the onlooker to look hard for the builders. LOL.

Now: a picture, a snapshot is really something done reasonably quick, inconspicious.

But, what on earth about a sketch, a portrait??

My parents fell victim in August to my determination of sketching people. And after my mum was mortified about my (admittedly poor) sketch, I deliberately did not try to sketch my brother when sketching him... so as almost on purpose not to produce any similarity.

Now, a long lead-in to this: stealing sketches of unsuspecting people. I still - and in fact probably before I stumbled across Anderson so wonderfully single-minded let's turn the table kind of take on mugging - think of taking something not offered by sketching strangers.

At Central Station
Ink in Moleskine, 18x13cm

But: here are some takings: at the train station on the way to the sea a few weeks back; and this afternoon while waiting on an appointment.

At the Coffee Shop
Ink in Moleskine, 18x13cm

The woman on the bench in profile found her way into my printmaking project: it needed some life drawing; and the outline worked reasonably well, it probably needs a bit more colour (how about a trusted orange); but the backdrawing - sketching on the back of the surface which lies on a thinly inked print plate - works well. It effectively produces an old-fashioned carbon copy of the sketch.

Print Project 1.3 Waiting, 20x25cm
Monotpye with backdrawing on blotting paper


Print Project 1.3 Waiting, 20x25cm
Monotpye with backdrawing on blotting paper

My avocado tree

is now being finally represented in three-colour, varied textured, monoprint.

I tried out a fourth mask to see how the shapes translate into print. And it works:

Print Project 1.3 Avocado leaf #4
Monotype on blotting paper, 20x25cm

I had experimented with a number of colours - a green/blue, orange and lemon yellow seemed a good combination.

Print Project 1.4 Avocado leaves
Multi-coloured, masked, and textured monotype
Tosa shi paper, 20x25cm

So, this morning I finally had two prints which satisfied various criteria:
- good registration
- good composition (colour/form)
- at least two different techniques for texture/printing

Initially, I had planned to use this thin Tosa Shi paper of this print from the back, i.e., print on the back rather than the front of the paper so that it shines through somewhat muted; that didn't look right and so I sprayed the paper - while lying on the plate - with water, quite a bit of water, some of the ink blurred, and it generally mottled quite nicely.

I overlayed with the orange leaf - again, initially wanted the negative shape of it printed rather than the actual leaf, but that didn't look right; I finally overlayed with the lemon yellow and imprinted tin foil on the ink plate before printing.

Both the water and the tinfoil textures are rather subtle textures - but I like the way the shapes are bold and then the actual print surface is quite subtly marked.

I'm chuckling away at the awkward way of writing down these things, and think of a friend's recent remark of better not to talk about some things; but I think it's more a matter of having someone 'talk printmaking' to me - some specialist vocab that so clearly isn't mine yet (in either language, really), but never mind.

Off to Edinburgh now to see this. And I need to run now not to be late...

Play 2

String, strung, strong: seascapes in red this time.

The marks? String wrapped round the plate, then inked - a bit of embossing results, some white - some of it masked off.

Seascape in red, 25x20cm
Monotype on blotting paper
Masked plate and string for marks


Seascape in red, 25x20cm
Monotype on blotting paper
Ghost print
Masked plate and string for marks


Seascape in red, 25x20cm
Monotype on blotting paper
Ghost print on wet blotting paper
Masked plate and string for marks

This is the print order. Some serious serial experimentation: note the marks of the string as they change; note the intensity of colour on the wet paper; note the embossing on the dry ghost print; etc. etc. etc...

So, this is the technique of my seascape project. Now I just need to overlay different colours

The sea... in print

... playtime ... nothing else:

Monotype, 25x20cm
tinfoil texture and backdrawing


Monotype, 25x20cm
tinfoil and backdrawing


Monotype, 25x20cm
masks, backdrawing and ink splatters

St Mary in the Marsh by Mark Leach

St Mary in the Marsh by Mark Leach
Pastel on board, 70x50cm

is greeting me every time I enter my flat. It has had its place at the far wall of the living room for the past two years. It is my window to elsewhere; it's my window onto the fields where I grew up; not just the fields, but them on a hot high summer afternoon; when you can smell the summer as it hits your skin. The kind of summer I haven't had for a long time; but whenever I get a scent of them, once or twice a year, it is so welcome.

St Mary in the Marsh by Mark Leach
Pastel on board, 70x50cm

But for the past two years, I've got a scent, just a hint, of them whenever I enter my flat. Mark's book, Raw Colour with Pastels, had just been published when I stumbled across it on Amazon: a book on pastel, a book about abstract pastel landscapes. And it was ordered. And it proved important, resourceful, inspiring.

It isn't a how to do book but much more of a biographical account of why pastel and colour matter to this artist. It's a bit similar to a good autobiography that isn't really constructed as such.

So, I learned how to prepare my own grounds with pumice powder and acrylics; how to simplify layers and: how to paint fields, lines, more fields, more lines.

St Mary in the Marsh by Mark Leach (Detail)
Pastel on board, 70x50cm

Really, a lot of the first bits of landscape abstraction have come from that.

