The Angel of Music

Night time sharpens, heightens each sensation.
Darkness stirs and wakes imagination.
Silently the senses abandon their defenses….

I’ve had a blast painting this scene inspired by the Phantom of the Opera. Christine, the aspiring young opera singer, is taught by a spirit she sees in the mirror of her dressing room, whom she believes is the Angel of Music. Alright, she’s a bit naive, but it’s sooooo romantic, especially set to the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber. (Yes, I listen to inspirational music while I paint. Sarah Brightman is singing as I write this.)

I had two wonderful models, Steve and Julia, who brought the emotions of the Phantom and Christine to life. My profound thanks to them! It was interesting painting candlelight. It’s warmer than the northern daylight of my studio. (See Girl Without a Pearl Earring and Girl Reading Gerard Manley Hopkins.) This painting will be on view at Bohlin Gallery in Mineral Point for Gallery Night, December 7.

I’m not blogging as often right now because I am working full time at Lands’End during their Peak Season. I’m looking forward to the new year though, when I plan to open Rosewind Studio and Gallery one day per week on a regular basis. See the Mineral Point Website in future for which weekday it will be.

Here’s a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay that references the season:

That chill is in the air
Which the wise know well, and even have learned to bear.
This joy, I know,
Will soon be under snow.

The sun sets in a cloud
And is not seen.
Beauty, that spoke aloud,
Addresses now only the remembering ear.
The heart begins here
To feed on what has been.

Night falls fast.
Today is in the past.

Blown from the dark hill hither to my door
Three Flakes, then four
Arrive, then many more.

The Phantom in the Mirror, Oil on Canvas, 24×36, $1500.00 USD

Apple Tart

I’ve been working full time at Lands’ End for the past two weeks and will continue to work 40 hrs per week through the middle of January, so this little painting of an apple tart is my offering for an overdue blog. I continue to work on my Phantom painting, which I need to finish by the beginning of December. I’ve been contending with acute arthritis with a second course of Prednisone, which I can’t keep taking, but am feeling good today. Hurray! It’s always a cause for celebration when the lame one can use her left hand without premeditation, at least for a couple of days.

My friend Josephine and I are reading the poetry of Wallace Stevens and W.H. Auden for Book Club. I’ve decided to blog part of a poem she wowed me with years ago and which has been my only acquaintance with Stevens. It’s called Peter Quince at the Clavier. I’d like to include all of it, but Blog Poems must be more succinct, so I’m jumping from Part I to Part IV:

I
Just as my fingers on these keys
Make music, so the selfsame sounds
On my spirit make a music, too.
Music is feeling, then, not sound;
And thus it is that what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring you,

Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music. It is like the strain
Waked in the elders by Susanna.

Of a green evening, clear and warm,
She bathed in her still garden, while
The red-eyed elders watching, felt

The basses of the beings throb
In witching chords, and their thin blood
Pulse pizzicata of Hosanna.

Beauty is momentary in the mind —
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.
The body dies; the body’s beauty lives.
So evenings die, in their green going,
A wave, interminably flowing.
So gardens die, their meek breath scenting
The cowl of winter, done repenting.
So maidens die, to the auroral
Celebration of a maiden’s choral.
Susanna’s music touched the bawdy strings
Of those white elders; but, escaping,
Left only Death’s ironic scraping.
Now, in its immortality, it plays
On the clear viol of her memory,
and makes a constant sacrament of praise.

Apple Tart, Oil on Canvas, 6×8, Private Collection

German Chocolate Cake

It’s been two weeks since I last blogged. The Fall Art Tour was a beautiful weekend and a success. In the meantime I’ve expe- rienced a resurgence of an inflam- matory arthritis I had twenty years ago. My left hand has been crippled, though fortunately I paint with my right hand, but besides working more at Lands’ End, I’ve had to see a doctor and a rheumatologist, which has eaten up some of my studio time. I did finish this still-life of a German Chocolate Cake from the Rolling Pin Bakery in Madison. The plate and the embroidered table cloth were borrowed from my beloved friend, Josephine, who brought out her treasures and said I could borrow whatever I wanted.

With German Chocolate Cake, I should be blogging a poem by Goethe or Rilke, but this poem by Yeats seemed pertinent at the culmination of a presidential campaign:

They must to keep their certainty accuse
All that are different of base intent;
Pull down established honour; hawk for news
Whatever their loose fantasy invent
and murmur it with bated breath, as though
The abounding gutter had been Helicon
Or calumny a song. How can they know
Truth flourishes where the student’s lamp has shone,
And there alone, that have no solitude?
So the crowd come they care not what may come.
They have loud music, hope every day renewed
and heartier loves; that lamp is from the tomb.

The Leaders of the Crowd by William Butler, Yeats 1921

German Chocolate Cake, Oil on Canvas, 8×10, $325.00 USD

Phantom in Progress

Well, it has arrived, the weekend of the Fall Art Tour. Southwest Wisconsin will draw hundreds of visitors to tour the studios of working artists, enjoy the fall colors, listen to live music and eat in the many excellent restaurants in the area. It’s a very good time. We artists will demonstrating our crafts and showing off a year’s work. I will be working on this painting, inspired by the Phantom of the Opera. It’s 24×36, a fairly large canvas. I’m thoroughly enjoying the romance of the concept. As soon as I’m finished I’ll blog the result, but here are a couple of areas of the painting that are pretty well developed.

