"WARTS AND ALL" Lesson #8

Lesson #8 Warts and All

PORTAITURE THROUGH THE AGES

Portraits have been a means of making those in Power immortal and thus leaving their mark in the world. They were the main employment of court painters. The portrait artists and their apprentices pictured many of the lords and ladies throughout history. Even as the Merchant classes rose to power because, they too, wanted to be immortalized and leave their faces behind for future generations. Aside from the large studio paintings, there was the miniature portrait often worn as jewelry. The resembled a broach or ring made of copper or ivory. They were a gift amongst lovers and a record for children. Often a lock of hair was kept in back of the little paintings. Naval officers and soldiers took them with them when called away to duty. These became a new branch of portraiture since the 11^th Century.

Jan Van Eyck (1422 –1441) was a painter from Belgium. He and his brother painted many alter-pieces and was court painter for Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy. In 1434 Van Eyck painted the “The Arnolfini Wedding Portrait” It is a double portrait of a man and his bride. It has almost the purpose of a wedding document with the artist as witness. Iconography is in use here as it was in the Middle Ages. The dog represents fidelity. The shoeless feet denote holy ground. The mirror on the wall shows the artist at work reflected in it. The one candle burning stands the sacrament of marriage. Arnolfini was a banker from Italy, who married Jeanne Cenami.  They are shown taking an oath of marriage.

 This one of the early northern European painting that has a foundation of egg tempera as an under painting and oil used to the surfaces of the panel. The painting shows the skillful brushwork in oils. Look at the handling of the drapery and clothing. If you examine the floor and windows in the painting you can see that there is an understanding of perspective in the painting, but not to the scientific level of later works. The space in the painting is in one-point perspective but the depth is not deepened and is somewhat limited. There is a wonderful understanding of light and shade in the painting.

 The bride seems to be pregnant in the portrait. This doesn’t mean that she was knocked up before the wedding. It was a symbolic condition showing the wishes of the couple rather than what might have been her condition at the time. It wasn’t a shotgun wedding since they were yet invented. The artist was expressing the future wishes of the couples.

Dominico Ghirlandaio (1449 – 1494) was a southern Renaissance (15^th century) fresco painter from Florence. He tended toward realism in his figures and landscapes. He owned a large family studio that included his brothers and many assistants. He illustrated the life of St. Frances of Assisi and did many alter pieces. Michaelangelo, who studied under this painter, was one of his many assistants. He received many commissions from merchants and bankers in Florence. He also designed mosaics.

He painted St. Michael holding scales of justice in his left hand and a sword in his right.

His most famous work in a portrait of  the Old man and his Grandson now hanging in the Louvre. It has none of the heroic drama of the High Renaissance.

Note: The realism of the wrinkles of the old man and the hair is more linear and stylized as Bottecelli might have painted it.

Note: The Tuscan landscape in the background, out the window, has three main shapes in the design and a repeat of diagonal lines.

Hans Holbein (1497 – 1543) painted an oil on tempera on wood (1542). Holbein fled to England to escape religious persecution. The reformation affected the work of such painters. Mannerist painting was born out of this time and the counter-reformation. One of his most famous portraits is the portrait of Henry VIII painted in 1542. Without the benefit of Facebook or the vast number of dating the king needed these portraits to advertise for a mate. One princess of the time commented that she would marry King Henry, but she only had one head and preferred to hang on to it. Holbein had very little sitting time with the king and painted the cloak and other objects from a dummy setup.

Frans Hals (1580 – 1666) was born in Antwerp and moved to Harlem where he rained till his death. Father of eight children, he worked as an art dealer and restorer. In 1652 he was bankrupt. He had a period of popularity second only to Rembrandt. What was distinctive was his painting technique where he used successive layers and simulated vitality by using smeared lines, spots, large patches of colour, and hardly any detail.

After he died and memory of him faded his painting sold very cheaply. It wasn’t until 1900 that he began to become popular again. His legacy is that he is on the 10 guilder

bank note.

