A Valentine for the Left Handed

Valentine’s Day is here. I hope readers of this post are in receipt of many happy Valentines - or at least one good one. Rather than give my own husband the usual disposable card, I decided to make a custom-made drawing that can be part of his art collection. For this I’ve made a drawing based on an old master’s work. This one is a drawing of Pietro Da Cortona’s (1596 - 1669) “Nymphs Carving Trees.” I decided on this as a valentine because, like my husband, all of the nymphs are left-handed. My theory as to why Pietro Da Cortona drew all the nymphs left-handed is that he could have posed models and used the reflection of a camera obscura to trace them - thereby rendering a mirror image. There are other paintings from the period with left-handed models for this reason.

Nevertheless, my valentine is a lefty. He shares this trait with mostly good company; eight presidents including Barack Obama, Ben Franklin, Albert Einstein and Oprah Winfrey. There were also a host of left-handed conquerors including Alexander the Great, Julius Ceasar, Napoleon and Queen Victoria. And my husband is apparently in good artist stead as well, with such notable left-handed artists such as Peter Paul Rubens, Albrecht Durer, Hans Holbein, Paul Klee, Michaelangelo and Raphael. The list goes on, but for those curious enough to know more, a left-handed web site will suffice. I looked at them and was surprised to find out that August 13 is International Left-Handers Day. Do I need to get a gift?

Illicit Love

Taking a 180 degree turn from my previous blog on Godly love, I’ve posted a pastel drawing I made from a sketch based on a painting by Watteau. The painting that I made this from on a visit, I think, to the Barnes Foundation, depicted a cuckolded man discovering an amorous adventure between his wife and another man. I recall some detail in the faces in the original painting. My pastel drawing, however, is in my more amorphous style. No need for a facial expression here anyway. The husband’s indignant stance says it all. We may have to wait and see if the Blogger glitch allows an upload of this image.

Agape

Some historians believe that the love associated with St. Valentine’s Day was the Christian love represented by the saint. This love was called Agape. A painting I made along this theme was the Virgin of the Roses, which I still have in my private collection. Many of the small paintings of the Virgin Mary have long since found their way into private collections of various clients. But this one was perhaps difficult to understand - the eyes of the Virgin painted so narrow and faintly that she looks blind. Certainly she is not seeing the roses she is surrounded by. Also a symbol of love, the roses in this painting denote the sense of smell and touch rather than sight, the virgins’s eyes focused spiritually inward.

Drawing After Tintoretto's Narcissus

No study of the permutations of love would be complete without addressing the love of self. For this I feature a recent drawing I completed after Tintoretto’s painting of Narcissus. There was much to admire in this painting when I first made the sketch in front of the painting - the bold composition with Narcissus strategically placed in the lower left corner, his dramatically foreshortened arm vaulting into the direction of the landscape. The mystery, too, of his right hand concealed beneath the water’s surface, searching in vain for the man behind the reflection, attracted me to the painting. Some of the details of this drawing are invented, since I only made a general sketch of the composition. Instead of figures in the background I included a small collection of vessels. The invention helps make the drawing at least partly my own. Narcissus comes to mind as I come to grips with illness. There is no narcissism quite like the self-absorption of the unwell. It can become a beast looming almost as large as the illness itself, growing exponentially with symptoms that demand attention. The challenge becomes one of not feeding this growth and to try as much as possible to reconnect to others. Caring for and responding to the needs of others can be quite difficult in the face of being needy onself. “And how are YOU doing,” I would ask, the unoiled machinery of reciprocity and altruism grinding together. But with help and practice it is possible, however small the contribution, to care again for the welfare of others. It is better than spending one’s time chasing phantoms beneath the water’s surface like Narcissus.

Excuse of a Heart

In my last post, I mentioned the exhibition of works of art that featured hearts at the Nina Liu and Friends gallery a few years ago. The second work I made for that exhibition was a slightly revised still life. Once again, it was a still life painting that was not painted to my satisfaction. These are always good to experiment with as there is no compunction about ruining a good thing. A bad painting cannot be made worse - but it can possibly get better. So after toning down some areas and keying up others, I added a small red heart on a platter, leaving it up to the viewer to decide what the heart is and what it signifies. It could be a candy heart with a red wrapper. It could be a locket. It could be a carving. Or it could be an excuse to include it in a thematic exhibition. The painting is now in a private collection in Charleston, SC.

Francesca on a Heart Rug

Although I had recently resolved not to randomly add little hearts to a design so it can be reused for Valentine’s Day, there was a time in the past when I had done such a thing. The occasion was an exhibition on the theme of hearts at the gallery of Nina Liu and Friends in Charleston. I had a painting of a woman seated in an narrow upright chair on top of a round pink rug. I never liked the painting but was too parsimonious to throw it away. So I first changed the rug into a heart shape. Not stopping there on the heart theme, I started adding all kinds of decorative green and pink hearts in a make-believe fabric design behind the model. For good measure, I covered the awkwardly painted hands with a round bouquet of tiny white flowers. A funny piece, indeed, which I still have hanging in my dining room above a quilt with similar colors.

Portrait of a Man with Dan Fabric Design

While in the midst of making drawings this month, I told myself that I would resist the temptation, by my seasonal search for hearts and various other love images, to force the topic by insinuating little hearts into the compositions. But recently, little hearts did present themselves in my search for an African fabric design to finish the background of a portrait I was working on. In the original sketch I made of the model’s head, there was only a roughly indicated piece of drapery behind his head. It was a blank slate into which I could insinuate a pattern of my choosing. I did find an interesting pattern in a Dan (Yacoubu) fabric. As serendipity would have it, there were little hearts in the design. The drawing was completed yesterday and boldly goes forth as a portrait true to both cultural and seasonal accuracy. The image above is a detail from this drawing.

Heart Heart Heart

While delving into my archive in search of hearts and love, I revisited my mosaic

chart series. Since I had not published my mosaic take on an EKG previously, I’ve selected this one to post in keeping with the February theme. The mosaic is made from glass, gold, and semi-precious gems and is now in the private collection of a cardiologist. It is the only one in the set of a bell curve, a bar graph, and a chart showing alpha waves, that I don’t still have in my own possession.

A Touch of Rubens

Peter Paul Rubens was undoubtedly one of the most sensuous of Baroque painters. Everything about his rendering of human skin was resplendent beyond the flesh of mere mortals. A fallen Amazon in his Battle of the Trojans and Amazons was painted as if she were a lush oyster offered up for the feast. Even his rendition of Christ on the cross was more sensual than spiritual. Christ’s flesh was painted to look like polished alabaster with the crucifixion marks so tiny as to look like nothing more than rosebuds. In Rubens’ robust scenes of amorous adventures, the cavorting people - and sometimes half-people- often border on the kinky. I stood in front of one such bucolic scene and made a quick pencil sketch, which I just blackened with charcoal and white pastel for a more dramatic effect. In the original painting, Rubens managed to make the man’s romantic partner look coy and seductive. My rendering, I think, makes her look somewhat overwhelmed. Would that I had the delicate touch of a Rubens!

February is the month of hearts and love. For this month, I’ll be posting images of both recent work as well as work from my archive on this theme. The image above is a valentine I made for my husband using water soluble pastels.