Sometimes you are in the middle of things and you have to leave.... this is a piece about packing up the studio mid-series. I always felt these rose paintings were composite elements of a larger work.. so here I find I was at least partially right. It may not be the end of the story. I may not know for some time. 
You can use a frame for a print of a self portrait but why not a cage? If you sometimes feel that you are in one it can be appropriate. But of course the door is open so it is all about choice. This is a detail from an installation I made as part of a show during January at the Goethe Insitute in Rotterdam. It was all about the effects of living from country to country on the work that I make. I will post the rest of the installation tomorrow. 
Three delightful models!... I made a soft ground etching - then used aquatint - which inadvertently put paid to some of the original drawing which hadn't completely etched. Grr. Then I went over with a soft ground again and added a few lines - especially to define the dog. Yes, its a dog. Then I totally forgot to cover the back of the plate so that meant the plate heated up in the acid and I etched a hilarious,unintentional, aleatoric abstract compostion on it for good measure - might print it off one day just to annoy myself.. meanwhile .. well. This process definitely isn't spontaneous but I am slowly catching on - only experience and our mistakes can teach us of course and I am a great one for wanting to run before I can walk..
Not my usual style but I do this every Christmas. I sit down before an array of coloured wools and "paint" with them until a Christmas stocking has made itself for this year's recipient. I make it up as I go along. We were so happy to have my Mother, Betty, with us on Christmas Day this year but I took this to the wire with the stocking finished at 2.30 in the morning and just hanging in time for Santa's boots to be almost visible descending the chimney. Most enjoyable.
My small daughter, sketched while she was asleep in 1997, aged about three months. She was not a beautiful baby and had a blotchy face but was none the less an absorbing subject whether I was drawing her or not.
Here's a drawing I made last time I went to SKVA in Rotterdam - very free and I got the ink to keep its flow by occasionally dipping my pen in the water (n.b. I love ink;I hate pens!) and started it off by shaking a few blots onto the page, one of which became his right nipple, albeit a a millimetre or so too low. 
The last and smudgiest of these monoprints. I think this was a very fast one. It is always interesting afterwards to find what I chose and notated from the scene in front of me. In this one the model becomes integrated with the foliage and objects behind her, and, as she leans towards me I just have time to note the back of her hand and the corrugated knuckles before the line falls away with the curve of her lower leg... and time's up.
Nearly the last of this series .........(monoprints, 30 x 30, 2008) tomorrow one last smudgy little one and then, since I am preparing an exhibition next month in the Goethe Institute in Rottterdam, who knows what strange miscellany all my sifting through and choosing will produce..
Two more from the monoprint series I am serialising. I love the accidental smudgy effects that are a by-product of this medium. Remember the actual drawing is on the back - a clean, 5b pencil drawing in a reverse image... I always prefer the print. Last examples tomorrow...
Just a couple of purely linear accounts of one-minute model poses... made a few weeks ago. Don't I make it look easy? Just try it... and these are far from perfect.
Sometimes, with models I know well, I really capture a likeness. It's not a portrait and getting a likeness is not the objective but it is quite satisfying when it happens. With this model on this occasion I was feeling her in a linear way. I was having some fun with the foliage in the background - I often feel the need for a context - even a narrative - though not always - as you will see tomorrow.
"Mignonne, allons voir si la rose,
Qui ce matin avait desclose
Sa robe de pourpre au soleil,
N'a point perdu cette vesprée
Les plis de sa robe pourprée
Et son teint au vôtre pareil.
Las! voyez comme en peu d'espace,
Mignonne, elle a, dessus la place,
Las! Las! ses beautés laissé cheoir!
Ô vraiment marâtre nature,
Puisqu'une telle fleur ne dure,
Que du matin jusques au soir!
Or donc, écoutez-moi, Mignonne,
Tandis que votre âge fleuronne
En sa plus verte nouveauté,
Cueillez, cueillez votre jeunesse:
Comme à cette fleur la vieillesse
Fera ternir votre beauté."
a bientot
Jane
Another recent fast sketch.. when you have only a few minutes it is all about choosing.. note this.. omit that.. mostly omit, of course.. 
Even when there's only five or ten minutes to play with I rarely just notate the figure although sometimes if the muscles are good I get lost in the anatomy. Composing with the figure in the space is where the interest lies for me and especially where there are other people working in the room to give it a slight narrative edge. Monoprint again... approx A4.
