artamaze by Katherine Hilden

Finding the Courage

Posted in Achievement, Caricature, faces, Failed Effort, literalness, Technique and Demo, Texture, Therapy, tagged aquarellable, artamaze.wordpress.com, courage, facefame blog, Kinko's, Leonardo, Lorrie Moore, Michelangelo, printmaking, Renaissance, sepia, Stabilo, zone on August 29, 2015| Leave a Comment »

I haven’t worked on the caricatures for my facefame blog since, oh my, January. In the winter and spring months I was up to here in printer’s ink, modifiers, press settings, the ol’ hot plate, solvents, exhaust fans and periodic printshop fatigue. Printmaking is not for the faint of heart or lungs. In five months I pulled (that’s how printmakers talk) 152 prints, and many more if you count the rejects. But more on that later, much later. This past week I finally summoned the courage to see if I could get back into the facefame-caricature mode. (facefame.wordpress.com)
I like reading Lorrie Moore. I pulled up the Google images for Lorrie Moore on my 24” computer screen, leaned the customary drawing board against my desk and drew her with the customary Stabilo aquarellable pencil. Twenty minutes, maybe all of thirty, and there was this intelligent, witty face on my paper. I was rather pleased. Well, I thought, the hiatus on facefame has just ended. I love drawing like this and there are plenty of writers and other artists (maybe even politicians in this presidential circus) that I’m eager to draw.
The next day, the drawing didn’t look good any more. It looked pleasing, you know, goody-goody. It said “look how well the artist controls the medium; a little ironic, but at the same time it has that classical feeling; being done in sepia, it alludes to the mighty Renaissance and who doesn’t love Leonardo and Michelangelo.” Time to put it aside, reconsider.
How can I bring this drawing into the 20th century, ok, the 21st? To do that, the drawing needs to be a bit edgy. Maybe adjusting the size will help. I took it to Kinko’s and shrunk it, from 14×11 to about 11×9. Now, loosely tracing that size to my aquarellable paper, I was less tempted by detail and literalness. I leaned into the pencil, deposited a lot of black stuff, smeared with a damp paper towel, textured the paper (in printmaking that’s called tone) and found my caricaturing zone. I knew I was in it when I drew her right iris with a flick of the pencil. That cranked up my courage and then adding the color patches was a sure thing, easy in the sense of “hey-it’s-my-drawing.”
This happens all the time, this wanting to please and then realizing the next hour, or the next day, that what you really need to do is summon your courage and do strong work.

All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
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Rump Tower

Posted in Architecture, Caricature, faces, Failed Effort, literalness, Semiotics, Surreal, Therapy, tagged Donald Trump, etymology, Oxford English Dictionary, Political ambition, rump, triumph, tromper, Trump Tower, trumpet on June 29, 2015| 5 Comments »

In these blog ruminations on how to look at paintings I’ve never said anything nice about “the verbal mode.” The idea is to turn that thing off, so that you can take in the painting (or drawing) in as pure a visual mode you can muster. I’ll stick to that, but I do occasionally go verbal and when I do, I get fascinated by the origin of words.
When I was walking along the river recently, I looked up and saw the word “RUMP” on a building. How odd, I thought, to put such a word and in such an aggressive size on a building. One sometimes sees that word with a T in front and I wondered if there was an etymology that would lead back, not just to card-playing lingo, but to “triumph.” Given the current presidential race, wouldn’t that be appropriate.
I pulled the OED, always a good read, out of its case, and combed through twelve columns trying to find out what was up with “triumph.” Much of what I found spoke to political ambition. 1) One corruption of “triumph” is used to designate a “playing card so that any one such card can TAKE any card of another suit. Take that! 2) Over centuries, since the Romans, “Triumph” became “trumpet,” both the instrument and the person “who or that which proclaims, celebrates, or summons loudly like a trumpet.” Loudly, really? 3) A thing of small value, a trifle, pl. goods of small value, trumpery.” Trumpery is good. If these presidential ambitions lead to frustration, the next tower could have the word TRUMPERY in humongous, therapeutic letters on it.
But wait, the best is yet to come. The Middle English (12th-13th centuries) version of “trumpet” was “trompe.” Now, this is truly precious because tromper in French means to fool, deceive. Je trompe means I deceive. What a find!
But what about “rump?” Predictably, more windblown towseling. “With rump and rig, with rump and stump.” STUMP would be good on a building, wouldn’t it. Later. But wait, “rump” as a verb means “to flog or scourge.” No-no. If you say that, YOU’RE FIRED! How about YOU’RE FIRED on an office tower!?
Combing through the OED leads from one thing to another and I sometimes overcomb. We shall overcomb.

