Emulation

 

Pierre Bonnard — sketch for La Salle à manger sur le jardin

 

I’ve been thinking ahead to the large still life that I plan to be painting soon.  This is the canvas that was going to be a large horizontal koi painting until I realized I just didn’t want to do that motif right now.  The canvas has since been up-ended vertically and the first early bits of paint mostly covered over with a pale blue (just because that’s the color that was already there).  I had decided to do “my version” of Bonnard’s La Salle à manger sur le jardin (regular readers may recall that I am in Monsieur Bonnard’s “classe” now — the one he teaches in the museums and in books from his perch in Heaven).

So I am asking myself exactly what it means to paint a version.  Do I use parallel color?  If so, as you can see from his sketch above, that means white table cloth, golden-ish room framing greens from the window above.  Am I using only his compositional idea?  Am I using a window something like the one he peered through in the lovely Villa Castellamare at Arcachon in 1930 (in earlier posts I went “window shopping”) or am I going to use my own humble window that looks out north on the yard, or perhaps the one that faces east and frames the holly tree?

Well, happily I don’t have to decide today.  I still have the “intermediate” picture to complete:  the tall bright vase of flowers on the green cloth with the blue background.  But it’s time to start thinking ahead….