My daughter found this quote from Simonides, a Greek poet, to put on my portrait brochure (right up my alley because I was a Greek major in college):

“Painting is silent poetry and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.”

Reading Thoreau, Eau Claire Dells, WI

This picture was my husband, Matt’s, idea. He took me to the Eau Claire Dells as a surprise and suggested that I paint a picture of a person reading Thoreau amidst the rocks and rapids. So, I asked him to pose for it. It’s a beautiful place. I’d never even heard of it, which is incredible considering I’ve lived in Wisconsin for almost forty years. Matt knows all the back roads though.

Here is a selection of what he may be reading:

“If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. But do not care to convince him. Men will believe what they see. Let them see.”

“I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestioned ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.”

“Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.”

“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”

…and my favorite:

“There is no remedy for love, but to love more.”

Reading Thoreau, Eau Claire Dells, WI, oil on canvas, 11×14, Artist’s Collection

Some Touch Ups

As long as I still own a painting, I will return to it and try to improve what I don’t like. I almost completely repainted the head of Bust of a Girl on a Red Chair (see June 5). I also repainted parts of the plate on Soile’s Sinful Chocolate Cake. Here are the results.

I’m working on a large piece right now, a scene inspired by Phantom of the Opera, and actually the most ambitious composition I’ve ever tried. It’s taken two photo-sessions with three models and my so much more camera-savvy photographer friend, Jesse, (who is also possessed of a great eye for emotional nuance and a good picture story), the purchase of a large mirror, the borrowing of a wonderful black-velvet and pearl encrusted dress, an encounter with a Photo Nazi at Walmart which almost caused me to burst a blood-vessel keeping my temper and remedied jointly by a much more rational employee at Walgreens and a vodka tonic to complete the cool down, a lot of consideration over which photos to use as reference and an entire day of drawing and composing the figures to fit the canvas (24×36). I’m about ready to start laying on paint.

…However, the Fall Art Tour, a three day event where hundreds of people — I hope (!) considering the economy — flood the community every year and visit the studios of working artists, is only 2 1/2 weeks away. The sixty hours or so I may need to complete the painting is entirely hypothetical at this point. My loving, duck-hunting hubbie is waiting for me to join him in Eagle River at our cabin for our yearly vacation. I’m trying to figure out how I can transport a large enough easel and lighting equipment to keep painting and be on vacation at the same time. Meantime my car is unfit to drive. Whatever it is that makes the back wheels respond to steering is broken. It will hopefully be repaired by tomorrow.

The Fall Art Tour is my big art event for the year and if the Phantom project even semi-makes it, it will probably be sporting a sign cautioning, “WET PAINT!”

Here’s a poem by Emily Dickinson that expresses (pretty well) what it’s like to be “my” Brain lately:

I felt a cleavage in my mind
As if my brain had split;
I tried to match it, seam by seam,
But could not make them fit.

The thought behind I strove to join
Unto the thought before,
But sequence raveled out of reach
Like balls upon a floor.

Bust of a Girl on a Red Chair, oil on canvas, 12×16, Private Collection

Soile’s Sinful Chocolate Cake, oil on canvas, 5×7, Sold

Death by Chocolate Cake

I finished this painting two days ago, but didn’t eat any of it, just in case. It’s half gone now though. Wow! I do love chocolate. I thought about it all day at work and was at the fridge the minute I came through the door.

I do these dessert paintings from life, which is such a pleasant exercise because most of my figurative paintings must be done from photographs.

Here is a poem for this week’s blog by Michael McFee. It’s called:

The Angel

unhooks her wings after another long day.
They are her glory but also a burden,
binding her chest and making her sacrum ache.
She reaches behind herself to unfasten
them without the least hesitation or thought,
letting the sweaty wings collapse to the floor.

The angel scratches a ticklish spot
and starts to let down the radiant hair
sometimes mistaken for a halo,
unweaving her braid as gracefully
as she composed its strands long ago.
But how can those backward fingers see?

And then she slips off her slip in the dark.
My heart is tinder to that holy spark.

Death by Chocolate Cake, 6×6, oil on canvas, Sold

Hazelnut Torte

Taste by taste and brushstroke by brushstoke, I’m enjoying becoming familiar with he scrumptuous cakes at the Rolling Pin Bakery. This one is called Hazelnut Torte. I’m painting another right now called “Death by Chocolate”, certainly my preference out of the various ways to demise.

Here is a poem by Louis Simpson:

The Unwritten Poem

You will never write the poem about Italy.
What Socrates said about love
is true of poetry — where is it?
Not in beautiful faces and distant scenery
but the one who writes and loves.

In your life here, on this street
where the houses from the outside
are all alike, and so are the people.
Inside, the furniture is dreadful —
flock on the walls, and huge color television.

To love and write unrequited
is the poet’s fate. Here you’ll need
all your ardor and ingenuity.
This is the front and these are the heroes —
a life beginning with “Hi” and ending with “So long!”

You must rise to the sound of the alarm
and march to catch the 6:20 —
watch as they ascend the station platform
and, grasping briefcases, pass beyond your gaze
and hurl themselves into the flames.

Hazelnut Torte, 6×6, oil on canvas, Sold