Well that, I was checking the supply because the bebushka was messing about and… chof! My glasses got full of milk. Now I see the world Jackson Pollock style. Some tongues say (I don’t know if they are evil), that he started painting his famous drip painting horizontally on the floor because his studio was too small to put the canvas vertically. It might be.
Lee Krasner was already exploring the same route too. I imagine them over the dinner table commenting on abstractions. Perhaps they even thought of it during an expressionist ketchup mess over the table. They were American after all, I say it because of the ketchup, not the mess. That is in international politics.
The madonnas of the cinquecento, or the quatrocento, or from wherever, aimed better than I did. A Saturday not long ago I went to the National Gallery. I wasn’t searching for madonnas, my muse and I were going for inspiration. To see how the classics lit their paintings to see if we could copy it with the camera.
Ha! Dreamers! That is why art is art, artifice and alternative realities and photographs are photographs and the spotlights, well, spotlights. And us still potatoes with lighting. Well, I speak for myself, I am a supreme potato when it comes to lighting, that is why I do it all with natural light. My muse is much more knowing, I am not going to put him in the same boat.
The older the painting the more painterly the light. I wanted to see the Virgin of the Rocks, by Da Vinci. Not to copy the light, I know I can’t. But because I love it. Also because the Flagmeister asked us to say hello to her when we said we were going to the National Gallery.
It happened that half of the museum was closed because of a strike, so I couldn’t see her. I couldn’t see another of my favourite paintings either, Saint George killing the muppet. It is medieval. Chronologically speaking, that is, not as a description. They used to kill more dragons then than now. It is a very funny painting.
I also have a tiny studio. Moreover, it is not even whole. It is a stu. And an eleven month old assistant that insists on reorganising my books and eating all oeuvres in within her grasp. One day perhaps it will occur to me to put a canvas horizontally on the floor, contemporary version, that is.
Illustration from the Feminist Gooseneck Barnacles Series.
“Cool”