Rembrandt Van Rijn (1606-1659) was recognized as the most innovative artist amongst a great many talented artists of his day. The greatest Dutch master of all time

he was able to instill the essence of humanity in his portraits. His portraits live on beyond the day when they were painted. As we can clearly see in the early Hollywood film about his life, Rembrandt, he maintained a large studio with many assistants. This type of production was not unusual for the time.

Amsterdam was a rich city of merchants trading on a worldwide market. There were a large number of commissions and portrait orders to fulfill. Aside from works to enhance the homes of rich merchants and government people, he painted many religious paintings for churches showing scenes from the bible.

Practice for the expression and character for his paintings often found its way into a large number of self-portraits.

Rembrandt painted and etched countless hundreds of self-portraits. There was a ready market for these as well because his fame had spread far and wide and people collected them like hockey cards. He loved to collect costumes and props, so often his studio resembled a stage set.

Rembrandt has remained the artist with the best visual record of his life because of the many self-portraits and family portraits. The combination of impasto and glazes has been his trademark technique of those years.

Francois Pascal-Gerard (1770 – 1837) A follower of the neo-classical style, he was a student of Jacques Louis David. Unlike his master he weathered the French Revolution without taking sides. He practiced a gentler, more delicate classicism. His paintings have a courtly manner and he was employed by Louis XVIII for the gallery at Versailles. His portrait of Madame Recamier is considered his best work and  has hung in the Louvre since 1802. It is a beautiful painting of a lovely woman which shows much of the neo-classical style of dress and of furniture.

The pose is not the standard portrait position but shows the figure in a graceful posture.

It has been considered one of the great paintings in the Louvre’s collection though there is little else remembered of the artist’s paintings.

Q.:  How does the costume identify the sitter and the time when it was painted?

A.:  The dress is of the period of the Napoleonic reign and the empire waist was later

        worn by Josephine.

Q.:  What other objects in the painting identify the period?

A.:  The roman style fainting sofa. Also, the pillars and arches are Roman.

Movie: “Brush with Fate”

            Thomas Gibson and Glen Close /DVD

            “Lust for Life”

            Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn VHS

            “Painted Lady”

            Helen Merrin

As the Crow Flies

 One my favourite scenes in “Treasure of Sierra Madre” is when the old-timer says, “It’s not far, as the crow flies” and Fred C. Dobbs answers, “Yeah, but we aren’t crows.” The saying goes way back in history. Humans and crows have travelled in the same circles for thousands of years. Yet they remain cautious and careful around our kind. One of my early Christmas toys was a “Crow Shoot” set with a cork gun and a target perch of four wooden crows. People shot crows sometimes for sport and sometimes because they were thought to be a pest that stole their harvest. In fact in recent years it is thought that crows do more good by eating cutworms and pest insects. The urban crow has very different behaviour towards humankind than the country cousins. Still if you feed crows, you see clearly that they are not all that relaxed about the situation. They don’t mob in ‘every bird for himself’ like gulls and pigeons. In a feeding situation there is first a sentinel bird and he (usually a younger male uncle in a family group) checks around first to see if everything is on the ‘up & up’ before making the ‘dinner-call’ for the others. The call is two short “caws” delivered with his head pumped up and down. Older birds eat first and the younger ones come later. That’s crow manners. If there are gulls nearby they just jump in and grab much to the disgust of the watching crows. Some food is brought back to nestlings if there is a family in the nest. The uncle also feeds the young as part of the extended family. It takes two years for hatchlings to mature and leave the nest. During that time they are educated by parents and grand-parents. It takes time to learn to be a crow. They are amongst the few animals that make use of tools.

  Crows appear in art as far back as the prehistoric cave paintings at Lascaux Caves in France. These are the earliest known artworks produced by human kind. There are over forty-six species of crow and three of those are in danger of extinction. Hearing a crow talk is always a surprising experience for a person, but not as you get to know how smart these birds can be. 