I discovered that Mark's paintings were still available in a variety of places - as I said, the book had just been out, and thus many of the paintings were still for sale. More by luck than anything else I stumbled across the site for St Mary in the Marsh. Blindly and wholeheartedly I had fallen in love with it. It was the singular colour of the sky - an otherwise ugly salmon pink which in another life was THE colour of the late 1980s and for good reason still has to make its comeback - , the almost halfway horizon line, the yellow of the field and the splashes of cobalt in the foreground. So I did something I hadn't done ever before: I sent him an email, and in the end bought the painting - I don't think I ever told my parents that I did that. In the process, we exchanged a few emails and I had been planning of visiting him in his studio south of London - even remember researching a tedious set of public transport connections to get there from central London.

Dear Gesa, That is wonderful news! I am so glad you are not disappointed. Always a worrying time for me - the photos can be very misleading. The painting has fond memories for me, so I am very pleased it has found a nice home. All the very best for now.. Mark

On 27 Oct 2006, at 10:48, Gesa Helms wrote:

Dear Mark, I got the paintig last night - a neighbour had signed for it while I was out. You can safely cash the cheque! I love it! It's great and there is no way I will be sending it back - those colours and textures (I will have some technique questions a bit later, if I may). It reminds me a lot of where I grew up - north west Germany with flat fields of wheat and barley on a hot summer day - it's the kind of mood you don't really get on the Scottish West coast, but now it'll be in my living room! So many thanks for this! All my best, Gesa

Brian had just written a post about Mark Leach's book. In this he mentioned that Mark had died in early July. Dear Mark, thank you so much for this painting and for the hint of a hot summer afternoon in Bokel in my flat! And for showing me the possibilities for abstraction in landscape, colour and lines and simple fields to paint the things that matter!


Please see Mark Leach's website here: http://www.markleach.net/
And have another look at a good quality shot of St Mary in the Marsh on his website here
An article on Mark's work appeared in the June 2007 edition of the Pastel Journal, with the PDF available here

It didn't rock her

... so she said after I had sent her some snapshots from the prints I was truly excited about. Well, admittedly, I. only got two small, poor lighting pics sent over IM for a quick look. But nonetheless, it left her very unexcited.

Even to my comment that most of the times still life doesn't rock, really she replied: no, some of them do. LOL.

Orchid and Vase (They do not rock)
Monotype on blotting paper
40x30cm

That leads on to work process: Assignment One of the printmaking is on monotypes; it's set out in such a way that there are four projects: markmaking; masking; textures/different colours; freestyle.

Markmaking made me crash into hurdle #1: mixing ink, keeping ink fluid and getting a good print - it was really about painting on the plate and taking a print. I tried, tried some more and failed some more, and quickly moved to project #2 [which turned out a lot better, see here]; I kept reading on to the freestyle bit and quickly came up with ideas for the four freestyle projects to do, starting sketches, collecting things to include and general plans for that. In the meantime I kept playing around with the inbetween parts: masks, different masks, different colours with different masks, collecting more leaves, seashells and other things for texture etc etc.

So, project 1 was still lacking 'a still life including two objects, negative space and shadows'. After six, seven attempts at various jugs, plants, cafetieres, pears and some more, I had previously given up.

But the inbetween parts meant that I got a clearer idea of colour and contrast with the prints, got to know that dried ink doesn't get fluid again [uhuh... eejit], registration of plate is important so that you get the alignment right and so on. Knew a bit more about the paper, the transfer process, that the clean-up isn't really such a pain...

So, when I then turned to that dreaded still life including two objects I chose colours (orange and green) and objects (orchid) which had worked well in the masked prints. And, heyho: I have a print that does work in terms of composition, it's a reasonably clean print, has two objects, shadows and negative space. Well: it doesn't rock, I agree. But in relative terms it does well. And: it completes the task.

I think the painting on plate bit is too painterly for me; I like the roller, sponge, water stuff better. But more of that later.

Now onto the prints for freestyle, jippieh... good that I have some ideas.

More of the same 'them'

... new colours, new shapes... slowly getting to grips with the different paper - one is blotting paper, one a Chinese paper.

The orange works very well, but I'm unconvinced by the purple - too muddy, really. Probably the napthol red to blame for that. I want a MAGENTA!

But in the meantime, Kari and Steph were getting close: it's organic and leafy. These are more of the same, and yet different...

Masked positive monotype
30x40cm


Ghostprint, 30x40cm


Masked negative monotype
15x20cm

Next task: all of them on one sheet...

The sea... in colour

A day out, arriving at low tide and sunshine (well, once in a while):









Now I'm thinking of lines, markings, reflections, more lines in sand and water...

Cy Twombly is Painting Loss (Part 2)

Twombly wasn't really painting loss in Hero and Leandro, or was he? What he did was taking a poem based on Greek mythology and wove a different narrative for it. It was one of loss and sorrow. But nonetheless a far removed one all the same.

Yet, a couple of rooms before Hero and Leandro - and about ten years earlier - he was painting some of his own loss in Nini's Paintings. A series of five huge, 300x260cm tall, canvasses, in response to the sudden death of his gallerist's wife, Nini Pirandello, in 1971.

