The Waterhouse Exhibit, Montreal


‘Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May’ 1908
(Click on any picture to view fullscreen)
“Throughout his career, Waterhouse closely associated women with the beauty, simplicity and decay of flowers, while valuing both as vessels of the seeds of new growth.” J.W. Waterhouse, The Modern Pre-Raphaelite
I, personally, don’t think of women as simple or flowerlike, decaying or otherwise, but rather as active, complex, fully-human, capable of the full range of human vices and virtues, as much a human norm as a man could be. Whether Waterhouse really thought of women that way, considering the number of temptresses and murderesses he painted, is food for argument. One cannot deny the beauty of the paintings though.

Lamia 1909


‘Listening to My Sweet Pipings’ 1911
“Reminiscent of the rural idylls in a similar format made by so-called Etruscan painters such as George Heming Mason and Nino Costa,” Listening to my Sweet Pipings shares “most resonance with the famous sequence of pictures of somnambulant women painted by Leighton such as Idyll, Cymon and Iphigenia, The Garden of the Hesperides and Flaming June. Leighton was long dead and in a world that was turning to modernism to express its spirit, it is as if Waterhouse werte expressing his belief in the eternal subjects of nature, myth and creation.” Amen, I say.
Posted by Picasa

The Waterhouse Exhibit, Montreal


Penelope and the Suitors 1912
Bronze Age (Mycenaean) Greece was imperfectly portrayed in the Iliad and Odyssey, since both poems were concretions of poetic material originating in the Bronze Age, but developed for at least four hundred years thereafter. However, the palaces of the Mycenaeans were being excavated in Waterhouse’s own lifetime. He clearly drew upon this new knowledge in his backdrop for Penelope, staving off her suitors until Odysseus (Ulysses) could return home.


‘I am Half Sick of Shadows, said the Lady of Shalott 1915
Notice upon the loom the tapestry from Waterhouse’s earlier painting of the Lady. Each picture is confined by the shape of the cirular mirror in which she sees reality reflected.


Miranda 1916
Waterhouse’s late Miranda is less restrained than his earlier Classical interpretation. She is now an active figure, less delicate; she strides rather than stepping demurely barefoot; she is perhaps a woman of the 20th Century despite her Renaissance costume.
Posted by Picasa

The Waterhouse Exhibit, Montreal


Tristram and Isolde 1916
(Click on picture to view the painting full screen)
Tristan (as I prefer the name) and Isolde are among my favorite subjects for poetry. Isolde appears to be staring over Tristan’s shoulder, as if the full consequences of their fatal draught are settling upon her.

The Decameron 1916
Boccaccios’s Decameron is set in a series of country retreats, where seven maidens and three youths, who have fled the Plague of 1348 Florence, tell each other tales as a form of mental and emotional escape. Waterhouse might well have wished for a similar idyll in the midst of the first World War, whichever destroyed the romantic preoccupations of Tennyson’s Britain. One can hear the echo of that (comparative) Eden in the words of Britains poets who knew both worlds, A.E. Housman, Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen.


The Enchanted Garden: from Boccacio’s Tales c. 1916-1917
An unfinished painting by Waterhouse in the last year of his life. It portrays the fifth tale on the last day of the Decameron. A garden that blooms in January is certainly a hopeful theme of rebirth in the grimmest year of WWI.
Posted by Picasa

Our last day and evening in Old Montreal

Inside Notre Dame Basilica
Geneia and I spent our last day in Montreal visiting historical museums, the Chateau Ramezay and Pointe-de-Calliere, which takes one beneath Rue de la Commune to visit the oldest building foundations in Vieux Montreal.
A room from an 18th Century French Chateau, given to Chateau Ramezay.

Above I’m outside the Chateau. It was the 18th Century seat of Quebec’s Governeurs, once visited by Benjamin Franklin on a diplomatic mission. We went skating in the evening at a rink built on one of the quays thrusting into the St. Lawrence Seaway. We ended our evening with a glass of Pinot Noir in our room, next to our (electric) fire.

