I've been painting a variety of different works that I've loved, or found fascinating, from art history. It's an odd exercise - it is showing me lots of things I didn't expect, along with my own shortcomings which I drearily fear.
This is a copy of a painting - or, rather, a copy of a reproduction of a painting. I have never seen it in real life, but growing up I had a book about art history that was great for kids, though most of the reproductions were in black in white. Sometimes I wonder if that contributed to why I was an avid drawer first, before I became a painter.
I had a wonderful high school art teacher - one of those necessary, hoped for teachers who help and protect you, as you learn from them. Sometimes the protection is as subtle as encouraging you to keep progressing personally, which, growing up in a small rural town, felt like an adult must feel finding a door of their prison cell somehow opened to a hallway.
Anyway, there was a painting of the late Corot in this book, in black and white.
The accompanying text went something like, "We heard there were fairies in this painting, Mr. Corot, but we don't see any."
"I see them", said the artist.
Early Corots were - and still are - kind of plain - like something naked vs. something nude. His landscapes and portraits seem to be aiming at verisimilitude, but in flat, unexciting tones.
Somewhere along the way, though, he underwent a major change, from a kind of keen and cool objectivity to a deep, romantic subjectivity. Looking at the variations on the landscape featured in the painting I copied, it seems recognizably true to place - the trunks, trees, river and marsh banks are all where they would be, when viewd from different angles. But the entire treatment speaks of nostalgia, dreaming, memory, love.
Trying to copy a master is a fool's errand in most ways: if it's perfect, you're a forger. If it's indistinguishably as good, you are conquered by the original master - just a passive subset, active enough only to erase oneself.
The only way to succeed is to pay honour. Some do it with money, some with curation and care, others by interpretation.
I didn't have a clear path to reinterpret it - looks like I was waiting for some outside guide to tell me what to do. I was uncertain of my re-developing technical abilities, and that shows up here too.
Ultimately, I just had to give myself a deadline and stick with it, and say: This Is Where I'm At Now.
I'm disappointed I couldn't take more joy in it while doing it, but I'm glad that I've noticed that I missed out on that, and am looking forward to working with those kind of openings, that joy, more and more.
I don't think it's some wild showy success, but it would be bizarre if it was. That's not the point though. The point is what I've learned doing it:
a) Work is work, look for the joy around and through it.
b) I'm hard on myself and my moods when I finish a work are usually whack, tending to the negative, so - let it go! Fuggedaboutit!
c) I should enjoy that I can make things that show me where I'm at, learn from it still, and ... have some faith that in leaving it to others, they will find worth in it where, for all the inner intrigues I've listed I cannot.
Souvenir Of Mortefontaine (copy from reproduction)
Oil On Canvas
30x40"
2002