KDM

AS THE CROW FLIES

AS THE CROW FLIES

by Karl MacKeeman 

Crows and ravens have been living in a relationship with human-kind from the dawn of time. Genetic research has shown that they followed the nomadic hunting tribes across the landbridge that stradleded the Bering Strait. They exsisted always at our fringe because where-ever humans would go they would be bifting rubbish. Crows would feast on the remains of hunting and fishing camps. The crow genic material can be traced all the way down the Pacific Coast of North America towards Central America. They are one of the few birds with as wide a range of distribution. Some variations exsist but for the most part a crow is a crow.

I watched them around my campsite with John and Graham in Baja, California, Mexico. We were camped in a catus forrest where as far as the eye could see there was nothing but catus, some higher than houses and as old as eight hundred years. We camped in a formation of caves formed by hugh rocks. In a clearing was a cerial tree of about thirty feet and a favorite perch of a few local crows.


Where-ever human beings went there was war. Crows blackened the skys throughout Europe and Africa where battles raged they fed on the carron. If you read about the wars in early Japan in the age of the Shogun and the Samari you read how the eyes of the dead were plucked out by crows. Crows were inteligent enough to know that the human race was self-distructive and would always provide a means of subsistance to the black birds. It was perhaps for this reason crows were associated with death and did not gain much respect in human eyes as did thier close relative, the Raven. Artic cultures also respected the raven. In Confederation Centre you can see a inuit whalebone carving of a raven.

The Vikings decorated thier longships with the image of the raven. West coast tribes elvated the raven to a god-like status. In fact they were instrumental in the creation of humans in the stories of the Hidia. They were carved into totem images and lodge and canoe decoration. Ravens are highly intelligent birds but not as sociable as crows .In Charlottetown one family nests near the Provincial archives. Edgar Allen Poe made ravens famous in his poem of the same name and it was even given some tribute in a film with Vincent Price. The Simpsons on television perhaps presented the most well-known version.

Crows have slipped into our language in many ways. Some people are said to have crow's feet around their eyes. In Scotland, to "go down the crow road" is to die and there's the saying "one crow, sorrow..." A favorite drawing tool I used in my youth was called a "crow quill" . It was a very sharp steel pen and tube-shaped at the nib. In Australia I heard the expression, "stone a crow". When I was a kid , we had target gun sets called "Crow Shooting" and sometimes we heard of people who "had to eat crow". "As the crow flys" was a common saying when in 1948, John Huston made the academy award wining film "TREASURE OF SERRIA MADRE".
Fred C. Dobbs made the best answer to that when he said, "Yeah, but we ain't crows." That's true enough.

Crows have been roosting in Victoria Park since it has been one of the last stands of trees left that havn't been turned into a golf course, patatoe field or a shopping mall. A war of wits has been going on to confuse and misdirect our black friends but the last time I looked up at the sky in the evening I could well see that they are back. They have not always been appreciated by people. In the National Park in Cape Breton they have learned how to remove rubber windshield wipper blades from the parked cars of torrists. Crows think that they make ideal nesting material. In Japan they steal steel wire clothshangers for the same perpose. The hangers are the same thickness as the tree branches they used to use The Electric company there has to hire a team of workers to remove the wire nests from electrical towers.

Crows are one of the few birds that have a recorded language. E.T. Seaton recorded a vocabulary of crow language nearly a century ago. Anyone who feeds crows on a regular basics will reconize some of the simple words for "cat" or "all clear". If you spend enough time with crows you learn a lot about thier family behavior. One old guy flew into my hand this summer. I've been feeding him and his family for years and he had medical problem with his feet that were all twisted and deformed. He was easy to reconize because of the one white feather in his left wing. I couldn't help but feel it was a farewell visit.


