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 and Other things

An interesting morning, with Hanna working on her poetry, and then piano. She brought along a couple of flyers from the Open Heart Forgery - a monthly poetry publication that's definitely worth looking into (just click on the link and download some free stuff!). They'd like visitors to download their current PDF, print off a few copies, and drop them off wherever you might like. Pretty cool....

As for me, it was the usual Monday morning, slow getting going. Must be those wild weekends. But there are a few drawings that aren't too bad, one from the piano, several in the kitchen.

While I was drawing Hanna at the piano it struck me that something other artists must like are all those reflective surfaces (the piano, a mid 20C Knabe baby grand, is black and polished). If one of these piano pieces goes to a painting it's going to be, uh, fun?



Then a couple in the kitchen as we wind up the session, the first thinking about something....



and changing the song on the laptop...



Finally, how I really spent my weekend - still lots to do - the drawings in the upper part were taken from sketches at Halifax's famous South End Diner (Google street view). Except the odd looking bird. That's taken from Gauguin's Nevermore

My Useless Studio Assistant....

...thinks he can cut it as a model, while I pick fur out of the encaustic. Or maybe he's just trying to reclaim the couch. Maybe that sort of snootiness comes from watching the recent royal wedding. He is elegant in his own way, I suppose....



Updated ...

the idea of Shorty relaxing by someone's feet is really pretty amusing...

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....

Hanna Bent Not Broken

Yesterday was a bit of a rough day drawing-wise, though not as bad as I thought. Perhaps salvageable! And today started out with some difficulty, but for a change improved as the session went on. Kind of like Nova Scotia weather...

We are currently working at creating another encaustic. We tried first working from her her feet, looking up (another failure), and then from her head - this one has possibilities. There's still a lot of fiddly things to do like reducing the curve on the upper back (but not so much that the raven tattoo gets lost), settling her face into the blankets, softening the robe, etc. But that's all probably best left to the painting stage.



There's a line down the drawing about 1/3 of the way in from the left. That's because I am used to working on 2x3 foot vertical drawings, and have trouble with horizontal formats. Can't think sideways! So I started with a vertical format, and thought I could leave out the legs & feet. But on the vertical format the drawing was just too incomplete, so we turned the support over and stuck the first drawing on the end, creating another foot for the feet.

But what to do about the background? Perhaps some verticals, and a raven.

Hanna Broken and Sublime

I've been off for a few days, dring to get this one done. It was supposed to just take a day or two! The best laid plans....
Encaustic on canvas, 24x36



Quite an enjoyable exercise. Hanna had been curious about encaustics; so we took advantage of her broken wrist (which has been keeping her off her regular job) to pile into this one. It's been a number of years since I did a large one, and I had forgotten how enjoyable it is. Much more pleasant than oils! An added bonus was listening to her collection of music (we've run through most of mine), which included a new-to-me group called Sublime. When she first mentionned them, I thought someone was setting Edmund Burke to music? I have sort of a disconnect from modern culture, I guess....

Hanna Broken II

We've decided to give encaustics a try - it's been several years since I did one. But the first order of business is to get a sketch together, which is here:



It's even sketchier than usual, and there's a lot of odds and ends (like the left arm) that need to be corrected at the start of the encaustics stage. But it's hard resist the perfume of damar and beeswax....