All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
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Jan Gossaert

Posted in Caricature, Illustration, Master drawings, Semiotics, tagged Catholic, Counter Reformation, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Flemish, Hapbsburgs, Hieronymus Bosch, icon, Jan Gossaert, Late Gothic, Madonna and Child, Met, s-curve, satire, Sebastian Brant, Ship of Fools, undogmatic on April 11, 2015| Leave a Comment »

The Flemish painter Jan Gossaert (c. 1478–1532) was much sought after, as a portraitist of Hapsburg royals and as a creator of altar pieces for Catholic churches. When I saw this Madonna and Child at the Met last December I just about burst out laughing. No, I didn’t actually laugh out loud, though that’s permissible in museums, but I did stand there for a long time, gaping at this extravagant and, yes, funny image of what was at the time a sacred subject.
He was a very busy man and it’s hard to imagine that he had time to paint for his own entertainment. But it’s also hard to imagine this undogmatic Madonna and Child hanging in a Catholic church in the early 16th century, during the Counter Reformation.
Let’s consider one bit of the historical context. In the Late Gothic, the S-curve of the Madonna becomes very pronounced and the baby Jesus becomes playful and fidgety, pure baby.
https://www.google.com/search?q=late+gothic+madonnas&biw=1536&bih=851&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=lYwoVabCJca8ggTs04GgCA&ved=0CCAQsAQ
But Gossaert’s Madonna is over the top. He shows her playing with the baby, but it doesn’t look like a lot of fun, does it. The baby looks terrified and frantic and mom–sitting on the floor with her knees pulled up–is more interested in posing than in bonding with her child.
The heap of blue cloth that we are supposed to accept as her gown is so overdone—even for the convention of the time—that I find it comically bizarre. It seems to be the work of an obsessive-compulsive. Or somebody who had an ax to grind.
Maybe Gossaert painted this not so much for his own amusement but as a satire. Satire wafted in the northern air. It was a time of political/theological upheaval and Gossaert may have had clients who were eager to see satirical views of the establishment’s icons. Who else would have bought a painting like this around 1500?!
Two contemporary northern satirists were Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536), who had the nerve to poke at the papacy, and Hieronymus Bosch (1450’s-1516), who made no bones about his disgust with the corruption of the Catholic Church and the general insanity of the time. Sebastian Brant (1457-1521) published his satire Ship of Fools in 1494. Here’s part of Bosch’s illustration of that theme:

We don’t have personal details about Gossaert’s life that would provide insights into his playful, very human and possibly satirical Madonnas.
For more Madonnas by Jan Gossaert,
https://www.google.com/search?q=jan+gossaert+madonna+and+child&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=bIsoVfaQIIS8ggTD9IHACQ&ved=0CCEQsAQ&biw=1175&bih=829
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
http://facefame.wordpress.com
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Klimt’s Adele

Posted in Caricature, Imagination, Semiotics, Technique and Demo, tagged Adele Bloch-Bauer, Byzantine, Egyptian, gold, Gustav Klimt, hieraglyphics, John Malkovich, money, mummy, Neue Galerie, Raoul Ruiz, symbol on January 4, 2015| Leave a Comment »

