Seeing is Believing : Endless hours looking into Portraits.

With the on going ever present wonder of sight....I feel blessed to be able to lose myself in the story behind any number of superb paintings and drawings. Recently sitting in a very contemporary chair at the National Gallery here in Melbourne.......my eyes trail around the room and stop clearly at the most evocative of all the works hanging on the wall......"The Japanese Gown"...by Philip William Steer. His model is viewing herself in the mirror in a very bohemian dress coat....a kimono. The colours are so demure and she is poised and comforted by her vision of herself.....I stare at it for a good hour or so.

So much time in the drawing before the painting....all encompassing knowledge in the handling of the fabric and the folds....his eye seems fixed on the garment details and her reflection in the mirror....its a true likeness reflected...that's hard to do. Years ago I was taught by a wonderful drawing teacher..."Anita Furey"...back then the classes were six hours long and my love of drawing figures was indeed heightened by her constant suggestions and movement of her quick demonstrative hand on my work...."like this...she said"...and with her way of showing and my confidence restored.......I learnt to observe and configure from her generous nature and  her pursuit for professionalism. 

Memory of the quietness of that Studio......as Anita did her rounds and we all concentrated so hard at gaining her praise and attention. My portrait of Margo James has made me look at her face almost everyday day...usually in the mornings....I'm tempted to change things, but feel it may not be like my clear idiosyncratic memory of her.....so I don't. She phoned me to say I had captured her long drop from under her nose to her mouth......its small observations like that which make the likeness appear.

The School of Fountainbleau around 1596....shows ivory-like figures .....intimacy and a strange insight into the lives of these elegant French ladies.....painted by an anonymous French Master....its a point of cultural history than art........it projects the way they were living and sitting in what seems to be a fashionable theme........my placement with these two portraits is about taking them again....and re-placing them individually.........two distinctive rings are made.

 The beauty and poise in painting.......I see so much of......has its own resonance ......hands and positioning of the body and its gestures.....creates a soulfulness within the work.....I recall standing in front of Elizabeth the first...the Tudor portrait in the National Portrait Gallery in London.....the garment detailing alone made me feel sorrowful.......she was clad from head to toe.....pale and distant.....an extraordinary painting to see......certainly one I will always remember......those portraits are alive in that place.

Eugene Delacroix.......this portrait had me reeling with excitement.....from the first time I saw it.....I imagine it is about redemption...or longing for a loved one....his handling of her skin and her thin mouth.....her eyes like white ponds.....glisten like two pearls.Like all great portraits, they grasp something in you...the viewer.....you become an explorer and a  disciple at the same time.

Black used by Manet.....like Lautrec ...is wielded like its butter on the softest bread.......to produce a silhouette like nothing you've ever seen. Manet the Impressionist......that's what he did....made a big impression....using black. Matisse is the other marvel....Henri's use of black was riveting. The black servant in Manet's"Olympia"....and Olympia herself wearing a black bow...draws you into the era......a highly fashionable era too!....he was the Couturier of painting....and so was Toulouse Lautrec......just got it right every time.

Self portraits are done when life gets hard. I find great pleasure in the delving act......an act of the hidden inner sanctum.... revealed like nudity....unashamed. Its like a pure instinctive quality.....that needs an outing.....I find it fascinating when people like the portraits.......they make their own observations and responses....often seeing something personal or something so detached ....... Black seems appropriate here....with a midnight blue shadow encroaching.

The Recluse.

This is a portrait of Dora Maar by Pablo Picasso.

I call this portrait the recluse because that is what she looks like here. Dora endured his wrath......after her affair with him.....she turned to Catholicism.....never to see him again....she was the most prolific of the Surrealist women artists.....alongside Leonora Carrington and Leonor Fini......I think this poem by her speaks of her silences :

In the secret of myself to my secret self

living you have me live

In this room I've lived out madness fear chagrin

the simple waking of a summers day

Exile is vast but it's summer, silence

in the sunlight a place of peace where the soul

invents only joy a child on the road to his home.

Dora Maar...1970.