Overlooked artists

Today's subject, painted over yesterday's leftover substrate, is a young Leonor Fini, photos of whom I found on the internet without knowing who she was. Turns out she was a powerful surrealist artist who painted some really interesting stuff. She also designed costumes and sets for the Paris Opera, and dressed herself as dramatically as if she were a part of one of those productions; she wrote three novels in later life, as well as illustrating many works by the great authors and poets, including Poe, Baudelaire, and Shakespeare, as well as texts by new writers. She painted many portraits of the famous and socially prominent, her last being a portrait of Paul and Linda McCartney, which was rejected by their agent as being "too precise and too sad."

She was born in Buenos Aires in 1907 of Argentinian/Italian ancestry, but spent much of her life and career in Paris. When she was a teenager she had an eye disease that forced her to wear bandages on both eyes; when she recovered, she decided she would become an artist and moved to Milan at age 17 and then to Paris in her 20s, in pursuit of that.

She had many lovers, for some of whom she served as a muse, and steadfastly avoided marriage and motherhood, living for much of her life in Paris and in the Loire Valley with two lovers (one artist, one writer), two assistants (who also acted as concierge and housekeeper), and up to 23 Persian cats. She actively worked through her art to subvert the roles imposed upon women by society, abandoning images of women who were fragile and innocent in favor of female figures who couldn't be categorized or sexually defined.

Despite her successes and exhibitions, Salvador Dali dismissed her work as "better than most, perhaps, but creativity is in the testicles." (One wonders if Dali's was the body on the table depicted by her in "The Anatomy Lesson." All the girls and women are looking at him with a degree of disgust surely deserved by that remark!)

Leonor Fini died in 1996. Despite her prolific career, the Centre Pompidou Collection du Musee d'art Moderne in Paris contains just one painting by Fini, a portrait from 1932. It also contains a dozen photographic portraits of her by Man Ray. This is a final slap in the face for yet another marvelous artist who happened to be a woman. It makes me want to paint her over and over, to extend the memory of her life and career!

As I did with yesterday's portrait, I let the background show through this, and dictate most of the colors I used. (I think her eyes were probably brown in life.) "Leonor Fini"—Posca pen and acrylic paints on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, 9x12 inches.

Don't waste paint

I haven't posted any art for 10 days because I haven't been able to paint. I went in a week ago last Wednesday to the podiatrist to get him to remove a small piece of glass from the bottom of my foot (in the arch right in front of the heel). I had broken a drinking glass in the kitchen about a year ago and, walking around barefoot in the summer, managed to pick up a stray piece in my foot that the broom didn't find. I immediately went to Urgent Care, where they numbed the foot, tweezed out the piece of glass, put on a Bandaid, and that was an end of it. Except that over the past few months I discovered there was still some glass in there. Perhaps it was deeper and had gradually migrated back up to the surface? but now I was feeling it when I pressed down on the spot or set my foot down unwarily, so I wanted to get it out of there.

Turns out, though, that there was no glass; instead, my foot had created a "plantar keratosis" in the spot where the previous piece of glass had been removed. So the doctor cut it open a lot wider than he had planned and removed the keratosis, and then he gave me six stitches, a bandage, a wrap, a sock, a boot, and a prescription for antibiotics, and told me it would take three to four weeks to heal! Talk about throwing a wrench into the Christmas season—not only has it been difficult to get around on it, but if I don't keep it elevated for a good part of the day, it hurts. So sitting at my desk painting for a few hours at a time hasn't been an option.

I have had one bandage change now, however, and taken all the antibiotics, and it's doing better. So I decided yesterday that I would paint a picture as a gift for someone. I painstakingly laid down a grid on the page so that the drawing would be accurate, then did the base drawing and started to paint, but after more than two hours' work it was turning into the most dreadful thing I have ever attempted, and I decided not to waste any more time on it.

That is a really long explanation to get me to the title of this blog post, which is  about not wasting paint.

The one thing that Emma Petitt says at least once and usually several times during every lesson is "don't waste paint." If you have a little white paint left, go back and hit your highlights one more time. If you have another color that goes with something in your painting—hair, background, clothing, whatever—then take your paintbrush and slap it in there. Leave that palette bare by the end!

Since I just started painting with acrylics this year, however, I haven't yet got good judgment about how much paint it takes. I inevitably either run out and have to add more, or overestimate from the beginning and have a bunch left of at least one but usually three or more colors. So since one of the tricks I have also picked up from Emma is creating interesting abstract backgrounds over which to paint my portraits, I am now making it a habit to pick up a pad of paper and my brayer (roller) at the end of the current painting and use the remaining paint on my palette to create the next background. Sometimes they turn out well, and sometimes they sit for a while before I can figure out how to use them, but either way, I feel relief that I'm not throwing away expensive art supplies!

So last night, when I gave up on that painting, I had paint left on my palette, and I used it for a new background. There were a lot of colors, and it came out pretty dark and intense; but there were some nice combinations and juxtapositions. This morning I gave up on sleep at 5 a.m. and got onto the computer to write a review of the book I finished at 1:00 before going to sleep; then I made myself some breakfast, did a few light chores, and thought about what to do for the rest of the day. The chores made sitting down for a while a necessity, and my eye was drawn to that new background. 

The other thing I have learned with the abstract backgrounds (this from Deb Weiers) is to look and see if there is already a "picture" contained within them, just waiting to be released. Sure enough, this one had a face and a couple of pseudo-Princess-Leia buns (that ended up translating to giant blossoms) staring out at me. So I looked around for a reference photo that would work, and found a dark-visaged girl with her features at the appropriate angle who was begging to be my model.

This is a little different from most I have done, in that I was so reluctant to cover up the interesting background that I did minimal coverage with the paint. Instead of using a big brush with broad strokes, I used a fairly tiny one and did almost a dry-brush effect on the face, using small dabs of paint and scrubbing them into the surface so that the underlayer wouldn't be completely obscured. Then I did the opposite on the clothing, by using a large brush with a thinned-out coat of paint that would darken without blotting out the underlayer. Between the two, I'm happy with her emergence from but lack of contrast with the background.

I also wanted a more definitive line than my usual Uniball, given the dark and challenging background, so I used a black Posca pen, which I think worked well. I'm pretty happy with her—and yes, I used the leftover paint for my next background!

Posca Pen and acrylic paints on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, 9x12 inches.