What is the deal with Picasso?!

This is the French painter Françoise Gilot, in her prime, when she really got going on her career. She was incredibly talented, beginning to paint at the age of five and, thanks to her father, was also well educated, attending the Sorbonne. But when she was just 21 years old, she became first a protegée and then the lover of Pablo Picasso, who was 63 at the time! I can understand being under the sway of a mentor, but...a 40-year difference? Sixty-three-year-old men look old and mostly unattractive to me, and I'm 65! (Yeah, if you're a 63-year-old man reading this, no, I don't care to know what you think of my looks, thanks.)

Anyway, back to Françoise. They stayed together for 10 years and, although they never married, she gave him two children, Claude and Paloma. After they separated, Picasso told all the art dealers he knew not to purchase her art. (Petty, petty man.) Two years after she ditched Picasso, she married another artist, Luc Simon, and had a third child, Aurelia, but their marriage only lasted seven years. Get this: Picasso convinced her to divorce Simon so she could marry Picasso and thus legally provide for the children, but he had already secretly married his model, Jacqueline Roque!

She got back at him, though, by writing the tell-all Life with Picasso, which sold more than a million copies, overcoming a lawsuit filed by him to keep it from being published. All the money she earned was used to help her children make a case to become Picasso's legal heirs. (He quit speaking to them after she wrote the book.) (Did I mention the word "petty"?)

But Françoise was not destined to be alone; seven years later, she met and married Jonas Salk! Yes, the polio vaccine guy. Their union lasted 25 years (until he died in 1995), although they spent at least half of every year apart while she traveled to paint in Paris, New York, and La Jolla, California.

During the 1980s and '90s, Gilot designed costumes, stage sets, and masks for productions at the Guggenheim in New York City. She also art-directed a scholarly journal and taught summer classes at the University of Southern California (USC).

She currently splits her time between New York and Paris (working for the Salk Institute), and continues to exhibit her work internationally. She is about to turn 100!

I set out to do one thing with this painting and ended up doing another, so it's sort of a mish-mash. I should have painted it in acrylic to achieve the style I wanted, but I just wasn't in the mood for the struggle, since I am not yet confident using acrylic, so I did it in watercolor and then tried to reproduce a few of the effects she puts into her portraits. I ended up painting a much more realistic portrait than I had planned, but with weird features like the purple around her eyes and the blue "halo" around her figure. She paints in solid swathes of color, breaking the face and figure down into simple sections, but it just didn't look right in watercolor the way I paint, so I ended up mostly blending. I think I caught her likeness pretty well anyway, though.

"Françoise Gilot"—pencil, watercolor, acrylic inks, white gesso, Posca pen, white gel pen, on 140-lb. Fluid hotpress (smooth) paper, about 8x11 inches.

Frieda

I've been wanting to try again with the technique I used on Daphne du Maurier, where you draw the portrait in charcoal and then "seal" it by running thin watercolor (or ink) over the paper. When I saw that Frieda Kahlo was one of this week's picks for women artists, I thought she'd be a great subject. She adapts well to being drawn in charcoal because of that raven hair and those black eyebrows, and I envisioned drowning her in the bright colors of Mexico—shocking pink, turquoise, orange.

The likeness isn't quite as good as it could be, but I think it's distinguishably her; and the unexpected result of dropping the bright colors over her was to give her a slightly obscured look that is actually expressive of the life she lived, which was determinedly positive but always overshadowed by the pain of her physical existence.

One thing that drives me absolutely crazy about painting portraits: In the reference photo, she is looking straight out at the viewer. The eyes were a little dark and hard to see, but as far as I could tell, I put the pupils exactly where they were in the picture, as well as the reflections, and yet in my portrait she is looking down and to the side. I just can't seem to figure out how to do that—I'm going to have to ask my expert friends (Sassa?) if there's a secret.

Here is "Frieda"—charcoal, Daler Rowney inks, India ink, white gel pen,

on Fluid 140-lb. hotpress (smooth) watercolor paper, about 8x9 inches.

Yayoi!

There are two or three other women artists to draw (or draw like) this week before getting to this one, but I took one look and couldn't resist.

Her name is Yayoi Kusama, and she is a contemporary artist who is famous for working in a variety of media, including sculpture, film, installation, and painting. She is known for using a wealth of repetitive pattern, and to some she is the "Princess of Polka Dots." She had a troubled childhood, and owes some of her avant garde art visions to literal hallucinations, in which she saw "infinity nets," a combination of lines and dots and flowers.

She was a major influence on the avant garde art scene of 1960s New York, but the lack of recognition for her work (combined with the success of male artists who mimicked her) led to suicide attempts. In 1977, having returned to Japan in ill health, she checked herself into a hospital for the mentally ill, where she lives to this day. She has a studio a short distance from the hospital, where she continues her work into her ninth decade.

Her exhibit "All the Eternal Love I Have for Pumpkins" inspired me to paint her submerged in an orange background with vaguely pumpkin-shaped stenciling in the background. I turned her usual wig from red to orange, and added in some polka dots reminiscent of her work. During her childhood her family apparently relied on the pumpkins they grew in their nursery for food, and they represented comfort and security to the artist. She lauded them for "solid spiritual balance."

The artist demonstrating for this day in the challenge chose to paint a young woman with brown hair (but with Yayoi's haircut), and then decorate the background with dots, circles, and flowers; it was a good painting, but when you have THIS face to paint instead, why substitute?

"Yayoi Kusama Pumpkin"—stencils and gesso, pencil, Daler Rowney inks, watercolors, Micron pen, white gel pen, on 140-lb. Fluid coldpress watercolor paper, 8x8 inches.

Back to the challenge

It's Sunday, and Olga Furman has come out with the reference prompts for the next eight days of portraits. This will be a fun week—she picked women artists.

Today's is Carmen Mondragón, who is actually more notorious for posing "shamelessly" for other artists (yes, men, you guessed it) than she is for her own artwork. It's no wonder they all wanted to paint her—she's beautiful in a kind of Clara Bow smokey-eyed way.

Today's demo was done almost completely in straight watercolor, and then the person (Lee Anne Hahn-Washburn) went back in with pen, but it was a brown Micron pen so it was more subtle than my usual style of black pen. Since I haven't painted anything in watercolors in ages (opting for the Daler Rowney inks for months now). I decided to make this painting straight watercolor, no inks, no pens, just me and my brush and my palette of Paul Jacksons.

I was intrigued by the way Lee Anne painted the portrait, because she started with the shadows in a pale purple, then strengthened them in a brighter purple, then put in the blush tones in pinks and reds, darkened the shadows with some brown, and only then did she go back and do any skin tone in the space remaining on the face. Since I usually do the opposite—start with a coat of "flesh" and build from there—I decided to try it her way instead, and I must say I liked it.

Another reason for straight watercolor was that the model's hair was pure blonde on the tips and faded out around her to a sort of glowing halo, and I wanted to see if I could duplicate it. Not quite...but not bad.

I decided at the last minute that I would include a piece of the artist's own work in her portrait; she mostly painted big-eyed girls like her (in fact, a lot of self portraits!) and cats. So I added one of her cats. Her style was charming, if somewhat primitive, and I think the cat adds a little to this.

"Carmen Mondragón"—Paul Jackson watercolors on 140-lb. Fluid coldpress paper, approximately 8x10 inches, with India ink and white gel pen used for the cat.