Diamonds and Rust

I was greeted like a lost lamb who had returned to the fold when I turned up for my watercolour classes again.
Immediately any aprehension I had about going back disappeared and I wasn’t even upset when we were told we would be painting outside. From previous posts you will know I don’t like it too much. Have you ever heard of a watercolourist who didn’t. I told myself it was a question of organisation.

It was a beautiful late Spring day, and as our theme was trees. It could all be very promising,especially as our classes are near a fair size lake,

The trouble is our teacher is a walker,not only does he walk here,but he walks in the Himalayas.He doesn’t mind how long we have to walk to reach his subject of painting desire.

Do you know what you must take with you if you want to paint outside?

Firstly something to sit on that will be comfortable for a couple of hours,
A liter of water to rinse your brushes, and something to pour it in to.
Depending on weather,another liter to drink.
Paints,brushes,palette,pencils.rags,tissues,pen knife and a large block of paper.
If you want to look professional maybe an easel.

A srong north east wind was blowing as we set off and I was glad I also had an extra pullover and hat,at least my hair wouldn’t blow all over my eyes.

On reaching our destination all weariness left us,the view was breathtaking even for Swiss standards. Trees,not quite in full bloom,sloping meadows covered with pink and white flowers,set off by masses of Dandelions. The lake in the distance it’s colour competing with the cloudless sky,and beyond that the high mountains still covered with the last of the winters snow.

It had to happen. I toddled along to an Art Vernissage which I do like attending for Arts sake if the subjects in the widest sense appeal to me. Not like all those people of course who are only there to wine and dine,although I am partial to a good, cold, dry white,and even more so to a glass of bubbly.Bollinger, if you want to know.

No, I am really interested in Art,and those of you that may have followed my revelations in that category will know that I like to dabble a bit myself. But truth is I am no talent,or I don’t think I am. People tell me what I paint is good but I am never satisfied with it. One of my colleagues at Art classes,say’s he feels just the same. The trouble is we are both perfectionists, the difference being, he turns out some brilliant work,but as he says he has been painting for years. That doesn’t help my self esteem either because he works at the next table.

So I got rather unsatisfied, and dissilusioned about it all and failed to enrol for the last set of Watercolour classes.-And I didn’t even excuse myself,or give a reason why to my teacher.

I havn’t picked up a brush or pencil in three monthes.
But I have been learning a lot from a fellow blogger: http:/ creatisphere.wordpress.com and realise now that even Artists go through this unsatisfaction.

So I went along to the Vernissage of a Watercolour Artist from Zürich, thinking I might learn something.
And who was the first person that I saw there on the other side of the wine.
My Art Teacher.

He had realised I was going through a “stage” and he hoped I would come back.

I start again next Tuesday.

Would you believe it,

The missing Ferdinand Hodler painting”Bare Chesnut Trees in Ticino” which I wrote about yesterday has been found.

An employee of the Volkart Stiftung in Winterthur, a town near Zürich, after watching the news on television, remembered seeing the painting in their storage room.

The painting belongs to Andreas Reinhart, whose family are generous art patrons with their own museum in the town. The Oskar Reinhart Foundation Museum. Am Stadtgarten, Winterthur.

He is very glad to have it back because it was left him by his late brother George,whose entire estate was donated to the Volkart Foundation, and of which Andreas is president.

To the question, if the painting was ever really stolen? At the moment the police are still investigating every possibility they say.

The loss was only discovered after the real transport firm sent by the Bern Museum stood in front of Reinharts door and was told it had already been collected by the artful trickster.

To all of you who may have read my post on the Swiss Artist Ferdinand Hodler yesterday. It was a mistake of course.

You can’t buy one of his paintings for 6,000 US Dollar, or I might even have one myself.

I have since corrected it .

Sorry.

Ferdinand Hodler was another Artist to whom success didn’t come easily.