When I saw Klimt’s golden portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer at the Neue Galerie in NY in December I thought “mummy”—as in dead, as in Egyptian.
What if instead of creating a celebration of Adele’s beauty, both physical and spiritual, Klimt was really showing his disgust with her wealth and status in society?
Most of the surface is gold leaf. He only painted her face, shoulders, forearms and hands. She is quite simply trapped and lifeless in gobs of gold. She is dead and buried. The association to Egyptian mummification is strengthened by what looks like the Egyptian hieroglyphics for “eye” all through the central panel under her face. This may be a reference to her reputation as an art lover, i.e. having an “eye for art and beauty.”
The painting is dated 1907. We can be sure that Adele was flattered by being shown wrapped in all this gold, which has a long history of being associated with royalty, but also, going back to Byzantine icons, with heaven and divinity.
What if artists are not as dumb and subservient as their wealthy patrons consider them to be? What if Gustav Klimt, who thought of himself as a prophet and above societal conventions, played a joke on Mr. Bloch-Bauer? He took his money and handed him a dead thing. Or, as Peter Schjeldahl calls it, a “flattish bauble, a thing, a whatsit.” Schjeldahl covers the money angle, which is what this is all about:
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/changing-my-mind-about-gustav-klimts-adele
John Malkovich is worth seeing in “Klimt,” directed by Raoul Ruiz, 2006.
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
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Toes

Posted in Achievement, Caricature, Galleries, Seeing, tagged Compte Prosper D'Epinay, Eirene, festish, golden section, Greeks, Julio-Claudian, Kephisodotos, little toe, marble, Metropolitan Museum of Art, peplos, perfection, personification of peace, Roman, Sappho, sculpture, toes on January 1, 2015| Leave a Comment »

Let us now praise famous toes.Famous squooshed toes, that is.

Why is Eirene’s little toe deformed? It’s 360 BCE. Nobody was wearing narrow pointed high heeled boots in Athens at the time. How did the sculptor come up with the idea of hammering such a crooked little toe out of his marble block?
The Greeks were famously obsessed with perfection and in the visual arts that meant the Golden Section. As an example, you can see that Eirene’s peplos drapes at about the line dividing her body into the Golden Section. But the little toe? Now, granted the Athenians had lost the war with Sparta in 404 BC and were understandably demoralized. They stopped writing juicy drama and instead produced brittle philosophy. Maybe their obsession with perfection gave way to a sense of humor. I was startled by the sight of this toe. It’s funny. Should it be? Can this be explained? Has anyone written a monograph on Athenian toes? Or will I have to live through this coming year distracted by this weighty mystery?
I walked on. Heading towards the Café next to the sculpture court at the Met, I was tripped up by yet another set of toes. Here’s a tense, heroic Sappho wiggling her toes as if playing the piano and, look, her little toe is puny and out of line.

What’s going on here? This sculpture is from the 19th century. Could it be that for two thousand years sculptors have been encoding their deepest existential gloom in little toes and nobody’s taken notice!? The little toe cries out for recognition. The little toe needs to be understood. The little toe demands scholarly attention. The little toe is the elephant in the room.
Ahem. I know three things about toes. 1) only men have foot fetishes, no women do; 2) ballerinas do their best point work if they have the most toes in a straight line; 3) our evolution may dispense with the little toe (and little finger) altogether, over many more eons.

So, my first thoughts of the new year are on solid ground, on an uneven footing and draped in mystery. I like it already.
An uneven, alert 2015 to us all!
Marble statue of Eirene (personification of peace), Roman, Julio-Claudian period circa 14-68 CE. Copy of Greek bronze statue, 375-359 BCE. By Kephisodotos
Sappho. Marble, 1895. By Compte Prosper D’Epinay (1836-1914)
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
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The History of Art Made Easy: Classicism and Romanticism

Posted in Caricature, Imagination, inspiration, Romantic, Surreal, tagged classicism, milk, Romanticism, Trader Joe's on November 9, 2014| 1 Comment »

Classicism gives way to Romanticism: right there at the dairy section of Trader Joe’s, a gallon jug of milk falls off the peaceful, orderly shelf without any apparent provocation.
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
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Picasso and Poussin

Posted in Caricature, Illustration, tagged comical, glorious, Guernica, Nicolas Poussin, Pablo Picasso, Paris, Rape of the Sabine Women, war on September 23, 2013| Leave a Comment »

A friend sent me this postcard from Boston this summer: Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), “Rape of the Sabine Women,” 1963.

