Recently Christina and I were happy to reunite with a friend whom I visited in LA and NYC decades ago. She hosted me for a few days this summer in the East Bay Area and helped with a fundraiser for MCJ and book signing for a Mississippi-born federal judge in Oakland. My friend and her husband became collectors of Black Folk Art and Outsider Art starting in the early 1980s. Before learning this about her, another friend took me to one of the first major exhibitions of Black Folk Art at the Corcoran in Washington in 1983. After her husband died, we lost contact with each other for a long time but reconnected late last year.
We spent a short while in her living room talking through various things and I realized exactly how I wanted to do a portrait of her. I took a few reference photos and there things lay for about five months.
Over Christmas holidays I sketched out the image, working from a reference photo and memory. I used a sharpened charcoal pencil instead of a charcoal stick. This let me draw more accurately and do more fine detail. I tried out this tool first with part of the Siesta painting and the Painted Lady painting, but this time I didn’t use turpentine to “ink” it in.
I started the colors in this painting at lighter values than normal. I kept mostly true to this until I had covered the full canvas, but along the way it meant I was generating interesting new color choices and I had very, very little reworking of parts of the painting, except for the face. Here is an early glimpse
Several influences were at play here - the obvious one is Matisse but I also am interested in how Hockney takes Matisse’s flat brightly colored patterns into the realm of a cartoon. As I got further into it, the pale yellow ochre floors and the bare legs called to mind the indoor lighting of Alice Neel or maybe even Francis Bacon. There was a big open expanse of floor in the lower left quadrant that needed to contain something. (Bacon would have left it open). I really enjoyed how the lighter colors, particularly the reds and purples opened up new terrain for me. Here is how things looked further along.
Christina is so careful in providing reactions and advice. She genuinely respects the process - I think that’s from having been a choreographer. I got most of the way through this scene and was happy with everything except the likeness and the empty spot in the lower left. After letting it set up overnight I was able to come in with the charcoal pencil and some fine brush work and get the face closer to what I wanted. Christina made a few suggestions on each and I was able to stay on track. This is the kind of painting where I have to use the yardstick as a substitute for a mahl to steady my hand and avoid smudging wet paint. Here is how it has ended up.
One odd thing I noticed. I moved the painting in front of a little standing light and saw that when backlit it resembled a little bit the kind of stylized almost stained glass style watercolors of Walter Anderson. That was interesting to see. It made me think about adding LED’s to the back of the painting to let people switch it on for a different effect.
