Inspired by the blue and white girls

You've read here before about my favourite blog:-- you know the one and it's getting better every week. I read it for a regular injection of my childhood friend's wit, creativity and down-to-earth take on life, as much as for the fascinations of her magic kitchen realm, which I travel via her experiences. She began a memorable post with the words, "My mother-in-law was a blue and white girl. I am, too." Accompanying the text was a photo of enchanting blue and white baking dishes and such (some inherited from her mother-in-law) against the blue and white tiles of her kitchen wall. To my ears only, it called out "Paint me!"

I'm a blue and white girl, too, and over the years my eye has been captured by all kinds of blue and white objects that might work in a still life. So why not now? I rummaged in my stash and found way too many bits and pieces for just one painting. Okay. Following my favourite painter/writer's advice to "constantly set yourself challenges," I decided I'd do a triptych -- an integrated work comprised of three parts, the "Blue and White Series." What's more, I'd work as large as I could with each of the three separate paintings the size of my art paper -- about 20" x 26" in finished format -- for a triptych total width of five feet.

After much fiddling, I arranged my set-up for "Fishing with the Blue and White Girls." A day later, the bowl would acquire some hard-necked garlic.   And those are beautiful weathered seedpods of Chinese Lanterns, which will stand in for their previous orange incarnations in the painting.

Uh-oh. With this set-up in the corner of my six-foot worktable (the main scene of action in my small 10x10 foot studio), there wasn't room for my easel -- !! A big year-end overhaul was obviously required to select and reposition the tabletop essentials. And lucky me! Coming along at precisely the right moment to see me through this project was a far-off friend's lovely gift of two hand-thrown pottery jugs, along with the potter's recommendation that they'd make great brush holders.

Here's the new worktable set-up (and the easel at an angle at which it would never be used!):

And in a starring role, at right stage centre back (?), are the two charming jugs -- one labelled STUFF  and the other TIME  -- "Just what you need," my gift-giving friend said.

Okay. We're ready for lift-off. This is the painting I described in my previous post, in which I began to work consciously on the idea of "painterly" vs. "linear."  Despite the fact that the composition is filled with anchoring lines, you can see from its evolution  how I tried to work with a broader brush. Here's the final outcome:

It's interesting -- to me, at least -- to compare this first painting of 2014 with one I finished in February 2007 -- exactly seven years ago, featuring that same irresistible cat-and-fish teapot and a similar colour inspiration. It's called "White Cats and Rumi Blue" -- gathering all the little gift cats (white ones, at least) I've ever been given and a particular shade of blue that led to my bonding with a cherished work-buddy as we discovered we both loved cats and a particular shade of not-quite-navy blue.

Whether my latest painting is painterly or linear, can we agree that I've made some progress? And who knows where the three-part series and the challenges I've set myself will take me?

As for the Blue and White Girls at the top of this post, they're no one in particular (except some magazine models). I was working on some colour studies with "chips" of colour cut from magazines and couldn't resist seeing what I could do with patterns clipped from the past year's LL Bean catalogs. Some Blue and White Girls just never grow up.

Stepping out of line

I've always loved to draw -- no wonder I still find it absorbing to do even elementary drawing exercises like the one above. This one, drawn "blind" (looking at the subject but not looking down at the drawing in progress) from a newspaper photo of two chefs smilingly showing off their creations, was proposed by a painter/teacher as a useful warm-up for painting. Its focus is obviously not on exactitude, but on "losing the edges" and capturing shapes within a broad form.

Many traditional artists consider "good draughtsmanship" a prerequisite for good painting, and I still try to follow Renoir's maxim, "Draw every day, even if it is something as simple as an apple. One can so easily lose the knack." At the same time, I've tried to  develop my painting skills, holding to the counsel of one of my drawing teachers (and many others): "The best way to learn to paint is to paint." Some years ago, though, I decided I would benefit from a little more structure and analysis and began to keep a workbook.

As I plan each painting, I record my initial impulse, what I aim to achieve, and, as it moves along, the process I follow. When the painting is finished, I make a brief self-assessment.

One thing I've repeatedly come to recognize is that my love for drawing -- for the crisp line especially -- is something of an impediment to my development as a painter. Again and again, I've considered how to "lose the edges" and felt that there's a hurdle here I need to get by.

Recently, some things have begun to click. In the spirit of "When the pupil is ready, the teacher will come," I happened to come across references in three different art books to Heinrich Wölfflin, an early 20th-century art historian and author of Principles of Art History: The Problem of Style in Later Art (and if that sounds ponderous, it's far less so than the original title in German, Kunstgeschichtliche something-something-something).

Reading the book offered me several a-HA moments -- ones which I won't try to summarize here. The key point for me at this time in my development is that Wölfflin was the first to make the distinction in artistic styles between the "linear" approach (think Dϋrer and Holbein) and what's been translated into English as the "painterly" approach (think Rembrandt).

Closer to home, consider my light-hearted "Conversations" series of about a year ago. "Conversations - 1" is painterly:

"Conversations - 4" is linear:

Wölfflin doesn't judge one to be superior to the other -- though it's clear that this thorough, analytical German loves art and gets most excited when he talks about the painterly. His basic premise is that the earlier (historically) linear style relates to the "tactile" -- the eye can follow the line around edges and shapes; in contrast, the painterly begins to rely solely on the visual, as the eye alone must make sense of what it sees before it.

One of the artist/writer/teachers who led me to these useful concepts feels that artists have a natural tendency towards either the linear or the painterly. Certainly this seems to be so in my case, based on a whole lot of personal artistic history, painted evidence, and my strong likes and dislikes. (Has Facebook forever ruined these words for us?). After all, what could be more linear than my recent "A Question of Scale"? 

Still, I've been shown a way to work alongside, if not over, that hurdle, and I'm giving it a try right now with my current work-in-progress. Alas, I'd already planned a composition -- in fact, a whole series -- that shouts "Linear!" but that will be part of the thrill of the chase. Wölfflin talks about "painting in patches" rather than "painting in lines" -- and my little wipe-cloth, at least, is already filling up with some painterly evidence.