Hanna At The Piano Redux

I was going to get back to this about 3 months ago, but it was hard facing the fact I had to grind off most of the etching and re-aquatint....So finally I got up the courage to bite the bullet - or more appropriately bite the plate - there's still lots of room for work (I want to darken the floor and raise the tone in the walls, and add in defining etched lines, for starters) but so far it looks salvageable...

Elizabeth and other things...

The sun's shining (finally!), Fats Waller is on the CD, and I sit at my desk working on redrawing the sketches of Elizabeth from Saturday, reworking the etching plate of Hanna at the piano, and watching the neighborhood kids building a fort out of knotweed stalks, and life's pretty good.

Anyway, here's some quick sketches from Saturday (complete with notes to myself, what a mess). Elizabeth is a new model to Richard's drawing group. Very quiet, graceful, and poised. I don't know if I'll do anything formal with them, though with her fine lines, formal carriage, and the mixture of sharp highlights and strong tones of the day, I really wish I had the patience a to do mezzotint. Maybe in the next lifetime!





As for the etchng plate, there's things I really like about it, and things I don't, which is a much worse position than when you really like a thing completely, or hate it altogether. I'm not a master of decisive action, so I'll probably just wind up redrawing it from scratch...

Hanna at the Piano

A few more piano pieces today, featuring selections from Chopin and Satie. Very good music to draw to! I hope to turn some of these into etchings or perhaps gouache, and I'll try one or two in the litho workshop this weekend...The lighting is going to be interesting to capture, as the piano faces into a corner with tall windows on either side.

Hanna playing Chopin's Nocturne 9-2:



A couple of Saties ( Satie gives strict yet ambigious advice - play the pieces in a manner "don't leave", "ligtly, with intimacy", "don't be proud", "dont eat too much", and "cooked". Hopefully we managed to convey this advice within the music, and also the sketches. What that would mean, I do not know):




This last one happened after we wrapped up, Hanna was putting on some makeup in the full length mirrors...

Hanna, Cooked

Well those of you who didn't read the last blog post before Blogger crashed and lost a bunch of stuff on Wednesday won't understand the title! Maybe they'll get it back, but in the meantime, tant pis, and do yer homework, and go practice Satie.

The next picture is of my first semi-decent litho, done Friday and Saturday at the Mahone Bay Arts Centre. Thanks Dan O'Neill for teaching the workshop, and thanks Sally Warren for doing such a great job organizing it.



There are a number of things I would like to change about it, though I like the basic design. For example, I would like to add more weight to the piano and bench so that their solidity would provide a stronger support for Hanna's intensely focussed liveliness. Unfortunately the ball grain aluminum plate lithography doesn't make that sort of change very easy, so perhaps we can redo it in an etching of roughly the same image size. (The image is about 9 1/2 by 12 1/2 inches, this one is done on Rives BFK)

The other current project nearing completion is this one:



There's still work to do on it, but it is coming along. Hanna suggested I strengthen the figures in the background, and add something to do with water, both of which seem to have helped a lot. One of the irritating things about encaustic from the photographic POV (though wonderful from the real life POV) is how variable they are under different light. It varies a lot from one day's photos to the next. I guess if you really want to see what it looks like, you should buy it. Or drop in sometime.

Hanna at the Piano

A few more piano pieces today, featuring selections from Chopin and Satie. Very good music to draw to! I hope to turn some of these into etchings or perhaps gouache, and I'll try one or two in the litho workshop this weekend...The lighting is going to be interesting to capture, as the piano faces into a corner with tall windows on either side.

Hanna playing Chopin's Nocturne 9-2:



A couple of Saties:




This last one happened after we wrapped up, Hanna was putting on some makeup in the full length mirrors...

Hanna at the Piano

Guess there hasn't been much posting lately! We've been busy on an encaustic which is taking absolutely forever (it's posted below). The encaustic will take a while to finish - lots to do on the background - so we're moving on.

Personally, I love genre work (basically people in everyday activities, though often pushed in the direction of homilies, from the entertaining Jan Steen to the somewhat stuffy - but beautifully done - Broken Pitcher by Bougeureau).

But for some reason there seems to be a special place in art for people playing the piano, and related instruments. Vermeer's Music Lesson and Lady Seated at a Virginal (Pollock fans should take a close look at the decorations on the instrument!), Matisse's Piano Lesson and Music Lesson, Renoir's Yvonne and Christine, van Gogh's Mademoiselle Gachet at the Piano or even Degas's Monsieur and Madame Manet (the piano got cut out) are all pretty typical examples. Why it should be such a popular theme is intriguing; perhaps it's because the sitter, if absorbed in playing, is no longer aware of the artist. Or maybe the use of muscles, motion, and focus is just really interesting.

So we relaxed for awhile today, Hanna played piano while I drew. A little rough for her with her right hand in a cast. The piece is Chopin's Nocturne 9-2. (Alas, my sound card is dead, you'll have to take your pick)










And this is the current state of the encaustic. So much work left to do! Maybe a little better planning is in order....