Hanna, Shorty, and Nietzsche

I always have trouble with horizontal format work, I seem to think better vertically. Yesterday was no exception, but it wasn't helped by the fact that my Corgi wanted to get in on the picture.

Hanna created quite a sensual and relaxed pose, and Shorty seemed quite content at the far end, down by her feet. Then things started going wrong.

The first mistake was just in the way I set up my easel. I often work from the floor; it puts me at roughly eye level with, or slightly below, the model, which creates a more intimate and less formal atmosphere. But no, this time I worked from a standard height. The second was setting up nearly perpendicular to her axis, which kills any major foreshortening - again creating a more distant feel. This quite appropriate for those who like to concentrate on artistic form (all the visual stuff that hits your eye - like line, colour, dimension, etc. - but not necessarily your imagination - like who is this person?). And finally, I didn't shoo the dog off...

About halfway into laying out the drawing, Shorty decided he really didn't like being near feet. (That's the result of a deeply rooted complex left over from a certain someone who has been exiled to BC to while away his time surfing, snowboarding, and living with a Border Collie :)) So Shorty climbed into the middle of the picture. He seemed to settle down, so I figured I could deal with that. But once that got rolling, he decided he was going to shift around and find a better pose, and then after that, well maybe something on the floor was actually more interesting.

Long and short, the result was rather unfinished, and I picked away at it today, before tossing in the towel.



So what's this have to do with Nietzsche? It started with an article I read over coffee this morning, called Bored With Modernism. It's actually an interesting article, and I am pretty sympathetic to his point of view, particularly the identification of a problem in art. But what got me was the art that he includes in a positive sense; it's all very concerned with form, including gesture. Not that the work isn't beautiful! But it is the formal qualities which seemed to count most.

And later today, still picking away at this picture, I stopped for awhile to browse through a Nietzsche reader that Hanna had leant me, and I came across section 59 of "Beyond Good and Evil". It's a bit of a diatribe about forms and morals vs risk and exploration, and takes a humorous jab at retreating to form rather than grabbing at what lies under the surface...

Here and there one finds a passionate and exaggerated adoration of "pure forms" in philosophers as well as in artists: it is not to be doubted that whoever has NEED of the cult of the superficial to that extent, has at one time or another made an unlucky dive BENEATH it. Perhaps there is even an order of rank with respect to those burnt children, the born artists who find the enjoyment of life only in trying to FALSIFY its image (as if taking wearisome revenge on it), one might guess to what degree life has disgusted them, by the extent to which they wish to see its image falsified, attenuated, ultrified, and deified, ...

So I figure Shorty was doing his best equivalent of Lassie's "Timmy's in the well" routine, but channeling Nietzsche instead. And if I got a bit of a cartoon rather than something better, well, at least I learned something. So an extra biscuit for the dog...