Help! I've neglected this blog AGAIN and I've done almost no drawing in 2019., but I did some painting - mainly inspired by a visit to Gabriele Müntet's exhibition at Museum Ludwig in Cologne.
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| Münter |
Here are one or two of the reproductions I made in a small format to celebrate Münter, but I am not convinced. She churned out up to 5 works a day. I can't say I'm enamoured of all her works or that it's even good painting in every case (sometimes she was dabbling and stopped half way through - or so that's how the works look). I don't don't understand why Abstract Expressionism was invented more or less by painters who really could paint 'properly', but what is proper painting??? The two examples I show here are completed paintings. I don't think Münter ever went back to a painting later. Her works were done mostly on the spur of the moment and when that momnt of drive went, the painting was probably as finished as it every would be.
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| My small version (oil)! |
The window (Münter's canvas was obling, mine is square!) says quite a lot about Münter and something about me, too. It is not to scale, of course, because the basic shape is different. I used a small canvas I happened to have here and it was not a case of copying the details, but of capturing her feelings as she watched the birds in the snow at breakfast time, which I could almost re-live since it was snowing outside when I started painting and the little birds were coming regularly to pick up some birdfood I had on a tray. There are so many photos of this painting that I'm really not sure about some of the colours. I read in many of her paintings that Münter was intensely lonely, although after some years grieving the ending of her relationship with Kandinsky, she did find a new partner. Kandinsky taught her much of what she knew, allthough he later claimed that he was indebted to her. But he was married in Russia and went back there leaving Münter after what was reportedly a stormy ending to their affair.
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| Münter |
The vase of flowers also appears on the internet in various colour schemes depending on how the photo was edited. I decided the flowera (peonies) were more likely to be pink , so that's how I painted them.
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| My square version (oil)! |
My canvas was square, hers was oblong and twice the size of course, so I played around with the shapes. As I said, the idea was not to make copies but to imagine what Münter could have felt as she arranged her lovely flowers in a vase, sat looking at them and then painted a schematic and anything but realistic view of them, which I found very hard to reproduce.
Neither of these paintings were in the exhibition. Münter was a prolific producer of paintings - up to 5 a day is really over the top even for an abstract expressionist, but maybe not as therapy!
This is one of my paintings done from a rose on my loggia some years ago.
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| Rose - 80x80 acylics |
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What with starting a new chorus and trying to complete my latest novel, I've neglected drawing almost completely. Here are a couple of fairly recent doodles.
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| Helena - I started this doodle just before xmas 2017... |
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.......then my grand daughter had to spend xmas in hospital (at 2 months of
age,) and I was too upset to continue. But a month or two ago I was able
to finish the drawing after finding it again - ripping it up would have been like giving up hope! Helena is now a sprightly, jolly little girl with a
beautiful smile and a 'winning' nature.
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| Who needs patterns when we have lines? |
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| More lines! |
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| I really should scrap this - I dabbled for days and it looks as if 3 different people had worked on it! |
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However, we all have to live with our failures and you can't win 'em all!.
Displaying this dabble-doodle is a warning to all who doodle without a concept!
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| This one is dedicated to my other grandchild Simon. |
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