Variation on an assignment

This week's LFI2021 assignment was to coat a piece of paper heavily with various texture mediums to get maximum bumpiness and then, after it dries, to do a drawing in charcoal over the top, that will naturally be affected by the underlying surface.

The teacher had about eight different things she plastered on the paper, including super heavy gesso, light and coarse molding paste, fiber paste, and ceramic stucco, all of which she applied in varying amounts with a palette knife; then she drizzled it with grated-up charcoals in shades of black and gray-green and plastered them in for a little bit of grit; and finally, added a few gold highlights just for fun.

I have gesso. Period. I have it in white, and in black, in acrylic primer weight. And since I don't think I'll ever use all those other things again, I'm not going to spend between $6 and $15 apiece for a jar or six. So I decided to do a little variation on her assignment.

Last night, I picked out a reference photo of Mary McLeod Bethune in old age, in black and white. I opened up both my white and black gesso. I covered the page with a heavy coat of the white gesso, and then I dropped bits of black gesso around the edges and worked it in as the background. I purposely left her hair area white to reflect her appearance in the photo, and I smudged in some paler gray in the face area to give it some texture when I go back to do the drawing / painting. I then had to let it dry for hours, because it was so heavy.

Here is the prepared surface. You can almost already see her hair, the outline of her face, her ear, and the darker areas of her jacket.

Later on, I took up my charcoal pencil and began a detailed drawing, but I just wasn't feeling it. As a painter, I have an innate suspicion of charcoal as an impermanent medium, and didn't know how I would seal it after. Also, I don't really enjoy charcoal that much, and if I was going to do something less defined than an ink drawing, I'd rather use paint. So, I picked up as much of the charcoal as I could with a kneaded eraser, and then gave it another coat of gesso in the face area to cover any wayward lines.

Today, I decided to paint the entire picture using gesso. The first thing to do was a drawing to locate all the features in their proper places, so I took care of that, and then considered my medium. Since it's pretty thick, I used some "Flow Aid" to thin it out. I put pure white in the middle of my palette dish, and then mixed white with black in successively deeper values so that I had the variety I needed for all tones from blackest to whitest.

And then, I began to paint. It's taken a while to come back to me, how to handle paint that you don't water down to blend. The whole idea of taking one color and pushing it into another strategically to give the lights and darks is so different from the successive layering of watercolor! But it's fun to play around, and especially solely in shades of black and white–it gives such an appreciation of gradations.

Since I had a clump of each value left over when I was done, I used it to create another black-and-white background to paint on later, so there will be at least one more like this.

While we are waiting for Miss Bethune to dry so that I can scan her, I'll mention some of the reasons I wanted to paint her. 

Mary McLeod Bethune (July 1875 to May 1955) was born in South Carolina the 15th of 17 children, to parents who had been slaves; in fact, many of her siblings were also born into slavery. But the family worked and sacrificed in order to buy a farm, and her father grew cotton while her mother did washing for white people, including her former owner. Mary went along to deliver the laundry and became fascinated with the white children's books. She believed that the only difference between white and black children was the ability to read and write, and decided that's what she would do.

She walked five miles each day to attend a black one-room schoolhouse; since she was the only member of her family to attend, she would then go home and teach her family what she had learned. Her teacher mentored her and ultimately helped her to attend college, where she prepared to be a missionary in Africa, but she was turned down for that and instead became an educator.

She married at age 23 and she and her husband had one son, but her husband later deserted the family. Bethune taught at various schools, but was most affected by her stint at a Presbyterian mission school run by Lucy Craft Laney; Bethune ended up adopting most of her educational philosophies, especially embracing the education of girls and women to improve the conditions of black people. She started her own school in Florida that began with six students in a house that sat next to Daytona's dump; after years of tireless fund-raising, her school merged with Cookman College to become Bethune-Cookman School, which later achieved official four-year college status.

She subsequently went on to found a hospital for black people, served for eight years as the president of the National Association of Colored Women, working to register black voters, and founded the National Council of Negro Women. She came to the attention of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt when she lobbied for their National Youth Administration (part of the WPA) to include people of color, and became good friends with them. She used this access to form a coalition of leaders from black organizations that came to be known as the Black Cabinet, an advisory board to Roosevelt on issues facing black people in America. She co-founded the United Negro College Fund in 1944.

These are merely the highlights of her achievements, astounding for a person of any gender, let alone for a black woman of that time period—or any, for that matter.

And here is my portrait: "Miss Bethune"—black and white gesso on 140-lb. Fluid coldpress watercolor paper. I could hardly do her justice, but hopefully it will remind people of this significant woman's lifetime of persistence.

Bored?

I've been wondering, since August, whether I would ever get bored by painting portraits, and I think today I hit that wall a little. It's mostly because I haven't painted one that really excited me for a little while; and also, I need to move into some new media and techniques to keep things fresh, but I'm flailing about in that area and not settling yet. So today I decided to make a traditional watercolor—that is, no pen, no white paint, no gimmicks or ornaments, just using watercolor and the white of the paper to convey my image.

This looks like it was done fast and sloppy with not much care, but honestly it took me as long to do as a portrait generally does, with less success. I'm not great with proportion and directionality when it comes to parallel and perpendicular surfaces, and I'm also a bit clumsy below a certain size. The entire painting is about 6x10 inches, with a fair amount of detail needed. I'm somewhat happy with the light, but everything else is kind of a mess, honestly.

Still, it was a nice break from painting facial features.

"Kim's girls"—pencil and watercolor on Fluid 140-lb. hotpress paper, 6x10 inches.

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.

Mood

Today the Congress acquitted Donald Trump for the second time, despite the clear evidence of his culpability. That invasion of the Capitol can be laid directly at his door. He incited it, and then he sat back and enjoyed it while people ran for their lives and some lost them. And he isn't even made to feel sorry for it. The impeachment just becomes one more vendetta against him by the evil Democratic Party, and he's out there right now, gloating and continuing to insist that he won the election and is our rightful president.

I despair. If, in the face of such damning evidence, we can't even make HIM pay, then how the hell are we supposed to purge the Congress of his venal, lickspittle accomplices and toadies? Voting against them in TWO YEARS is not enough. Two years in which they do further damage. Two years in which they collect their generous salaries and enjoy their all-encompassing health care, while they meet for lunch at their clubs and play golf and send their children to expensive private schools—as a good percentage of the rest of the country goes hungry and dies. Our country has turned into France before the Revolution. But the only revolution we have seen was in favor of the dictators.

My art today expresses my mood. To respect everyone's finer feelings, I will just call it "Mad." It started out as kind of a joke, but after the verdict arrived, it was all too real. I am disgusted, demoralized, depressed...MAD.

Pencil, Uniball, Daler Rowney inks, gesso, on 140-lb. Fluid coldpress watercolor paper, about 8.5x10 inches.