While I did this little India ink sketch and oil painting before seeing Susie Burpee's dance performance, "The Spinster's Almanac, A Cabaret of Solitude," this March in Toronto, down at the Distillery District, and though the figure in this is Victorian, there is something about her...
So I composed these words, I wrote them on the back of the painting in pencil, that were mostly a response to Burbee's performance, to perhaps add to the tiny painting (maybe 9" x 5") in handwriting:
Nails claw inside the breaking shell. Spinster's Almanac. Miss Haversham. Dance of downy feathers, beating heart, aloneness. Only windows seen or seeing. Escape into the confinement of solitude.
Only my hard drive is full, and I can't take a better, more in-focus picture and upload it, or even one with the scrawled words on it until I rectify the situation, sigh. I'll upload the finished little painting whenever.
I've missed your drawings and paintings so much! Love the way this combines your characteristic colours and black-on-colour with a figure so different in outline, proportions, feeling from anything I've seen you do before, and so evocative of another age and mentality.
ReplyDeleteWonderful painting! I love its meditative quality.
ReplyDeletethis is a really beautiful piece of art! I love the "sketch" quality, scratches and smears - it's all your mental fingerprint for us to see. Beautiful!
ReplyDeleteThank you, Jean. It's the first little sketch I've managed since I started working at ScotiaBank in mid-November, and I actually drew it at work one morning when the computer system was down. Later that week I saw Burpee's energetic and disquieting dance performance, and felt a synchronicity with my little piece.
ReplyDeletee_journeys, many thanks.
ester, you do so much more with the techniques that you have described at your art site. I'm still in primary grade, an ink drawing, a coating of acrylic matte medium, some water-based oil paint. I need to be able to use Photoshop to see where I might put the words, though. If I want them in the billows and folds, defining the shapes, or as straight journal-type entry in the white space. Many thanks for dropping by!