Charming…

'Waiting For The Prince', oil on board, 5x7," 2009.

This image came to me very slowly over a period of almost a year. I like to keep a collection of these small Masonite panels already primed and I just leave them lying around just incase something comes to me. This one started out as a study for a duplicate piece I was commissioned to make sometime after the Annual Student Exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy.

You see the original was part of a diptych called Husband and Wife. I made them just before the opening and didn’t even have time to take pictures before they had to be hung for the show at the Academy. One person bought the ‘husband’ part and another person bought the ‘wife’ part. They were sold separately. Some months later the woman who bought Wife asked me if I would make a duplicate of Husband so she could own the complete diptych for herself. Of course I did that for her. I had to work from memory though, because I never took any pictures of the work (shame on me)! I made several versions of this Husband piece and while they were very interesting, I wasn’t satisfied that they sufficiently duplicated the effect of the original. I finally asked her to bring Wife to me so I could at least work on them together, because originally they were painted side by side. In the mean time I was able to get a photo of Wife for my portfolio.

As I said, I started working on several of these very small panels in an attempt to conjure up the original piece from memory. The piece is deceptively simple and therefore it was very exasperating to accomplish this. But after working through several versions I came to a resolution that, while I could never make a true copy of the original (that type of work is so spontaneous and relies so heavily on the chance activities of pigment, spirits and oil on an imperfect surface), I achieved a variation of the first Husband that fit together well with its partner.

On the back end, as is often the case when working in series, I had several panels with different variations of the theme – the frontal view of the man’s torso with cropped head and limbs. These panels ended up becoming the start for a triptych entitled Crucifixion (only the center piece of that triptych is currently available for online view, when it comes back from the gallery I intend to get an installation shot with its component parts included), and of course the basis of Waiting for The Prince.

I’m very fond of Waiting for The Prince. I have the feeling that I will be seeing more of this idea in future works. The little girl of course is really the subject of the story, its really a self-portrait in many ways. I’m happy to see anything in art that deals with childhood sexuality. That’s a meta-theme that is always important to me. Its behind my work in ways that I’m not even sure I understand yet. I love looking at Balthus for this reason. Paula Rego is also one of my heroes. The funny thing is, I don’t particularly like the way either of them use paint (of course I’ve only seen them in books so my analysis of that facet of their work is definitely incomplete, someday I’ll probably eat that statement), but the themes that they deal with in their pictures are very close to my heart, and I could read them and read them and not even have to think about painting or art; just think about the relationships between the figures; about their bodies and what could be in their minds. I discovered both Balthus and Paula Rego in a book when I was a little girl. The images seemed like they were about me. The artists had found a world that I was already in at ten or eleven years old and we met in that world through those pictures.

Today I’m making my own pictures, and I still want to go to that world I found in my girlhood. That’s why I feel this sort of alarm go off, this barometer that signals me when I’m getting close to something that really matters to me in my work, when I start to paint the body – sex – and its strange to me. Its more or less distorted, just the way it is for a child because its an alien thing. Adulthood, womanhood, manhood, flesh, organs; life. When I see the strangeness in the physical form, the typical bodies, you know – not circus freaks or grotesques necessarily, but normal, average people – it  means something to me. This is what we become, I think as a little girl. We are becoming more and more these odd cabbages. Its an apprehensive feeling, and its exciting too.

Desire mixed with fear, that’s what my poetry is about. I want you to see how you can have desire for something, for flesh, for relationships, for people, and how it repulses you at the same time. Is it beautiful or is it ugly? That the problem I’m always wrestling with in life, and in my work. I don’t know how to answer it most of the time. I always try to make beauty–always. I aim high, and my shot waffles in the wind and the gravity drags my ideas down to the earth and my paintings and drawings are very fallen forms of beauty. Just like us.

You can see much more of my work at my main art site michaeledwardsart.com.

Spare Parts

Right now I’m working on a larger-scale (that is, roughly life-sized) figure-portrait in oil on canvas. This is a throw-back to the kind of paintings I was making prior to coming out to Philadelphia for graduate school at the Academy. The fact that actually I made it into the studio yesterday when all I wanted to do was sit out on the benches next to Christ Church and read is a testimony to how beneficial it is for artists of my temperament to work with live models.

I hate to admit it but I’m actually pretty undisciplined. Sometimes I can drift into a lethargy that keeps me unproductive for weeks and even months at a time. I eventually get so depressed trying to be anything but an artist that I finally drag myself back into the studio to see if I can still do it. I wish I could make you believe that I’m the type that can’t wait to get to the studio and would rather die painting or something like that. Its just not true. I make art despite myself, really. I just keep going back to it.

I remember once reading in The Art Spirit by Robert Henri (years before I attended the Academy where he taught), that Henri too got himself into a bit of a slump from time to time. I remember him saying in one of his letters that knowing he has an appointment with a ‘sitter’ that day is sometimes the only thing that would get him moving. That he often would feel entirely discouraged and uninterested in making work, but not wanting to break the social appointment with the model he would show up and paint, and that within a short time he would feel so happy and so interested in his work again that his depression was totally forgotten. This has usually been true in my case.