A one-minute monoprint. Not enough time of course but I was after the sulky, flippant mood of her pose.. I think she had just been told off for bad time keeping.. Half of the buddah behind her is visible - not taking sides.
Three lightening-short poses from Friday's model session which was a well-attended first gathering of the year around a model with dramatic presence. Mindful that I will be back in the graphics studio next week I decided to break out into print medium and work in monoprint. I get a childish pleasure from turning up the result in reverse on the back. I was also enjoying the element of visual rhyme between the model in her cleopatra-like make up and the little buddah figure in the background. They seemed to reflect on each other. More of these tomorrow.
When my friend Ruth left The Hague I threw a small party to say good bye and these roses were given to me by the guests. When people give me roses i usually paint them and then, since they were a gift, I give the painting away. (Birthday roses 50 x 40 cms oil on canvas 2008) I never try to get an exact observational drawing. I just choose the things that I want to paint from the flowers in front of me. I think there is a lot of personality in the leaves.. like a small nest of baby cobras.. the flowers have that lovely heavy floppiness that garden roses have when they open .. anyhow as an artist of the human figure I always run to this subject like a guilty lover to his mistress.. very enjoyable.
I am off to France for the Summer to my second home in the Auvergne - a place where the internet connection is so slow that it is not worth the frustration. So the blog resumes in September with the Autumn fruits of the Summer's productivity. A welcome return to routine. I leave you with a little sketch (nude, reflection, artist, oil on paper A3 2007) and good wishes for the Summer.
A painting I am making in the studio at Rijswijk. To be continued... I am going off to my house in France for a week - a wonderful prospect. 
Pambos reclining. (pencil on paper, A3, 2005) A quick study while waiting for Koula to turn up and pose with him. If models as good as this one grew on trees I would start a plantation today.
The superimposition of this 2007 nude study on a partially effaced earlier drawing, (or drawings), gives the impression of a slight, winged creature at rest in front of a domed classical-looking building with another ghostly figure emerging in between. Memory doesn't serve.... but on finding it again I am rather drawn to the vulnerable, hunched, sleeping figure and its flame-coloured background elements.
Yesterday I took a big canvas and painted this one-hour pose of Titi in a mad rush and not very serious mood (Two ladies painting Titi; 120 x 100 cms Oil on canvas.) I thought afterwards that if I had really pushed it I could have actually made it rather funny and why not - there is room for humour in art as it certainly exists in life. There I am on the left in my stripy butchers apron. I guess I must have seemed quite comical myself, like one of those undercranked silent movie characters, frantically trying to paint the scene in the limited time I had..
This was a quick preparatory study for a colour drawing I posted last October. I wanted to go further with it but in the end the pose turned out to be too difficult to hold for the model and he complained bitterly. But sketches like this are also works in themselves. (Nude study, A3, charcoal pencil, 2007) I liked the way the screen and the lantern in the background translated into a sort of landscape..
On a hot Summer morning in France I drew my small daughter before she woke up. I can rather tell from the way I have drawn this that it must have been the Summer I spent reading about Egon Schiele and looking in particular at his drawings and watercolours.. i can also tell from the size of the child .. so probably 2004. I am off to England for a few days.
Titi, so called because of his man-boobs, (unfairly in my view), is here seen at work, (Titi, chalk on paper, A2, 2007). I am also seen at work, a hasty 2 minutes grabbing the nugget of the situation, and his reflection in the mirror is also indicated. A typical Rijswijk moment.
I used to call this technique of white ambiguous layers the "Turkish White Veil of Death" .. I was sort of joking but not any more. Hoping for the permission of its owners I rename this painting Under the Turkish White Veil of Love..... A tiny, tiny, tiny embrace - (watercolour, white oil paint, paper 10 x 15 cm 2005) to put back the clock.
It goes without saying that people who have lived well into middle age have long life and experience behind them with many stories to tell. They may have lost the bloom of youth but the patina of age has its own attraction. To the artist - to this one anyway - older subjects are rich indeed. Their bodies and faces tell stories. I would give half a dozen satin-skinned twenty-something models for this one .. I don't know him, or even his name, but he had a depth that made drawing him absorbing. He would have been extremely handsome at 25 but less good to draw. One can read the story of his life on the lines of his face, and body and all of them suggest subtle things to the pencil. (Man, standing, charcoal pencil A3. 16 04 08 with apologies for the photo) In fact, in other studies where he was facing me, there was a danger of giving too much attention to the high level of interest in his face - craggy but fine - and still handsome actually.