"Pegleg" was an old friend from Spring Park Road. I learned about cache from him. He would hide food I gave him and then call the others to join him once he tucked away something for himself. This is a custom also shared by bluejays which are close cousins to crows. oil 20"x16"
"Crow In Winter" 20"x16" oil on canvas.

 KDM

DOWN THE CROW ROAD

by Karl MacKeeman on Friday, May 6, 2011 at 12:49pm

Ravens are a little less socialable than crows and live in smaller groups. In Charlottetown they nest close to the archives in the centre of the city.I've been sketching and painting crows for many years now but of course they are not a popular subject. Had I choose pretty song-birds that would have paid for paint and canvas, but crows, even though are not pretty are song-birds. In fact they are considered amongest the largest songbirds. Many people wouldn't find the songs of of crows to be pretty. In fact I've known people that have shot crows just for the crime of disturbing thier Sunday morning hangover.It sure isn't pretty what they do to the sidewalks on Brighton Road and there has been considerable expense used to discourage the roosting in Victoria Park. Crows are a world-wide problem because they have one the widest distribution of any bird. Some cities have whole departments devoted to what they call "the crow problem".
Cultures as differant as the west coast first nations tribes of North America and the ancient Greeks have considered crows and ravens 'god-like'. Apollo, the sun god, had a white raven as his messanger and confident until the bird brought him news of the infidelity of the human woman he was dating at the time. In his anger Apollo killed his lover and later regretted it. A case of blaming the messenger, He turned the raven black to mourn her and banished him from Mount Olylimpis.
The Hidea believed that the human race was created by raven along with the moon and the stars. People who lived closer to nature than we do today were well aware of the intelligence of all members of the crow family.
Where-ever people went crows have followed.They have adapted well to civilization. Our wars provided food for flocks of crows and ravens. Our gibbets and garbage dumps did the same. Members of the crow family can eat almost anything and much of my failed cooking experiments have gone to the crows without complaint. The only thing I've seen rejected is carrots.
Ernest Thompson Seaton was amongest the first writers to record and write about the language of crows and observed, sketched and wrote about his observations of crows in the Don Valley. These birds are amongest the most intellegent creatures on earth. Crows are one the few animals that can make and use tools. Few animals can do that. Dogs have trained people to pick up thier poop in little brown plastic bags but were're not sure if that's a sign of thier inteligence or ours. They not only learn new behavour but pass it on to others in the flock. In Cape Breton, in a national park the learned that rubber windshield wipers on automobiles make excellant nesting material. Removing rubber windshield wipers from parked cars has been a problem for park officials there. In Japan crows adapted wire coathangers as nesting material. Stories of crows adapting to survive in a urban inviroment abound.
Some good reading material on crows have come to print.
"Crows: Encounters With the Wise Guys" by Candace Savage, Greystone Books, Toronto, 2005
"In the Company of Crows and Ravens" by John M. Marzluff and written and illustrated by Tony Angel, Yale University Press, 2005
"The Way of the Crow: Black Spirit" by Laurie Lacey, Nimbus Pub., Halifax 1996.
This last book is small but packed with some great crow stories.

KDM

PAINTINGS OF CROWS

A CONVERSATION IN HALIFAX

 This bronze statue sits atop a public building in Halifax near the waterfront. This is a 20" x 16" oil on canvas, framed $400.00 Crows have been classified as amongest the larger songbirds. People are surprised to find out that they are in fact songbirds. They're voices are not pretty but they do have a language that is universal and amongest the flock they have regional words. The warning word for cat or preditor is the same everywhere. The food call is the same everywhere and the young stay with the parants often well over a year and still call for thier mom and dad to feed them. I observed a crow and it's behaviour while camping in Mexico.
Crows behave in a similar way in the desert as they do in Victoria Park.  In Charlottetown the city fathers have spared no expense in trying to discourage the crows from roosting in the Brighton aera. Crows endure and have returned to roost dispite the efforts made to discourage them. They are an unstopable bird.