But then, an unusual thing happened yesterday while working on the portrait. About halfway through the four-hour session, I started to feel, well, sluggish again. It was like something was telling me to stop. So I stopped. I thought perhaps it was just the fact that I hadn’t eaten anything in a while, so with her permission, I left the girl sitting there while I got myself a snack and cup of coffee at the gas station down the street. I felt a bit better. I was well enough to keep plodding along. But there was something bothering me about the work that I was doing. I was grateful to get a call from a visitor and to allow them to come up for a chat and cut our session short. As I said, this is an unusual reaction for me. Normally, I have as much difficulty stopping myself from working once I’ve started as I do getting started once I’ve stopped. But yesterday, I just wanted to keep the painting from going any further before I’ve reflected on it more carefully.

I believe I need to put some more effort into finding out what this piece is really about. Like I said, its the first time I’ve worked on a large painting in several years, and I do feel a bit exposed – just as my subject is exposed. There is certainly a very reflexive relationship between myself and the model that I have sitting for this portrait right now. Its quite psychologically charged, I think.

And there is one little detail that bothers me. You see, I’ve done a funny thing with her: I’ve made her look as if her head was shaved. Well, its not a big deal, except that I’m not sure how she’ll feel being portrayed that way. You see there is a social dynamic here. She is an unpaid model.  A collaborator. That’s part of it you know. That’ what makes our relationship an important element of the piece. It affects the decisions that are being made. This is the truth about portraiture: it’s social.

In real life she has longish hair. But the girl in the painting is bald. That’s just one thing. You see, I’m not really sure if I’m painting a portrait of this person, or if I’m using this person as a model to paint someone that exists only in the painting – like a fictional character. What am I doing anymore? Do I really even need this model here?

Well, it does seem especially helpful to have her – I mean, if anything the painting is based on her has a subject. You know, I remember reading that Paula Rego always used certain models in her paintings and they weren’t necessarily portraits – they were characters she was creating. The model would help her see the character she was trying to picture. She used the same girl over and over again because they had a lot of trust between them, and she said in the interview (it was in that big Phaidon book about her that came out like ten years ago) that she had ‘short limbs’ and sort of looked like girls she would see growing up in Portugal, and they were like herself, and so the paintings of this model were sort of self-portraits in that way.

I think this model is a bit like that for me. She looks like figures I have already imagined in some of my drawings and doodles and things. She fits right into my stage-play and seems perfectly cast. This is all well and good. So do I allow myself to modify her as much as I wish, to use her for spare parts? I feel some real reticence about that. Would it still be a portrait if I did? What then would it be a portrait of? How would that effect our relationship to eachother?

Working with Live Models Again

Its three fifteen in the morning again and I’m still awake. I’m working at the “J-O-B” tomorrow so I’ll have to reschedule with my new model, see if she’ll come by on Thursday and Friday instead. I just wanted to reassure you that I am working with live model in the studio again so in case you were worried that I was going to keep making up figures from my imagination – never fear.

Its true, when I first moved to Philly I really left all my lovely free models behind in Seattle, and I although it was a big disadvantage in some ways, I decided to use the lack of ‘friends close enough to take off their clothes and lay around while I stare at them’ to my advantage, and apply myself to seeing what I could do with just materials and me.  As it turned out, this approached yielded some exciting results, and the two years I spent in grad school at The Pennsylvania Academy mostly just figuring out what I could make marks on paper do was probably an extremely important phase of growth for my work. I got a lot of things out of my system – and also opened up several cans of worms that I’m still trying to stuff into proper position and probably will be for many years to come. I guess that’s what grad school is for.

In fact, I spent almost the whole two years just drawing and didn’t get back into painting again until literally weeks before the big ASE (that’s the annual student exhibition – you know, the graduation show). Kind of a strange move, but I kept the paintings very small, and off to the side, and as it happened, all the attention went to my beautiful big strange ‘navel’ drawings which appeared before me in my little white, windowless grad school studio with no models, no ideas, no plans, no colors, no nothing. I’m still in love with them. It was good that they stole the show – they were the underdogs of my oeuvre.

But ah, painting. Once the excitement was over I took the check from the sales during that show and promptly lived off of it for three months, reading books, staring into space and making these little tiny oil portraits using myself as the model – and somewhat constructing the figures out of my imagination. Good clean fun all summer. I sold a few at Artists’ House Gallery in Old City Philadelphia. Was in a few more little group shows there. In preparing for this last one in April, I decided to use the live models again.

It just seemed to be time, and actually, it finally occurred to me that I had at least one friend that would be a candidate to lay around and let me stare at her for free. A beautiful girl, a musician that I know. I gave her a sheer nightie to wear as she wasn’t to interested in going fully nude. It worked out beautifully. She sat very well, a still and very serene model. She was shy, but being a dear friend she gave as generously of herself has she could have.

We made two paintings in six weeks. Quite a record. I was extremely worried about having enough work to fill the space that I had been granted at Artists’ House. A whole half a room isn’t much but my paintings were so small! In the end the show looked beautiful. I had asked my friend Jeremy McGirl to do the frames for me again – as I’m not much of a builder. In the end the sales covered the cost of the framing and supplies with a decent profit leftover. Just enough to buy more supplies.  Yes, sometimes we make art and sell it just to earn the privilege of making more art.  It’s a habit many of us must support with a “J-O-B”. Speaking of which, I better go to sleep so I can work for The Man tomorrow.

More about my current project later…

Sincerely,

Michael

PS You can see what I’m saying at my art site below…let me know what you think!

michaeledwardsart.com