Posted by Picasa

Yesterday and Today


We learned just about three weeks ago that my husband, Matt, has lung cancer. He had been suffering from pneumonia for about a month and a half and it wasn’t responding to antibiotics, so he finally opted to have a bronchoscopy and find out what bug he was fighting.
Well, we did, and it was totally unsuspected. So this year we will be fighting cancer.
Posted by Picasa

The Musician Goes Spelunking

The Musician Goes Spelunking, Oil on Canvas, 36×36

I’ve been working full time since the Fall Art Tour and doing much painting has been an impossibility. However, I wanted to post this large work, a nod to the many interpretations of Orpheus and Euridice in the history of art.  I haven’t touched it for a couple of months, until the last few days. It is pretty well developed.

I’ve been reading poetry with Orpheus as the subject lately. I would like to post a poem I love by a poet I’ve only just discovered.*
I Dream I’m the Death of Orpheus
by Adrienne Rich
I am walking rapidly through striations of light and dark thrown under an arcade.
I am a woman in the prime of life, with certain powers
and those powers severly limited
by authorities whose faces I rarely see.
I am a woman in the prime of life
driving her dead poet in a black Rolls-Royce
through a landscape of twilight and thorns.
A woman with a certain mission
which if obeyed to the letter will leave her intact.
A woman with the nerves of a panther
a woman with contacts among Hell’s Angels
a woman feeling the fullness of her powers
at the precise moment when she must not use them
a woman sworn to lucidity
who sees through the mayhem, the smoky fires
of these underground streets
her dead poet learning to walk backward against the wind
on the wrong side of the mirror.

1968I’m also reading Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus. Rilke is an old favorite of mine, probably due to the fascination Greece and the Ancient World exercised generally over the 19th and early 20th Century German thinkers, poets, and musicians. (There is a connection between Nietzche, Rilke and Sigmund Freud in the person of Lou Von Salome, who as a friend and sometime lover, was what one must call a Muse to them all. Those who are interested in the personal lives of these creative people, however fantastical, might want to check her out.)

“The Musician in Mourning” will be appearing in The Best and the Brightest Juried Show and The Celebration of Fine Art in Scottsdale, AZ from January 15 through March 28.

The Musician in Mourning, Oil on Canvas, 18×18
*The poem refers to “smoky fires” and “underground streets.” I personally believe in the simple Biblical statement that “as for the dead, they are conscious of nothing at all,” (Ecclesiastes 9:5) and that our hope for future life lies in resurrection.
The Musician Goes Spelunking, Oil on Canvas, 36×36, $1400 USD
The Musician in Mourning, Oil on Canvas, 18×18, $900 USD
Posted by Picasa

High Pasture

This is also probably the final incarnation of this painting (originally blogged on August 27), which I’ve called High Pasture. I worked on the shadows a bit more, as well as my daughter’s face, the grass, and the rock outcropping behind.

High Pasture, Oil on Canvas, 16×20

Posted by Picasa

Coconut Macaroon Pie with Chocolate Sauce

I’ve been snowed under with my other job lately, so I haven’t blogged in a while. However, I have been gathering the photographic references for the Odysseus-inspired painting I want to do. It’s been a difficult summer weather-wise, hard to get together with my models in the right lighting conditions. Now it’s late autumn. The sun is low in the southern sky, whereas the photographs I took of the pig, Elroy, were taken at the height of the summer when the sun was many more degrees towards the zenith. Either I put the project off for another season or I use my imagination to harmonize the lighting.

The painting above is a revision of the one I originally blogged on May 21. I was never happy with the whipped cream, which melted and lost its contours too quickly for me to paint accurately. I tried several times. So, because the painted garnish was so thick, I ground it down with a cuttlebone, procured from PetSmart, repainted the top of the pie and drizzled chocolate over it instead. The plate and the doily are unchanged.

Here’s a poem by A.E. Housman from A Shropshire Lad. It seems fitting for a November day.

XXXII

From far, from eve and morning

And yon twelve-winded sky,

The stuff of life to knit me

Blew hither: here am I.

Now — for a breath I tarry

Nor yet disperse apart —

Take my hand quick and tell me,

What have you in your heart.

Speak now, and I will answer;

How shall I help you, say;

Ere to the wind’s twelve quarters

I take my endless way.

Chocolate Macaroon Pie, Oil on canvas panel, 5×7, $110.00 USD

Posted by Picasa