He was born in the city prison at Bern Switzerland,there his mother was the cook. It was 1853, and although married his parents couldn’t afford to live anywhere together they were so poor. The Hodlers had five children before Ferdinands father died. His mother remarried and her second husband brought five children of his own into the family before he left them all and went off to see the world.

At the age of twelve Ferdinand was head of the family.

Three years later his mother collapsed and died in the city, and the young boy loaded her body into a cart and took her home.Later with the help of his brothers ans sisters they took her coffin to the churchyard.

He said later in life “This picture remained long and clear before my eyes for ever”.

For many years he unsuccessfully tried to be accepted at one of the Art Schools. At last his talent was seen by the Artist Barthelemy Menn who ran a well known Art School in Geneva.

He was allowed to study without paying,but he didn’t have an easy life. His fellow pupils mocked him for being so poor,and because he spoke such appalling french. Most of the time he was hungry.

His paintings from that time were dark and dismal. What he depicted was the fear of the illness that killed both his parents and most of his brothers and sisters. Tuberculosis.

Then in 1887 he was invited to Paris and was awarded an honorary medal for one of his paintings.

At the same time he was working on “Night” and in it he showed what until then nobody had dared to show in this way. It took him two years to finish and it was a scandal for the Art World.

The name Hodler was known.

He was invited to Vienna, he was invited to Berlin.Only the prude city of Geneva didn’t want to show his paintings.

Hodler became more and more a painter of light. After Parallelism he found Symbolism,a movement that mostly he started.

He eliminated everything unnecessary in his paintings,a way that led to almost total Abstraction.

He painted huge canvasses and frescoes always on the search for expression. and he conquered his own world.

In 1914 Wilhelm 11 ,the last German Emperor said at an exhibition as he was presented to him.”Emperors and Kings come and go, but there is only one Hodler. It is my honour to meet you”.

Not much later Hodler signed a petition against the German bombing of Reims Cathedral,and attended a dinner with the emperor wearing not any German orders of merit but the rosette of the French Legion of Honour on his jacket After which public opinion wanted all his paintings in Germany destroyed. The Kaiser just had them boarded up.

Almost a hundred years later Hodlers’ paintings are worth almost 6.000,000  dollars each.

Not many people can afford one,but you can look at them at the present Hodler Exhibition at the Art Museum in Bern.showing a hundred and fifty of Hodlers works from museums and private owners.

One is missing.

It was collected from the owner before the exhibition by a woman with an identity card showing herself to be an employee of the Bern Museum and it hasn’t been seen since.

The Artist Chaim Soutine has apparently been rediscovered by the modern art market.

Reason for the Kunstmuseum in Basle,Switzerland to hold an exhibition of the Russian Jewish painters’ work showing around sixty paintings that will put Soutine in context with his famous contemporaries Chagall and Picasso.

Now as you know I love art and try to paint a little. I have the feeling that I have an eye for a good painting, but now I really am not sure.

Maybe I have been influenced too much by a graduate of the London Royal Academy of Art who swears over the art mafia, and considers Gainsborough his favourite artist. Very traditional to say the least.

Now I have seen Soutines pictures, and I am not sure of anything any more.

One in particular took my interest “Abgehäutetes Rind” (Skinned cow or ox)

t The animal has been slaughtered,skinned and hung as if it had been crucified. From death flows life and colour, from cruelty an inner light.

To paint this Soutine hung the slaughtered animal in his studio,and kept the colour alive by continually pouring fresh blood over the carcass. That was until the police alarmed by the the smell of rotting flesh carried it away.

That isn’t an anecdote.The painter could neither paint from memory nor photographs, and found vivid observation a special form of relief.

Without doubt his paintings are more than interesting, masterpieces maybe?

I think I will stick with Gainsborough unless someone can explain what I am finding difficult to understand.

I am still struggling with my watercolour painting. After almost a year of weekly classes I don’t see a lot of improvement in my work,and I still seem to make the same silly mistakes. With watercolour it is difficult to amend them once the paint is on the paper and I don’t want to cheat and use white goache. So I thought I would go on a painting holiday where I could paint without interruption ,and have tuition too, once the weather improved.

