Gone Up in Smoke

The Girl With Her Head in the Clouds, oil pastel on paper, 2012 This past fortnight I’ve returned to an old, neglected love: oil pastel drawing. I used to use oil paint too, once upon a time, but what I really love about pastels is that one uses one’s fingers – literally. It’s a much more tactile experience. I like to layer pastel on as thick as possible until the pastels are literally melting between my fingers, and I can smear the colours around, blending them even more (bringing new meaning to the term ‘finger-painting’).

I do like soft pastels too – only marginally less – but they are impossible to use in the home as the dust gets everywhere.

This week, a certain word once heard long ago, that described this blending method kept whispering in my head: sfumato.

a certain word once heard long ago … kept whispering in my head: sfumato

Detail of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona LisaI finally took time to look it up and there it was: sfumato is one of the four canonical modes of the Renaissance. Leonardo da Vinci was the most prominent practitioner, and his Mona Lisa shows the technique, as does Bernadino Luini’s picture St. Catherine. The Italian word literally means ‘gone up in smoke’ and describes a method of painting in which there are no strong outlines – colours blend together softly from light to shadow.

Detail of Bernadino Luini’s St. Catherine Something’s Coming, oil pastel on paper, 2012 With oil pastel, I usually use a light, neutral stick to blend the colours below – white or warm or cool greys – or whatever is the lightest tone in the area I am working. While I practice this technique through the many layers of oil pastel, I nearly always finish with a final smudging layer.

I often find myself unfocussing my eyes as I work to further blur the colours together, to the point where I literally have to walk away to rest my eyes – which undoubtedly is very bad for my eyesight! Leonardo da Vinci himself described sfumato as ‘without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke or beyond the focus plane’. Such a beautiful notion.

The Other Side, oil pastel on paper, 2012

Greetings From the Past

This card is dated 21/12/1905. I love that the birthday message was carried entirely on the front, and the sender (whose name I cannot distinguish) writes ‘Do you still collect pictorial postcards?’ all over the picture!I have finally found a pleasing background for my random poems – vintage postcards! Though postcards seem as ephemeral as the magazines I have cut words from, they have stood the test of time: many of them are over one hundred years old. The people who wrote and received them are long dead, and it seems a fitting tribute to use their greetings and remembrances as a background for poetry.

The reverse of the card above.The original ‘found poems’ I created were pasted into a book, but I discovered, many years later, that the glue I used had turned a dark yellow and utterly destroyed the paper. I scanned them all in and cleaned them up – a daunting task. (Note: Any collage artists out there – don’t use the traditional rubber cement; it is not archivally sound; a simple glue stick would be better.)

Originally I wanted to create a real collage and stick the words onto the vintage postcards; create a whole new piece of art (hardcopy as opposed to digital). But now that I have bought them and admired their poignant and faded beauty, and exclaimed over the elegant handwriting, I am loathe to deface them. They have lasted this long – when perhaps they might have been put in the trash – so I cannot bear to cover them up with words snipped out of Vogue and Elle magazines.

Here are a couple for you to admire, front and back. 

This wonderful card, posted from Uruguay in 1905, still bears traces of glitter attached to the girls’ outfits.The card (above) was addressed to Mademoiselle Amandita Ambrosani (how lovely!) in Salto. I do hope that minimal address enabled the postman to find her.

Franz Roh, Magic Realist

Total Panic, 1937Franz Roh, by Lucia Moholy 1926Unlike the sometimes brashly coloured collages cut from modern magazines today, the images Franz Roh (1890–1965) created are masterful subtleties in warm greys and olive. Somehow this restrained palette lends a more disturbing air to his compositions. Inspired by Max Ernst’s Surrealist collages, Roh pasted together nineteenth-century engravings, excising them from the stolid gravity of the middle-class and casting them into an avant-garde world of whimsy.

Roh was a German art historian and critic of avant-garde film and photography. He began his career as a freelance writer and art critic, and when the Nazis forbade him to continue this work, with the encouragement of László Hoholy-Nagy, he turned to experimental photography.

Orchid Thief, 1935He Handles the Clay-Toned Boat, 1945Bride of the Winds, 1930Loathing photography that was simply representational, he often used a combination of techniques, such as multiple and negative printing, collage and photograms to create his fantastic and sometimes disturbing imagery.

It was he who coined the term ‘magic realism’ in a different sense from today’s accepted literary usage: referring to art style the New Objectivity. In his terminology, Magic Realism was related to Surrealism, though in distinct difference, it focussed on the object and its actual existence in this world, rather than the subconscious reality that the Surrealists explored.

After the war, Roh resumed his critical and academic career, and only publicised his photographic work near the end of his life. They still manage to surprise and fascinate today.

Strange Ark, 1930The Isolation of the Narzisms

It Started to Rain Blueness

I always enjoy making my found poetry. I close my eyes and pull out a handful of cut out words from the little vintage tin. Then I spread them out on the table and regard them. Sometimes a poem emerges quickly, sometimes piecemeal. Sometimes, like this morning, the fragments lie scattered across the table while I eat my breakfast and let them sink in. Then, like a jigsaw puzzle they mysteriously, magically fall into place.

Today the random poem lead to a doodle, and then to another more tragic than the last – which turned into a darker fancy than all that had gone before. I had to write a sequel to dispel the sinister turn the day had taken. But more on those another day. 

Oh, check out the Facebook page for a colour version of this collage poem – I couldn’t quite decide which I preferred.

Spun Sugar

From Christian Louboutin’s Fall 2011 look bookMarie Antoinette, Wendy PaulaRococo is an artistic movement of the eighteenth-century that grew out of Baroque. Extremely decorative and pretty, it was a reaction against the grandeur of the heavy Baroque style, and is characterised by pastel colours, asymmetrical designs, sinuous curves, voluptuous shapes and plenty of gold. It was applied to all forms of art: sculpture, painting, architecture, interior design, décor, and the performing arts. Lush, witty and playful, it first made its graceful appearance in Paris. Just think of Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. Here is a little collection of mine in lavish pinks, greens and golds.

Watteau II, by Stephanie PeekFrom Such Foulness of Root Does Sweetness Grow, Ray Caesar, 2009Inside of the ladies garden at Vauxhall, Joseph Highmore (1692‑1780), 1778