Nikki Tate's Blog, page 8
April 20, 2018
R is for Red (AtoZChallenge2018)
Kiki de Montparnasse in a Red Jumper and a Blue Scarf, by Moise Kisling, 1925
It’s one of the first colours we learn to identify as children. Our eye is drawn to the red smear in a visual composition. It’s the symbol of blood and of love, anger and the universal color of stop signs around the world. Associated with the Red Cross, the red sun on the Japanese flag (it’s actually the most popular colour used in flags with 77% of all flags including it somewhere…), red is also the least common hair colour in the human population (only 1-2% of the world’s population can lay claim to red hair).
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Moise Kisling obviously liked both Kiki and the colour red… (this portrait is called Kiki de Montparnasse in a Red Dress)
Red is one of the primary colours – the others being yellow and blue. In theory, if one mixes two primary colours you get secondary colours (green, orange and purple) and then, if you mix primary and secondary colours you wind up with tertiary colours. If you know what you are doing and have a bit of black and white you should be able to mix any colour you can imagine.
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As a kid, I was totally intrigued by the magical paint-mixing that went on while Dad was working. Even now when I visit his studio this process seems like a strange kind of alchemy, capturing light and form, shape and shadow by smearing colour on a flat surface…
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By contrast, Piet Mondrian seems to have gone to great lengths to keep his colours clean and separate. This is Composition C (No. III) With Red Yellow and Blue, 1935
Also keeping it simple (colour-wise) is Roy Lichtenstein and this pop art portrait.
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Head – red and yellow (1962)
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This pensive child caught the eye of Mary Cassatt. Little Girl in a Red Beret dates from 1898.
Would you call the child’s smock pink? Salmon? When you think about it, there are many, many words describing ‘red.’ Ruby. Carmine. Fire engine. Crimson. Rusty. And, plenty more… What’s your favourite shade of red? In case you are wondering, today’s artwork effort on my part was completely the wrong palette (greens and blues) so I won’t post here and spoil the word of the day…
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I went for a long walk this evening and took a ton of photographs. Scrolling through them there was a shocking dearth of red anywhere to be found. Except, in this photo which I snapped of a hula hoop hanging from a tree at the side of the trail. Who knows why a hoop should dangle just there… is it possible to drop your hula hoop and not notice? I thought the diminutive splashes of red were a lovely contrast to the more muted palette of the mountains before spring has fully sprung…
See you tomorrow…
April 19, 2018
Q is for Quarry Lake (AtoZChallenge2018)
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Quarry Lake Park near Canmore
Well, sometimes the stars align, hey? I was wondering what on earth I’d dredge up to talk about when Q rolled around. After I picked A. up from a dentist appointment, we headed up to Quarry Lake for a stroll and a pizza-themed picnic. Because it’s so close (about a five-minute drive from downtown), it’s a pretty popular spot and even though the trails are soggy at the moment there were lots of people out and about enjoying the spring sunshine (and, yes, it is very strange for me, a Vancouver Islander for so many years, to consider a snow-covered landscape to be in any way related to the word spring).
The views here are terrific – Ha Ling is one of my favourite mountains (we can see it from our condo, just across the valley), but up close and personal, it’s an impressive peak. Quarry Lake Park is also a designated off-leash dog park, which makes it a great place for pup-watching.
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Quarry Lake Tree (bark detail)… Keep an eye on the blog for a pastel interpretation of these great colours and patterns!
The lake was still sort of frozen (everything is quite slushy this time of year) and overed with snow, but in the summer should one try to swim out a bit and dive down (good luck – it’s cold no matter what time of year you visit…), you’d have to hold your breath a loooong time before you reached the bottom as it’s over 100 meters deep in its deepest, darkest corners (if a lake can have corners…)
Once a quarry (surprise, surprise), the park is slowly reclaiming land once used for mining. And, yes, I do mean the park is doing the reclaiming. Picnic tables and toilets aside, large areas are just being left alone to slowly return to their natural state.
