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By Heather, on June 9th, 2010
I feel like I’ve hardly been here in the past month or so. Inspiration has been thin on the ground, and I’ve been very busy. I’m not long back from visiting home. It was wonderful. I really didn’t want to come back, and it just made me dreadfully homesick while I was there. Funny, I thought you get homesick when you leave a place, not when you go back!
I have lots of gorgeous pictures from home and I will be adding them tomorrow hopefully. I managed to get to Kelvingrove Art Gallery, where the Glasgow Boys exhibit is being held. I only saw some of the exhibition because we’d been up since the crack of dawn and were on our way back to Aberdeen (a 4-hour journey), so our time was limited. I tried to go the day before when I had lots of time, but it was a bank holiday and the museum staff around the country were on strike, so it was a no go for us. The Glasgow Boys exhibit is running until September and we intend going back home in a few weeks so there’s plenty of time to see it.
There was so much to see, and of course, I just had to take hubby upstairs to see Salvador Dali’s Christ of St John of the Cross. This is one of the most famous images of Christ ever painted, and the most reproduced. I have often regaled my hubby with the tale of when I first saw this painting – when I was a teenager – hanging upstairs in the gallery, high up on the wall way above me, and no matter how high up the painting was it always appeared as if you were looking down on it. Strangely enough, it is this view of Christ being looked down upon that caused the painting to be attacked. Presumably it was deemed that no-one should look down on Christ, but rather all eyes should be raised upwards. However, what is not said here is that this is God’s view of his son on the cross. Christ is the connection between God and earth.
The painting has two perspectives here: the image of Christ is taken from above (a heavenly perspective) and the landscape is at the viewer’s eye-level, signifying that we are mere mortals, anchored to the earth - the fishing boats further confirming our earthly status. God looks down on all of us, and Christ is the inbetweener, the bridge; he is at the heart of everything.
Dali wrote about this piece: “In the first place, in 1950, I had a ‘cosmic dream’ in which I saw this image in color and which in my dream represented the ‘nucleus of the atom’. This nucleus later took on a metaphysical sense; I considered it ‘the very unity of the universe’, the Christ ! In the second place, when thanks to the instructions of Father Bruno, a Carmelite, I saw the Christ drawn by Saint John of the Cross, I worked out geometrically a triangle and a circle, which ‘aesthetically’ summarized all my previous experiments, and I inscribed my Christ in this triangle.”
What I truly love about the story of this painting is that it was on sale in 1951 (just after the piece had been painted) for a price of £12,000, and the city council managed to get it for the measly sum of £8,200 – a lot of money then but a pittance compared to its worth today. The council also, very astutely, managed to secure the copyright for the image from Dali himself – notoriously difficult to gain from any artist past and present. There was an uproar in Glasgow from the local people, the art establishment and the art students who all thought the money (the only money left in the kitty) was completely wasted and could have been better spent. How wrong they were!
The public flocked to see the painting from far and wide, and they have never stopped coming. It has paid for itself many times over, and indeed the Spanish government offered Glasgow £80 million for it. It was refused. The painting goes on loan to Atlanta for 5 months in August. I for one am against this. To quote Julian Spalding, the former director of Glasgow galleries and museums, “The Louvre lent to Atlanta, but they lent stuff that was basically from their stores. They didn’t lend the Mona Lisa.” I understand the reason for sending it abroad, but I think it cheapens the artwork. You don’t go to your local gallery to see the Mona Lisa, you go to Paris. However, I would urge anyone who may get the chance, to go see and it. It’s a stunning painting, and it is the one piece that developed my love of art, and my love of Dali. Seeing it on a computer does it no justice at all, and really should be seen in person.
By Heather, on May 29th, 2010
I’m going home to visit my family, so I’m going to be off the grid for a few days. I’ll be setting off in about an hour or so, and it’s a 4 hour drive, but the weather is good so that’s a bonus. I’ll try to take lots of piccies to show you when I get back. Hope everyone has a great weekend!
By Heather, on May 25th, 2010
Woohoo! Finally got my internet back! How is everyone? I’ve missed my blog so much! Actually, the thing I missed most was access to my online banking! I kept phoning my dad to get him to check my bank account on an almost daily basis. How on earth did I manage before?
Can’t say I’ve been really busy over the past month. I haven’t done a lot of painting, or much of anything. I took it as an opportunity to have a well rested holiday. Of course, I am going away for a few days this week, so I’ll be offline again.
Anyway, while I was offline I created a painting for my mum’s birthday. I had been intending to paint an image from home, and had gathered lots of images as you may well have seen in a previous post. However, I stumbled across an old photograph of my granda and his mother, taken when he was just a toddler, so I thought it would make a perfect present.
The photo was black and white – naturally – and the light was blown out, so detail was hard to define. I had to make some of it up as I went along. Now, I’ve never actually painted a portrait. I don’t think I’ve ever created a full-on realistic painting either. I’m an abstract painter as you know, but I am looking to improve my painting, as well as my looking, skills. So I took a deep breath and dived in.
Thankfully, the wonderful Don Hatfield came to my rescue! Don very kindly sent me his teaching video, Fantasy Portraits in the Garden, which I found to be a godsend! It is two hours long and there’s a lot of information in there. When I started watching I thought I was going to struggle with it, in the sense that it was a bit over my head, but I settled into it and I really took a lot from it. I will write a detailed post on it later.
Don paints in an Impressionist style, so this was also going to be another first for me. It was going to be a real push! However, following Don’s instruction I ploughed on. I have included the painting in stages.
At first, I started to lay down the parameters within which to work. I tried to work to Don’s idea of bringing colour from one part of the image into another, in order to unite the painting, so I dragged some of the blue background into the white shirt.
The next stage was about trying to bring in large blocks of colour. At this stage I really liked how the hair on my granda looked, and the skirt on my great-granny.
Below: I worked more colour into the painting, still trying to keep it in blocks but again bringing in colour from other areas. I tried to make sure I had blues and yellows in the shirt due to the light bouncing up from the skirt and coming in from the wall in the background. The faces were also starting to take shape as well.
I worked on, and had most of the colour down that I was looking for, so I started focussing on the detail on the faces, and this is where I started to struggle. The eyes were too high up, and the nose on my great-granny was too short, and my granda’s face was just totally out of whack. So I moved to working on the clothes a bit more. I have to say, I actually love how the clothing has turned out. I love the green jumper with the white handkerchief and cuffs and I felt that these needed no further work on them.
I worked on the faces again and again, and no matter what I did; no matter how long I left them and how many times I came back to them, I just couldn’t get them down. I think the face of my great-granny looks pretty good as a portrait of some lady, but doesn’t look a great deal like the photograph. My granda’s face I just couldn’t get right at all. I was happy with the mouth and his left eye, but the right side of the face is all out, and I was terrified of destroying it, as this was the day of my mum’s birthday, so I had to surrender to it.
I took it over to my mum and she recognised it instantly as being her dad and granny, so that was a positive at least. She loved it, which is more than I can say for myself. I felt so disheartened that I couldn’t get it, but it was my first ever portrait, my first realistic painting and the first time I’ve tried Impressionism, so I think I’ve done not too badly considering!
By Heather, on May 9th, 2010
I just wanted to let you know that I’m without internet access at the moment, and I’m not sure when it will be up and running. I’ll be back on soon hopefully.
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About Heather 
I'm a student artist, and have just started my second year at college. I work in many areas of art, specialising in abstract fine art, and I'm also studying traditional realism at an Atelier School in Aberdeen. Follow me on my journey, and share my experiences, as I progress through my studies.
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