Cy Twombly, Nini's Painting, 1971, 261x300cm
Oil-based house paint, oil paint, wax crayon and lead pencil on canvas
Kunstmuseum Basel

They are all there is in the room, apart from a bench. They are all part of the same. Tall, wide, repetitive: scrawl upon scrawl upon scrawl on beige canvas. Unlike many of his other series, these five are so similar - it is difficult to discern which preceded the others. There is no numbering, no development. They are all simply Nini's Paintings. And that is important: it doesn't matter. It's melancholic sadness that repeats itself, over and over and over again. Not just across the canvasses, but in layer upon layer.

Much of the commentary on Twombly's work process remarked on such layering right throughout his work - the white housepaint that is used so frequently to undo what was before, e.g. also in the Poems to the Sea, or the centrality of the whites in Hero and Leandro, notably in Hero's drowning. It's gone and still it is there. Joane Eardley's work process was also driven by such layering: of paint, of dirt, of collage - in fact, any collagist actively builds this into her work process: to build up history, narratives, stories through such layering.

In many ways it's probably too neat an image - one of the things I like about collage or mixed media is the fusing of different layers, how they become something new, one, many, rather than staying separate.

Well, and that kind of goes back to mourning. The catalogue's opening paragraph on Nini's Paintings refers to Freud's 1915 essay on Mourning and Melancholia*. How, with any loss, mourning goes through all the previous ones to finally arrive at the most recent. [Well, and his argument is that melancholia occurs if that isn't happening right].

So, there is a layering, recalling, rewriting and perhaps fusing of past experiences. Working the way through the various rounds, experiences of loss... scrawling a name, different names over pages, over and over, whitening them out, adding new ones on top. And at some point the painting is done. Well, done in the sense that it can remain as what it is. And one can look at it.

It's funny. I read most of this when I was back home. But I remember the sheer physicality of those paintings in that room. Me sitting on that bench in the corner, they all around. It was about acknowledging the presence of something important.

Paintings I like? No, they are not pretty nor nice. They are important.


* - Hm, I tried to find a full text version of the text, but didn't; here's a summary of some sort:

What ARE we???

Monotype on paper, 15x20cm
Masked negative


Monotype on paper, 15x20cm
Ghostprint


Monotype on paper, 15x20cm
Masked positive

... besides the first working examples of my masked monotype experiments?

Do you know? They are representations of something, but of what? I've been quickly filling the washing lines spun across my flat, so if you know what they are: leave a comment and the first one with a right answer will get one of them sent.

Now... more printing...

Hero and Leandro

aka... Cy Twombly is Painting Loss (Part 1)

Ok - I've been carrying this one around with me for a good while, so I reckon it's time to put it on paper. There were two rooms - or rather two series - in the Twombly exhibition that didn 't leave me.

For this first one, I briefly contemplated filing it under my Paintings I like tag. But that doesn't capture it. It doesn't get to it at all. There is something terribly wrong with LIKE in this context. It's far more complicated than LIKING implicates. Liking is niceness; prettiness; oh, that is kinda cutesy.

Well, there is something really aesthetically appealling about the series of four paintings - or rather: pieces of art - that constitute Hero and Leandro. Just looking at them from a distance. A wave, viridian and a dark magenta crimson, rising up on the left...... calming, calming further until it is white nothingness - thick textured off-whites layered atop of each other to the far right of the three pieces in oil. Large paintings they are. Intricately layered in oil with the white and the wave and the green and the dark red. Violent calm it seems to shoutwhisper.

Then. Tucked on as an afterthought a small piece of paper with a scrawled line:

"He's gone, up bubbles all his amorous breath"

- a line from Christopher Marlowe's poem which gave the inspiration.

That's the art.

Cy Twombly, Hero and Leandro, 1981-84
Part 1 168,x200cm,
Part 2 156x205cm
Part 3 156x205cm
Oil, crayon and graphite on canvas
Part 4 42x30cm
Graphite on graph paper
Cy Twombly Gallery, The Menil Collection Houston

The concept? It's so obvious that it sticks; unsticks the beauty of the piece wholeheartedly. Leandro - the lover of Hero - crosses the sea to visit his loved one. One night he drowns. In despair over his death, Hero drowns herself in sorrow and the sea. Do you get it? He dies in a bloody, green wave of powerful mediterranean water. She in contrast simply vanishes into white nothingness, demurely, obediently, the nothingness engulfs her sorrow. I kind of see Kate Blanchet in all her white Lord of the Ring otherworldliness walking into a calm lake, all glowy and sacrificial.

A painting I like? No. Nobody drowns in waves of blood, unless you've been hit over the head beforehand. Your lungs just fill with water, no blood, just no air. And then a body is washed ashore within a couple of hours and not only in three weeks, if one's lucky. I know that bit, and I wish I wouldn't. But that isn't the point. How boringly does he think he can go and construct gender? Yawn... active/ passive, red blood/ white sorrow... C'mon Cy! I'm sure you could have done something a bit better on this one! It's not even an old piece, you did this in the early 1980s! No?!

It's just a shame that it's an awfully attractive - beautiful - series of paintings. Liking? ... far too nice for it.