"STOP"
is an oil on canvas 16" x 20" framed $400.00  I painted this after seeing a crow perched on a stop sign being sassey. Crows are not shy. They are very territorial and I have seen them gang up on a stranger in the neighborhood. The family clan stays together sometimes for three or four years. The oldest bird in the clan I fed, became crippled so that he could not use his landing gear. He would land on my hand so I could feed him. His clan continued to come at a feeding time to my backdoor on Goodwill Avenue. There was more than three generations in my yard. Once I even observed one of the perched on the head of a fake owl on the roof of the nieghbors' house. Fake owls don't worry crows. I could spot old "Whitey" by the white feathers on his wing.
 When I lived on Spring Park Road, I fed a crow I named "Pegleg". He could walk on only one leg because the other was damaged and out of use. He was always the first to be fed but would cache his grub under a leaf pile or elsewhere and then would call the flock to feed after stashing some lunch for later.
KDM

A TALE OF A LOST PAINTING

A TALE OF A LOST PAINTINGby Karl MacKeeman on Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 4:25pm Holman Hunt painted an image of Jesus with a lantren knocking on a door, it was called, "The Light Of The World", looking for an honest pawn broker or dealer of some kind. On television antique dealers, pawn brokers and antique pickers are all honest and fair dealers. In real life you have to be careful. I used to tag along with my Dad on some of his haircut jobs. This put us into a lot of cellers and kitchens in Halifax. Ira was one of Dad's pals from the Dockyard and Dad was cuting his hair. He was telling the story while his hair was being cut of how the 'wife' sent him out for fish & chips . Ira lived near Williams's Fish-n-chips on Robie Street, one of the best meals for a quarter you could get in Halifax. He said that on his way he saw a sale on steak at the local butcher and he came home with steak instead. Well this didn't go over big with Ira's Mrs. She wasn't accepting any subsitutes, so Ira had to wrap up the steaks and put them in the freezer. He wrote on the package "mistake" . While this tale was told I noticed a painting in the celler rafters and Ira gave it to me. It was a sea battle beween two frigates. One frigate was flying the stars and stripes and one was flying the white ensign on the mizzen stay sail boom. I knew a frigate was any ship of under 50 guns. I did not know much about the War of 1812 in those days except that it was fought around 1812 and Lidwig Beethoven(1770-1827) wrote a piece dedicated to it. Later research told me it was very close to a world- wide conflict that invovoved most of Europe being invaded by Napolian's vast Armies. It included a US invasion of Canada and a French attack on Russia, Spain, Portugal and Italy. In Nova Scotia we were poorly defended from U.S. invasion and Privateers. I took the painting to a dealer near Gottengin Street who told me it wasn't valuable because of the darkened varnish and I walked out with $15.00 . Later after the money was spent I read an ad in the paper seeking a painting of this same battle. What helped indentify the ships was the American ship flew a banner with the words, "Free Trade and Sailors' Rights". It wasn't until later I read about the presidents' collection of paintings in the oval office and the battle and it's importance to Halifax history. The President of the time was a Naval vetern so paintings of naval history was of interest to him. Later that same man who had survived the sinking of his torpedo boat in the South Pacfic had his brains splattered by a bullet in a car in Texas. Another American tradition. The Halifax Painter, O'brien painted several versions of the battle between the two frigates, HMS Shannon and USS Chesapeake . The Roal Navy was having difficulty maintaing the upper hand with privateers in in Nova Scotia. Shelburn and Charlotetoewn were sacked by US privateeers, who were stressing the Royal Navy's resouresss. Both HMS Guerriere and HMS Java were recentily sunk by USS Consitution (44 guns). A young officer named Philip Broke set out to remedy the situation by training his crew in gunnery and even paid for the shot for their practice. He sailed down to Boston and called the Yanks out for a fight. The USS Chesapeak was armed with more guns than the Shannon but the gunnery practice paid off. Broke wanted to take on "Ol Ironsides" as the nickname for the USS Consitution was called and came close to catching up with her after a chase that lasted many days. The American ship had taken several British warships some as close as the Grand Banks. Captian Broke was hoping to finally duel with the Consitutution on June 1st, 1813 but she was in for repairs. (That ship is still tied up and at the wharf in Boston) A letter was sent with an American prisoner to Captian Lawerence of the USS Chesapeke. I read a detailed report in the archives at Dalhousie. Few battles are as romantic as painters have painted them. It should be remembered that these were wooden ships and the effect of a broadside was a very horrific thing. Splinters and fragments of deck wood were nearly as effective as the shots themselves. That shot encluded not only the traditional round shot, but grapeshot which was a tied bundle of small balls that resembled a bunch of grapes and chain shot that was made of two half balls joined by a length of chain meant to damage rigging but did as much damage to crew as well. By the time grapples were used to bring both vessels along side for boarding , the decks of both sides were swiming in blood. Crews were armed with pikes, cutlasses, sabres, pistols, axes and muskets so the fighting was brutal and hand to hand. Both commanders were wounded but Captian Lawerence died shortly after the 1/4 hour battle was over. His last words were, "Don't give up the ship" which is used today as the moto of the US Coast Guard. It was said that the Americans lost over 60 and the Shannon about 30 men and boys but other reports put the figure much higher. Crew often died later from wounds. Doctors in those days delt with most wounds by amputation and that was why they were called "Sawbones" or "Bones" for short, a tradition that continued on the Starship Enterprise. The Prize was towed into Halifax and Captian Lawernce was buried at St. Pauls' . Some time later the body was exhumed and returned to his homeland. While in New York many years ago I came across a hugh monument to him near St. Patricks' dedicted to the American captian. A Nova Scotian coin had the likeness of Captian Broke on it and the Shannons' bell is in a museum in Halifax. The painting I had was never seen again but I believe it was copied from a popular engraving of the subject. What the experience taught me was the importance of historical research. I learned to be more careful and there was a few honest dealers that were helpful. Near the South Gate of HMC Dockyard there was an elder black lady, I think her name was Mrs. Johnson. She sold me a beautiful wicker creel that I still have and use to this day. She went to all the auctions and taught me a lot about the value of old junk.KDMNote: A fictionalised account of the battle can be read about in "Fortune Of War" by Patrick Obrian

