|
To Paint is a risk: to paint the figure a leap into the unknown: to paint the nude even riskier: to paint confessionally is heroic.
Marilena has some magnificent pieces on display at Elizabeth's Cyan Studio art space. They explore what looks to me like the Nordic vision of the human figure and are filled for me with the music of Sibelius, that desparate longing you feel in the North for a delayed spring.
Best in show is a woman entering what looks like a green and wet world on one of those days that drives you crazy, in spring, in the North, one of those days you don't want to miss, one of those days for skinny dipping before winter returns for another go.
The risk is that everybody "knows" what the human figure look like. Marilena knows how to draw, and draw well.
But the only way to avoid lay critique is to paint in the absolute Salon style that was perfected, strangely coincident with the advent of photography, in Louis Napoleon's France. This is only because the absolute "accuracy" of a Bouguereau constructed our idea of what "good" painting looks like: a glossy and Hollywood unreality.
Marilena is more Expressionist. She doesn't wall herself off from the feelings of birth, of yearning for one more Spring in a world that is so terribly old in so many ways, or the basic feeling of being exposed, in art where the artist totally empathises with the model.
Of course, even if you paint "realistically", you then get into hot water with people who would cover the human body. My grandmother, with my Mom's encouragement, my Mom having artistic yearnings never once met in Hell's Kitchen and the Depression, went to the Metropolitan Museum (it was free), but returned saying it was an immoral place, with all those naked statues.
There's an epidemic, according to a recent report in the BBC, of penis whacking off, of various Neoclassical statues scattered about London in public places. Fortunately, the giant, nude statue of Napoleon that the Duke of Wellington nicked, probably in Spain, is safe in his house: but the last time there was an epidemic of this sort of sensitivity was the Dark Ages.
Wasn't it.
Some feminists have claimed that the nude in Western art is basically some guy exploiting women, some layabout in an attic who should get a real job. Of course, when a woman paints a nude, this drains the feminist explanation of any sense whatsoever, and, even when a male paints a nude, he is often identifying with the exposure felt by the model, because in art he exposes himself to others, who, in most times and places, are mostly ready to lynch the guy for making art in the first place, for example by tossing bricks through his window. It's "not good" at best, and at worst fatwa time.
[They also tossed bricks through Wellie's window, whereupon he installed iron bars, and it was these bars that have Wellington the nick-name "The Iron Duke". But no artist he, of course, it was more in response to his views, which were quite Conservative, indeed they were damn-your-eyes Tory...but not Conservative enough for him to throw his support to Reform, and letting Catholics into the better clubs, in 1830, which simply caused more brick-throwing, this time, from the Tory die-hards.]
[Which just goes to show, but I digress.]
The nude, Marilena's and Goya's Naked Maja, pose an existential question which we normally avoid in acquiring things, and shopping for clothes. What is this life? Will Spring (Fruhlings-Zeit, right, LG?) never come? Why is there something rather than nothing, and what is the destiny of that something that feels such pain, feels such joy, and gives such birth?
About my only cavil, really just art nerd advice to Marilena: be careful with wooden panels in this climate. Daniel Thompson, in The Art of Tempera Painting, warns us that glue will always fail you, especially in dampish climates (even Krazy Glue, in my experience).
Perhaps the philosophical reason is that glue needs glue to stick it to the thing it sticks to, and this meta-glue needs a further glue...you get the picture but again I digress.
Thompson gives a complicated procedure for joining panels just so, with the grains opposing, to avoid trouble.
However, don't let this prevent you from buying Marilena's work! The panels will survive if you have a dehumidifier, which many people do here. Daniel Thompson (an art school professor) is of the old school in which art students were encouraged to produce pieces that could last hundreds of years, but in my own work, I have to reject this as an important technical criterion: the important thing is to make art, and, computer imaging can make digital backups.
_________________
Publish and be damn'd
|
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