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Ha Ling from Quarry Lake Park, Mixed Media Experiment (yep, I touched Deb’s pastels… living dangerously! Don’t know what I’m talking about? Visit P is for Pastels)
See you tomorrow! I wonder if I’m actually going to make it through the R-S-T-U -V-When-will-the-alphabet-ever-end doldrums this year?? So far, so good… it’s looking promising!
April 18, 2018
P is for Pastels… (AtoZChallenge2018)
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Two Dancers (pastel on paper) by Edgar Degas, 1898-1899
A long time ago (when I was moving from Victoria to Canmore) I discovered a box of art supplies in our storage room. In that box were some ancient pastels that perhaps once belonged to my son-in-law, perhaps a gift from his mom who loves to scavenge for treasures in garage sales and thrift shops. T. claims to have no idea where they came from and had no interest in keeping them, so they wound up moving here to the mountains with me.
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The mysterious thrift store set of pastels…
Pastels are terrifying. They are messy and intense and stick to your fingers like a bad relationship. Or something. Anyway, they’ve stayed in a box with an ancient pad of pastel paper and a few other bits and bobs waiting for me to get brave enough to touch them.
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The Players (pastel on paper) by Raphael Kirchner
Then, my friend Deb moved to Canmore and decided to clean out some excess art supplies and I found myself with a few more, newer pastels – also too scary to touch. Part of my anxiety around visual art comes from having grown up with an actual, accomplished artist. Talk about feeling intimidated! I was chatting with Dad about this at some point and he shook his head and said, “…when you were a kid you didn’t worry about it. You just tried stuff. You were quite good.”
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Pastel by Robert Brackman
He’s my dad and I was a cute kid, so he’s obliged to say stuff like that. But, it did get me thinking that kids don’t worry about whether or not their efforts are good enough. At least, not at first. Eventually, many learn that yes, everything we do is judged – either by others or by our own inner critics… But at first, we just play. We grab whatever supplies are in front of us and we scribble and swirl, mix and match, experiment and goof around.
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Georg Anton Urlaub, Self-portrait (1735) I didn’t realize that pastels have been around since the Renaissance… I bet this guy wasn’t nearly so neurotic when it came time to pick up his pigment sticks…
What, I wondered, would I have done with this abundance of pastels when I was 6 or 7? Who knows? What I do know, though, is I would have done something. I wouldn’t have kept the stuff in a box for two years wishing I had the nerve to play.
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Bruised Planet Adrift (Nikki plays with her box of pastels… There. The curse has been broken. Now I’ll practice a bit, learn how to use the darned things, and see what I might be able to come up with. Note: I’m still a bit leery about touching Deb’s lovely, very new pastels.)
And, finally, one of the names of artists I heard mentioned often when I was growing up was Victor Pasmore, a British painter who influenced Dad when he was an art student. I don’t think this painting of his was done in pastels, but it does have a spiral-esque thing going on… just like me (heh heh). And, his name starts with P, so it’s totally legit to include him here today…
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Spiral Motif in White, Black and Indigo, Victor Pasmore (1951)
See you tomorrow!
April 17, 2018
O is for Opportunity, Outlines, Opening and Getting Organized
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Typewriter Eraser, Scale X (collaboration with van Bruggen) by Claes Oldenburg (1999)
This is one of my favourite sculptures in Seattle. A huge typewriter eraser, it brings back memories of the bad old days when I had to retype whole pages when faced with more than two mistakes. Those erasers chewed holes in the page if you weren’t careful!
OK. Whether or not I get this post done will be in the hands of the blog gods… because, yeah – I’m not as organized as I probably should have been today. Both of my writing groups meet today – one in the afternoon and one in the evening and, of course, I’m scrambling to polish the opening of the assisted dying book to whip it into reasonable shape so I can get some feedback. That’s how it goes, sometimes. Often, if I’m honest. The deadline looms and suddenly I am a writing machine.