WHEN THE LAST PICTURE IS PAINTED

by Karl MacKeeman on Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 3:03pm

Painters have walked the streets like hookers with portfolio in hand seeking approval by popes, cardinals, kings, princes and miserable art dealers but in the end the best of them went on to paint to please themselves. I found these words, the ones I want carved on my tombstone where-ever that may be in a book about Kipling. Any boy who's been a Wolf Cub knows this writer. The old library at Dalhousie University had a room devoted to him and his ghost was said to haunt the place. I spent many hours there ducking out of hockey practise in the nearby rink. The old man's ghost did not walk through the stacks, that I could see. Something I didn't know about Kipling, was that he was a very good graphic artist and self-published and illustrated his first books. They were sold in railway stations all over India.

"When Earth's last picture is painted

and the tubes are twisted and dried,

When the oldest colours have faded,

and the youngest critic has died,

We shall rest, and, faith, we shall need it

-lie down for an eon or two,

Till the Master of all good Workman

shall put us to work anew...

And only The Master shall praise us

and only The Master shall blame;

And no one shall work for money

and no one shall work for fame,

But each in his seperate star

Shall draw the Thing as he sees it

for the God of Things as they are!"

-Rudyard Kipling (from L'Envoi)

Many galleries have closed. Some fine artists have died and many just faded away discouraged. The Printmakers' Studio died an agonizing death. A few, very few artists have had the honour of having thier prices go up after they have passed on. Most remained unkown and over-looked to this day. KDM