It’s as unmistakably Picasso as “Guernica,” 1937. Both paintings are from an artist who was a life-long renouncer of the insanities created by politics, war being pre-eminent among them. He was an anarchist.

He had mastered the techniques of the Renaissance by the time he was fourteen and then set out to produce work that was distinctly anti-Renaissance. As if to say, “sorry, folks, we took a wrong turn there; this stuff from the 15-16-17 hundreds is really enticing, but it’s all based on enslavement and torture of one group or another.” He loved African art because, as he said, “it’s against everything.” By “everything,” I think, he meant western civilization.

He painted “Guernica” as an outrage against the bombing of a Basque town during the Spanish Civil War in 1937. He used his skill at distortion to get at the ineffable suffering and horror of that day. The viewer stands before this work, mute, despairing.

While living in Paris as a young man, Picasso frequently visited the Louvre, where he certainly saw “The Rape of the Sabine Women” by Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665). At age 82 and living in his villa in the south of France, Picasso takes up this theme. As in “Guernica” we see the assault and butchery of innocents. There are four figures: a woman crushed on the ground, a child screaming for help, a soldier on horseback wielding a spear and a soldier on foot with a sword.

Again, the distortion of the figures is extreme. This time, it seems, Picasso isn’t asking us to feel empathy and outrage. Instead, it seems to me, this image is comical. The comical effect comes from the facile lines. Compare, for example, the slashed, broken hands in “Guernica” to the hands in “Sabine Women,” where we get loopy-doopy toes and gooey-oozy fingers. Here the lines are fast, facile and glib. “Guernica” takes a long time to look at, even in reproduction. Here, in his “Sabine Women,” the eye loops through the composition very quickly. These easy, fast lines do not convey suffering and do not evoke empathy. Maybe Picasso at 82 is beyond outrage. This painting seems to be a satire. He has given up on us and can only show us how comical and testosterone-driven our world is.

And is the Poussin painting not comical? In its day, war was glorious. Really? Who thought war was glorious? Must have been the kings. They started those wars and thought they themselves were radiating glory. But what about the artists, what did they think? Oh, well, the artists worked for the kings and that whole crowd that benefited from wars. Is this not a comical situation? Well, we only broke the spell of the “glorious” in the 20^th century. One way, probably the best way, to break a spell is to make fun of it. Draw some loopy-doopy lines to make the point that what used to be “glorious” is really hopelessly, pathetically laughable.

Sources:http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/24/world/europe/botched-restoration-of-ecce-homo-fresco-shocks-spain.html?hp

Picasso,Doubt, Invention and Poor Mrs. Giménez

Posted in Caricature, Collage, Cubism, faces, Imagination, inspiration, tagged 17th century, Athena, Barjo, Bible, Descartes, Doubt, Ecce Homo, Gertrude Stein, invention, Isis, John Mill, Klimt, leeuwenhoek, Leonardo, Michelangelo, modernism, Montaign, Mrs. Martiniz, Munch, Osiris, Picasso, Rafael, Zeus on August 30, 2012| 2 Comments »

In 1910 in an ornate little church in Borja, a village in northeastern Spain, a local painter named Elias García Martínez filled a narrow white wall space with a little fresco called “Ecce Homo.” It shows a scroll on which the suffering thorn-crowned Jesus-head is turning its eyes skyward. Over the years the fresco deteriorated and Mrs. Cecilia Giménez (below), with the permission of the priest, set out to restore it to its original, of which she had a photo to work from.

The news broke last Friday and over the weekend little Borja was overrun with hundreds of tourists who were eager to see what was universally called a “botched restoration.” One tourist, interviewed on Spanish TV, said that the original was nice, but this she really likes.

Now what? What can the church and the town do?

1) Paint over the fresco with white paint and forget about it.

2) Hire a competent painter to duplicate the original and forget about the temporary embarrassment.

3) Leave it as it is now, the “botched restoration,” the “monkey face.”