Which is not to say I haven’t been working on the book for the last… oh, I don’t know – 18 months or so. I have been steadily busy – reading, researching, making notes – organizing my thoughts, writing outlines, writing sections and then – making more notes, re-organizing everything, adding more stuff, finding better ways to express complicated ideas.
But there’s something about knowing the editor needs the manuscript on her desk on May 1 that sends terror into my heart, lights a fire under my backside, and sends words flying across the keyboard (or, fingers flying across the keyboard and words scrolling across the screen).
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Sometimes it’s a real challenge to follow my thoughts as they zig-zag all over the place during the revision process…
It’s coming along. I will get the draft done on time. But wow – this has been a tough project to wrangle into shape. That said, when I had the opportunity to explore a topic as interesting and relevant as this one, there was no way I was going to let it slip away. In that way, I am a ‘yes’ person through and through. I’ve never been one to walk away from a challenge. That’s not to say I’ve always been successful with every project I’ve attempted: failures have taught me as much (more?) than my triumphs. But neither (successes or flops) would have been possible without trying.
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Edouard Manet: Young Woman With a Book (1875) It’s sooooo much more fun to relax and read a good book than it is to pull out your hair trying to write one…
And that, my friends, is all I’ve got today. Here’s hoping things will be a bit better balanced tomorrow and I won’t be writing this with one eye on the clock and my heart beating just a bit too fast than is probably good for me.
April 16, 2018
N is for Ned (Kelly), (Sidney) Nolan, and Notoriety
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Ned Kelly in 1880
Nobody needs to keep moving quite like an outlaw, a fugitive on the run, a criminal on the lam… Where am I going with this? Keep in mind that this month my theme is On the Move: Travel, Transitions, and Transformation, so all my posts should, theoretically, somehow relate. And, if you’ve been following along, many of the posts have wound up having some connection to art as well, art being the ultimate means of transforming real life into something… else. Oh boy, that thought is heading fast in the direction of musing about the question, What is art? [If you feel like you might have an answer, please feel free to post your thoughts down in the comments below…]
Meanwhile, however, Ned Kelly comes to mind. Ned was one of a handful of iconic figures I was aware of as a child growing up in Australia. The swagman (of once a jolly fame) and Skippy the Bush Kangaroo were a couple of others… Ned, though, he was a guy who got my mother’s goat. Why? she ranted, would people admire a common criminal? “He was nothing but a hoodlum!” That may have been true, but good old Ned, who came by his dastardly ways honestly (his father was a convict) ignited something in Australia’s collective imagination. His early misdeeds mostly involved stealing horses and a bit of cattle rustling, but he and his gang later upped the ante by robbing banks and killing police officers. It all ended badly, of course – Kelly survived a wild shootout (many others didn’t), but was then tried, convicted and hanged.
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Sidney Nolan’s The Trial (1947) is one of many paintings depicting scenes inspired by Ned Kelly’s life.
His story, though, lives on in art, film, music and literature.
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Ned Kelly survived multiple gunshots because he was wearing this armour under his long Aussie coat. Love him or hate him, you have to admit he was ingenious…
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Armoured Helmet by Sidney Nolan, 1956 – In this intriguing painting, it seems like Nolan is trying to capture the view from the inside of the helmet. some aspect of the wearer’s face (Ned? is that you?) and the helmet as seen from afar…
I’ll leave you with this final factoid… Did you know Mick Jagger played Ned in the film Ned Kelly (1970)? I had no idea, but I’m thinking I need to track down a copy…
See you tomorrow…
April 15, 2018
World Art Day – and Week Two Recap (#AtoZChallenge2018)
According to my source (thanks, Dad!) today is World Art Day! Given that Dad was the first artist I met (and certainly the one I’ve known for the longest), here’s a black and white photo of an early painting from Australia.
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The Rocks by E. Colin Williams – not sure of the date – 1967ish?
