Mugshot 68: Double Portrait, Queen Marianna and Jean

I went to the Meadows Museum in Dallas to see the Velazquez show. There were only a few paintings,  I think the show specified they were early court paintings.  The jewel of the show was the Phillip IV, I'm not certain of his number, and he was painted when Velazquez was 24 years old.  When I compared those early paintings with what I know of V.'s later ones, I could see and understand the difference.  The early paintings, although beautiful and ambitious, were without the poetry and breath of the later ones. I did turn a corner though and stumble on my friend, Queen Marianna, and so I got a little shot of the two of us.

Mugshot 43: Halloween

I have a Velasquez in my studio - not a real one, of course, a Chinese catalog of his work with all the copy in Chinese - opened to a painting of the Spanish Infanta, with her hair done in the most rapturous architectural shape, and then white plumes with red bows attached to it. So I was just thinking...children with headpieces, hmmm...and thought I'd have a go. I can see that the thing to do is to copy the painting to really understand it, so I am preparing a canvas. I'll see if I can find a photo of this painting. One of the interesting things about V. is that you can't see any brush strokes. At all. I don't know how he achieved this - there are directional marks of paint but no typical strokes and no edges, either. On this painting I tried to have no edges, really that's difficult to believe when you look at it, it looks like all edges. And so to work.

Lemon on Orange Kimono

The back story: a good painter friend mentioned looking at Diebenkorn, the forms, space, etc. and so I picked up my own book and spent some time looking at the way the color flattened the space, even when there is minimal modeling. I love this idea when it works, the perfect tension of the color and the picture plane, everything pressing outward in dynamic balance, if such a thing is possible. So I tried to set up that situation using a single bright lemon with enough other color and pattern that would cause it all to hang together in that "fresh but inevitable" manner. Regardless of the success of this painting, it is a direction I have been going in for a long time and still find thrilling and natural to my view of the world. Just how to combine it with a mug shot.....how to use the modeled figure with this degree of abstraction. Oy.

Also -- Happy New Year! Thank you everyone for your support and encouragement, I appreciate it enormously.

Jean

Mugshot 25: Jill W.

This is an honorary daughter who came for a visit and succumbed to the purifying mask.

Also, I want to thank all of you for your generous comments on these paintings. It's so exciting to open up the blog and see response. It helps to keep the fires lit.