The first two options seem to be out. The organizer of the town’s patron festival is already happy about the new fame of Borja. On the web, 18,000 people have signed a petition stating that the fresco should stay as it is now. A Facebook page, called “Señoras que restauran Cristos de Borja” has 38,874 fans and 58,048 followers (as of this writing), many of whom have created their own versions of the fresco. Here’s one, inspired by Rafael. For more, see https://www.facebook.com/SenorasQueRestauranCristosDeBorja

Let’s consider option #3. The face as it is now is a confrontation with modernism. The modern mind is rooted in the 17^th century, when Leeuwenhoek first saw microbes through his microscope’s lens, Montaigne (a little earlier) introspected and doubted, Descartes doubted himself to exhaustion and John Mill studied various translations of the Bible and said, whoa, we have 30,000 problems here. To name just a few of the people who showed us that things are not what they appear to be and that the mind makes stuff up.

Mrs. Giménez, in her mid-80’s, is now world famous. She is notorious. How could she do such a thing? She’s apparently surprised at the results of her effort. Is she crazy? Couldn’t she see what she was doing? She may be asked to have her head examined and her introspection and free-associations would be interesting, but not as interesting as the FACT that we now have this image she made up.

That’s what’s important: she made it up. And another thing: the original fresco from 1910 by whatshisname was also made up. Let’s see, what else can we name that’s been made up: Michelangelo’s David, Michelangelo’s Adam, Rafael’s madonnas, Leonaro’s Last Supper; Klimt’s Kiss, Munch’s Scream; Egyptians invented Isis and Osiris, the Greeks invented Zeus and Athena, and so on and so forth.

The human imagination makes stuff up. You won’t find that statement anywhere in the 12^th century. The clerics who are ringing their hands over this fresco problem haven’t traveled through the 17^th century to the beginning of the 20^th, when Picasso and others blew the roof off our skulls.

When Picasso painted Gertrude Stein 1905 and 1906, she sat for him an estimated eighty-plus times. Towards the end of 1906 he got stuck, dissatisfied with how he had painted the face. We can only wish we had a documentation of that stage of the work. (We know Picasso owned a camera.) In the fall of 1906 he went to Spain and when he came back he painted over the face. Giving into his fascination with African, Oceanic and early Iberian art, he now turned Gertrude’s face into a mask. In other words, he invented. He made it up. We look at this painting at the Met and think it looks like Gertrude Stein—after all, that’s the title on the wall label—but at the same time we know IT’S ALL MADE UP. It’s this awareness that makes us modern.

Picasso would have loved this “botched restoration.”

https://www.google.com/#q=Borja+Fresco+site:youtube.com&sa=X&ei=Gog_ULqbHI7W9QT_m4GgBg&ved=0CDsQ2wE&hl=en&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.&fp=6c862fd85693d052&biw=1012&bih=589

http://www.spiegel.de/reise/europa/jesus-fresko-in-borja-stuemper-kunstwerk-zieht-hunderte-touristen-an-a-852168.html https://www.facebook.com/SenorasQueRestauranCristosDeBorja

Caricature, Last Class: Draw the Teacher

Posted in Achievement, Caricature, faces, Technique and Demo, tagged caricature, courage, eyelashes, psychology, self, teacher on August 24, 2012| Leave a Comment »

In the penultimate caricature class we dealt with the profile. Here’s my demo on that topic.

But the inevitable finale to a class in the art of caricature would have to be what? Of course, you have to draw the teacher.

This caricature class, earlier this summer, met for only five two-hour sessions. Make no mistake, this is a serious class. (You can find earlier posts on specific demos.) One of the topics we kept coming back to is the psychology of the whole business. Drawing women, for example. Or drawing people you know, your family or your friends. It gets complicated!

——

My students (only three were present for the last class, hey, it’s summer) rose to the challenge. It really does take courage to draw caricatures.

You can tell, that they got the lesson on eyelashes for women.

One student apparently saw my Cruella de Vil side. That’s fine.

———————————————————————————————–

When I caricatured myself about eighteen years ago, I also showed no mercy. But then, for my business card, I had to go for a more show-biz look. Did I mention…it’s complicated.