This is an old area of Sydney – here’s a link to the Wikipedia page about The Rocks, now a touristy destination while still preserving some of the flavour of this historic district.
All these many years later, Dad is still going strong, still painting, still exploring new subjects, materials and techniques. Yes, he’s my father so I’m a bit biased, but I find him inspiring and love getting texts each day with updates from the studio. I never know what to expect and it’s so cool to be able to see paintings as they progress from the roughest of sketches to finished works.
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Self Portrait, 2015 E. Colin Williams Unfortunately, this photo isn’t really sharp, but it’s kind of fun to see the artist posing with the artist…
Hmm… I’ve been enjoying the daily blogging challenge this month – maybe I’ll continue for another month and just blog daily about Dad’s projects. He’s got lots on the go at the moment – then you could all see the cool stuff I get to see arriving on my phone each day…
I will chew on that between now and the end of April … Let me know in the comments if you’d be interested in an ECW Art-themed month of blog posts starting in May.
Meanwhile, here are links to this past week’s blog posts:
Day 9 – H is for Home
Day 10 – I is for Ice
Day 11- J is for Jumping Jehosephat (and a BUNCH of other fun J words)
Day 12 – K is for Kisses, Klimt and Kerouac
Day 13 – L is for Landscape, Leonardo, Liu, Lowery, Lichtenstein and Lots more…
Day 14 – M is for Mary, Mountain (but not Montmartre)
See you tomorrow when we return to our regularly scheduled alphabet… Thanks for reading!
April 14, 2018
M is for Mountains and Mary (but not Montmartre)
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Mary Vaux – mountain-lover and subject of a one-woman show performed by Shirley Truscott
Last night we headed out to see A Portait of Mary Vaux at ArtsPlace. A mountaineer before women were allowed to be mountaineers (and, really, being forced to tackle glacier travel in long, heavy wool skirts hardly made scrambling around in the Rockies any easier), Mary left quite a legacy of mountain writing, botanical drawings, photographs and precise scientific records of glaciers on the move.
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In 1887 Mary Morris Vaux Wolcott got serious about climbing. She was the first woman to reach the summit of Mount Stephen (10,495 ft)
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Balsamorhiza sagittata(arrowleaf balsamroot) This painting of Balsamorhiza sagittata (arrowleaf balsamroot) was done by Mary Vaux.
Listening to Mary’s words written long ago reminded me just how lucky I am to live here. Poor Mary had to travel from Philadelphia whenever she needed a mountain fix!
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The mountains were in a strange mood today – uncertain whether to welcome spring or hang onto winter for a little longer. I meandered into town, my headphones in, listening to music. Last night’s performance was accompanied by the cellist, Elizabeth Sorochan and this reminded me just how much I love the cello. As a matter of fact, I’m listening to 2Cellos right now… The music certainly suits the mood of the day…
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The mountains might have been misty, but the ice has mostly melted in the valley bottom.
Occasional snowflakes flitted around as I wandered, lost in a mix of musing and meditation. Mellow. Mmmmm….
I had plans to write about Montmartre and some Malers (Maler being the German word for painter…). There are plenty of German artists to pick from, but I think most will have to wait for another day…
In keeping with the theme of women artists, botany, and the letter M, I’ll finish up with this one by Maria Sibylla Merian.
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See you tomorrow!
April 13, 2018
L is for Landscape, Leonardo, Liu, Lowry, Lichtenstein and Lots more…
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Mountain and River by E. Colin Williams. Yes, I’m lucky enough to live inside a landscape that looks a lot like this painting done by my father.
Growing up I looked at a lot of landscapes – not just the ones we lived in and drove through but also the ones my father painted and my mother photographed. In a way, I got to see everything at least twice – once as a fleeting impression as I moved through the landscape and again, later after it had been filtered and transformed on its way to becoming a painting or a photograph.
Maybe because of that I love seeing how artists interpret the world we live in, how they try to capture the essence of a place on a two-dimensional surface.