So I contacted a very helpful lady at creArtive,Rhodes explaining what I wanted and that when considering different groups I fitted into what I think is known as a senior citizen, but my eyesight still enables me to paint and my hand doesn’t shake. I felt almost ashamed to admit that I wasn’t young any more, even though my generation of war babies had done more than many to alter the course of the world. But then I thought of the Rolling Stones and said what the hell.

Somehow the names given to people having reached the age of 55 seem to me discriminating, and does nothing to make us feel better on having reached retirement age in the first place. OLDIES, PENSIONERS even WRINKLIES. !!

Why can’t we introduce a more acceptable name for the old hippies, 68ers and war veterans.

I would suggest,

SEENAGERS

“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end.

But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning”

Winston Churchill 1874-1965

We had snow where I live before Christmas,but then the seasons seemed to become disorientated and as we left for Canada the 18th of December was like a day in Spring.

The Holidays have come and gone but the snow still hasn’t arrived, at least not 600 meters above sea level in Switzerland.

Today I went to my Watercolour class again and it brought back happy memories of snow in the cottage country of Northern Ontario.

Funnily enough I don’t find painting snow so difficult,maybe because I love the colours that I need to use, soft and vivid blues,pale pinks, light greys and yellows.

Of course we were painting from photos ,and luckily nobody suggested going outside to paint a warm winter day (you all know that I havn’t really got enthusiastic about painting outside.I did try it again in Thailand but the paint dried up)

So painting today was the best of two worlds. Being warm and cosy in the middle of snow.

I am enjoying my hobby again,and I think at last I might even be improving.

Painting by David Gibbins U.K

As a beginner to this Art,I have already noticed what a gift masking fluid is.

Usually I forget where exactly I want the light to hit on my picture and paint over the small parts that I should have kept white. This is where the fluid comes in handy.
Masking fluid is a rubber based product that can be spread over paper like paint keeping that area free of colour,and removed easily by rubbing a finger over it. Unfortunately it’s not so easily removed from the brushes you use to put it on with.

On my last holiday I wanted to take my painting things with me but feared I would have to leave my wonder fluid behind as I had very little room and even the smallest bottle was quite large. Also the thought of it running out everywhere and the messy brushes was daunting.

Then as I am a woman who likes to paint her nails too I had the great idea of pouring some of the masking fluid into a clean and empty nail varnish bottle.

It worked perfectly, the bottle was small and it had it’s own built in brush which never dried out and was always at hand.

Of course the idea might have been around for a long time, but if it hasn’t and you want to try it be aware that the brushes in nail varnish bottles aren’t all the same.

Like all Artists brushes, the more expensive are the best.

Two Vermicelles and a big piece of Apple Strudel were staring at me as I opened the fridge door yesterday on my return from Art Classes.

The house was empty apart from Dominic von Tribo who was miaowing around my feet, and he doesn’t appreciate all the things that I do.

I hadn’t had time for a real lunch not that I was even making that an excuse, I just put the objects of desire on a plate and scoffed the lot.

You don’t have to be very perceptive to realise my painting hadn’t gone well at all.

It might be a sign of improvement because I am actually beginning to blame my teacher. He should have known by now that my great talents couldn’t be guided towards the abstract. Not at this stage anyway. (Am I beginning to sound like an artist?)

I am actually in his watercolour class because I admire the way he paints, wanting to be a sort of Raffaello to his Michaelangelo and what does he dare to do before I am quite that far.He changes his technique.

The Autumn leaves this week are no longer botanically recognisable, form is not important he wanted to see colour.

Cadmium red and yellow ochre, burnt sienna, crimson and sap green all mixed together with a splattering of prussian blue, and called art.
I asked if he found my painting just a tiny bit “restless”

“Not at all ” he said “from a distance.”