weird and arcane things I must ponder

The bars framing the flowers on either side are products of Pierre Bonnard’s painting that I’m emulating.  They have no other referent.  They’re part of the structure of the window in the Villa Castellamare so I either make stuff up (which may happen) or I follow Bonnard’s lead.  In his painting the two beams are different colors due to alterations in light.  For the present I’m doing what he did so that the left beam is ochre colored and the right is bluish.  (It’s been a long time since I saw the actual painting so I have no idea what the real colors are and book illustrations always exaggerate.)

Anyway it makes me wonder what Bonnard was thinking.  Because the foreground things in my painting are all different from his — especially the flowers — I’ll have to adapt all the Bonnard elements to go with my changes.  All that happens later.

For now I had to decide whether the ochre creeps up and the blue creeps down — and I decided that they do.

Here’s Bonnard’s –

contemplating planes

The objects on the table would appear — I think — at slightly varying angles.  In Bonnard’s painting La salle à manger sur le jardin which this painting emulates, one comes upon the table as though standing in the room so that objects on the table are slightly below you.  In my painting, by contrast, the compotier and certain various other objects are not really sitting on the same plane.  And I guess I shouldn’t write that in my blog post because perhaps some observers wouldn’t notice unless one draws attention to it.

I am not being literal, though, about the objects.  The compotier has to be seen slightly from above or it looks wrong.  In contrast I think seeing the bottom level of objects in profile just somehow feels right.  So I’m going with my artistic intuition rather than attempting to assemble these things in true space.

When you walk into a room you look around, and you move through the space yourself.  This painting is large enough that it benefits from having a mobile quality.  So the objects sit in ways that perhaps relate to their being noticed at different points in time.

Below, my painting in progress on the left and its mentor by Pierre Bonnard on the right.

 

Drawing Loosely

Pierre Bonnard was the master of a loose sort of airy drawing.  The drawing above was a study for his painting of the  Dining Room Overlooking the Garden (La Salle à manger sur le jardin) that I wrote about in an earlier post (in regard to little copies I made of some of the details of the painting when it was exhibited at the Phillips Collection in Washington).

Almost everything Bonnard had to say about art he said with paint, but he does also have a few spare collected thoughts rendered as words, among which we find this advice: “Every painter must find in his “elements” of work, resources, reminders from which to draw from.  He only needs to look until he finds those which are true to his expression, to his usual needs, but there again the role of the unexpected is great.”

“Tout peintre doit trouver dans ses éléments de travail des ressources, des rappels, parmis lesquels il peut puiser.  Il n’a qu’à chercher jusqu’à ce qu’il trouve ceux qui sont conformes à son expression, à ses besoins habituels.  Mais là encore la part de l’inattendu est grande.”

The scribbly-ness of a drawing like this I find so beautiful.  It is as though he has captured the light that everywhere surrounds things.  And further Bonnard has found something quiet and sparkling and private in the moments of everyday life.

[Top of the post:  Drawing for La Salle à manger sur le jardin, by Pierre Bonnard, pencil]