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Leonardo (da Vinci) is not the first artist that jumps to my mind when I think of landscape painters. This painting is called Bird’s Eye View of Sea Coast and was painted in 1515. I find it fascinating because it feels quite abstract and clean in its execution, features the strangest composition, and shows the world from a perspective Leonardo could not have experienced firsthand. It’s a strange blend of cartography, art, and imagination.
Lautrec painted lots of outdoorsy scenes, but generally they include people, horses, or both… This is very different to my father’s paintings which rarely included humans, birds or animals. Until recently, that is, when Dad has been exploring subjects he spent little time with earlier in his career (a topic I’ll explore in more depth in a later post).
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Fishing Boat by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1880
In the literary arts department, Jack London had a gift for capturing the landscape on the page. The Call of the Wild certainly evokes the brutality of the Yukon and the impact the landscape has on its inhabitants.
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Jack London was not the only one inspired by images of the frozen north. The Russian painter Nicholas Roerich often turned to the mountains in winter for inspiration. This is Snowy Lift (1924), by Nicholas Roerich
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Here’s Roy Lichtenstein’s take on the northern landscape. Arctic Landscape, 1964
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L. S. Lowry’s dull as mud colours were typical of his early landscapes, this one from 1910. Though it’s titled Clifton Junction, Morning this hardly screams ‘morning light’ to me.
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Compare Lowry’s somber morning with this exuberant sunburst by van Gogh. Enclosed Field with Rising Sun, 1889.
And, finally, here’s a landscape by Georgia O’Keeffe… It may be abstract, but I can still see the landscape in the colours and natural forms.
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From the Lake, 1924 by Georgia O’Keeffe
Today I was priviledged to watch the amazing photographer Amy Liu at work. She was taking some photos of Ally Lacentra, super-talented young actor (and my step-daughter who, as luck would have it, has an abundance of Ls in her name).
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Amy and Ally at work – I felt bad for them as it was brisk outside today! Poor Ally had to try and look relaxed even when the chilly spring breeze blew down from the mountains!
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One of the many gorgeous shots Amy Liu captured during the shoot today. Lovely!
And on that note, off I go to get back to work on the current work in progress. Let me know in the comments below if you have a favourite landscape painter…
Catch you later!
April 12, 2018
K is for Kisses, Klimt and Kerouac
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Portrait of Helene Klimt by Gustav Klimt, 1898
Given that an unexpected sub-theme of art and creativity has emerged alongside my original planned theme of On the Move: Transitions, Travel, and Transformation, I thought I’d go with the flow and have a look at Gustav Klimt (and kissing).
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Gustav Klimt, 1914
Austrian by birth, Klimt often turned to the female form for inspiration.
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The Kiss (1907-1908) by Gustav Klimt – oil and gold leaf on canvas
Kissing, it turns out, is a common subject in art.
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The Kiss by Francesco Hayez, 1859
I was certainly taken by Rodin’s sculpture, The Kiss during my recent trip to Paris. It’s an impressive piece of sculpture and not just for its size. It has literary connections as well. Apparently, the couple depicted fell in love while reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere (beware of reading racy literature… you never know where it might lead!)
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Mary Cassatt revisited the image of mothers kissing babies several times including in this painting from 1891 entitled Mother’s Kiss
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Picasso’s Kiss (1925) is, not surprisingly, inscrutable…
Given that Romeo and Juliet must be one of the most famous couples of all time, it’s hardly surprising that their passionate affair has been captured in art.
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The Last Kiss of Romeo and Juliet by Francesco Hayez (1823)
Of course, one doesn’t only have to kiss babies and sweethearts. In this next painting, Joan of Arc gets intimate with a sword. And no, that’s not some kind of euphemism.
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Joan of Arc Kisses the Sword of Liberation by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1863
Considering I’m supposed to be a writer, I’ve been largely ignoring the literary arts in these posts, something I’ll endeavour to address from here on… Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road might not have been about kissing per se, but reading the novel when I was younger definitely instilled in me a love of the open road and – road trips! When I was looking through my photos for shots that might tie in with Kerouac, road trips, or kissing, I came across this one:
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Sorry, Dad – avert your eyes. I call this one Texas Kiss and Kick. It was part of a selfie series we took when we were on a climbing/camping road trip in the southern USA several years ago.
I do love road trips. Looking through those photos makes me want to load up the car with snacks and head off … Kansas, maybe. Or Kentucky?
Are you a road trip fan? What’s your favourite road trip destination?
April 11, 2018
J is for Jumping Jehosephat! (AtoZChallenge2018)
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This morning I was hanging out in my jammies listening to Dolly Parton (what’s not to love about Jolene, Jolene, Please Don’t Take My Man, right Sheryl McFarlane?), wondering what on earth I was going to write about for the letter J when I started Jonesin’ for a blog post topic. Yeah, I’ll admit it, I was feeling jittery when I considered jumping online and reaching out on social media to see if I might score a hit of inspiration. I typed up a Facebook post asking for help and hesitated before thinking, hell – Just do It! (Thanks, Jenny…)
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Sorting through my myriad options proved to be a juicy task… The word juice reminded me of our recent journey to Spain where sipping freshly squeezed orange juice was one of the (many) joyous experiences along the Camino.
Jesus! The response was overwhelming! Before I knew it I had a list a mile long and my dilemma had switched from being desperate for a single idea to a thousand possibilities jostling for position. How could I possibly do them all justice? At some point I said I would cut off the submissions and would use every word suggested in this blog post… a promise I soon realized was both foolish and optimistic. How to juxtapose juniper (something you’d likely catch a whiff of in June or July) with joggle? Joggle isn’t even a word, though it’s such a good suggestion (from writer Dayle Gaetz) that I couldn’t resist including it. As Dayle explained, it’s what happens when a jogger jiggles while underway…
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I like to include relevant images whenever possible, so though I was a bit short of photos of jellybeans, I did find this one of Fabio jumping from one boulder to another on a climbing journey a couple of years ago… I confess I experienced a surge of joy when he made it safely to the other side of the chasm.
No longer in a jam, I found myself with options in not one, but two official languages (thanks, Dad).
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The Juggler by Marc Chagall, 1943 (Original title Le Jongleur)
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The original title of this horse head on a yellow background by Fernand Leger is “Tête de cheval sur fond jaune” (1953). Joli, n’est pas?
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And while we are on the artwork section of the blog post, how about this jester? The painting dates from 1442 and is called Portrait of the Ferrara Court Jester Gonella and is by Jean Fouquet.
Feeling pretty joyeux at this point (I mean, look at all those Js!!!!), I took a break to julienne some root vegetables for dinner and then joined a couple of ice climbers for a quick chat at a local watering hole (I had to retrieve an ice screw that had inadvertently made its way into someone else’s gear bag). After a bit of verbal jousting about whose ice tools are superior, I decided to leave the guys to their dessert and head for home, but not before seeing a few photos from what looks to have been a great day of skiing not far from here. It’s hard not to be jealous when you see such glorious images of the kinds of places you can only get to with a Jeep, some time in hand, and a decent pair of skis.
This post could have been a Jeremiad (look that one up, I had to), in which I complained bitterly about the paucity of worthy words beginning with J. Instead, no joking, I was about as far out of this world with joy as Jupiter (sorry, had to reuse joy and tossing Jupiter in definitely feels a tad awkward…). Maybe after a cup of jasmine tea I’ll be able to come up with a better final paragraph. On the other hand, I may find myself distracted by the Jets (of Winnipeg fame) who are playing their hearts out on their way (we can only hope) to the Stanley Cup!! Maybe I shouldn’t write that here… it might jinx the team…
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Donkeys or Jackasses? You decide… (Franz Marc, 1911)
