Lana Sutton #7: I’ll tell you how the sun rose

Edward G. Nilges, “Final Grisaille State of a Portrait of Lana Sutton, Holy Terror and the Dancer of Dawn”, 19 Oct 2010, acrylic on canvas, 12×16 in

Edward G. Nilges, “State of a Portrait of Lana Sutton, Holy Terror and the Dancer of Dawn, as of 7:00 PM 19 Oct 2010″, acrylic on canvas, 12×16 in

Edward G. Nilges, “State of a Portrait of Lana Sutton, Holy Terror and the Dancer of Dawn, as of 19 Oct 2010″, acrylic on canvas, 12×16 in

Edward G. Nilges, “Three States of a Portrait of Lana Sutton, Holy Terror and the Dancer of Dawn, as of 19 Oct 2010″, acrylic on canvas, 12×16 in

A DAY.

I’ll tell you how the sun rose, –
A ribbon at a time.
The steeples swam in amethyst,
The news like squirrels ran.

The hills untied their bonnets,
The bobolinks begun.
Then I said softly to myself,
“That must have been the sun!”

* * *

But how he set, I know not.
There seemed a purple stile
Which little yellow boys and girls
Were climbing all the while

Till when they reached the other side,
A dominie in gray
Put gently up the evening bars,
And led the flock away.

Emily Dickinson

The final severity of the grey goo is then followed by the dawn. You must control the brush to avoid having to scumble in form with white overmuch later on and to keep the freshness of the translucent colours.

You don’t want to remodel form later with opaque white. However, the feet will need some of this work.

The brush strokes recapitulate the history of Western art for they show dancing, intersecting planes of color-form, the common feature of Cezanne and Poussin.

The upper part of the sea needs work but I like the lower part, a dull green waiting for the sun, which shall illuminate its slight ebb and flow with rose scumbling.

The color of the dawn should be restrained for it will rain later.

Her face has to turn with colorform into the light.

The red of her red, white and blue must be more American. The white sash needs restrained impasto in pure white with a just-cleaned brush.

Her hair needs more lights on the right side for it is a feature of Native Son’s photographs.

Lana Sutton is a dancer, musician, gardener, environmentalist, activist, and holy terror in Chattanooga, Tennessee, who doesn’t mow her lawn. This painting is based on photography of Native Son.

Aung San Suu Kyi #3: reflections on Marina, princess of Tyre

Edward G. Nilges, “State of ‘Aung San Suu Kyi’ as of 24 Aug 2010″, acrylic on canvas 15 x 15 cm

Alter? When the hills do.
Falter? When the sun
Question if his glory
Be the perfect one.

(Emily Dickinson)

She looks a little posh
That look came hard to her
‘Twas her father’s struggle
Against the lathi rod and cosh

She got an Education
Abroad…they can’t forgive
That with such Gifts…she’ll give

Resentment unallayed
Is but a Tribute paid
By those who can no longer praise
The morning sun, its Rays

(Apologies to Emily Dickinson)

The photograph inferior, but the painting is changing. A fundamental feature of the dysfunction from which I still struggle to emerge is blindness to process. The painting is darkening and the brush strokes in the background, albeit abstract, are much more difficult to get right.

They need to literally represent the social struggle surrounding her. They are underpainting for what probably will be Asian yellow and the red of flames.

I always find abstraction harder than realism.

To the Unknown Helper #28: reflections on Mahler

I dreaded that first robin so,
But he is mastered now,
And I ‘m accustomed to him grown, –
He hurts a little, though.

I thought if I could only live
Till that first shout got by,
Not all pianos in the woods
Had power to mangle me.

I dared not meet the daffodils,
For fear their yellow gown
Would pierce me with a fashion
So foreign to my own.

I wished the grass would hurry,
So when ‘t was time to see,
He ‘d be too tall, the tallest one
Could stretch to look at me.

I could not bear the bees should come,
I wished they ‘d stay away
In those dim countries where they go:
What word had they for me?

They ‘re here, though; not a creature failed,
No blossom stayed away
In gentle deference to me,
The Queen of Calvary.

Each one salutes me as he goes,
And I my childish plumes
Lift, in bereaved acknowledgment
Of their unthinking drums.

(Emily Dickinson)

Edward G. Nilges, “State of The Unknown Helper as of 6 Aug 2010″, acrylic on canvas 50*60

Edward G. Nilges, “Detail of State of The Unknown Helper as of 6 Aug 2010″, acrylic on canvas 50*60

Edward G. Nilges, “Detail of State of The Unknown Helper as of 6 Aug 2010″, acrylic on canvas 50*60

To the Unknown Helper #23: reflections on Mahler

It might be easier
To fail with land in sight,
Than gain my blue peninsula
To perish of delight.

(Emily Dickinson)

Edward G. Nilges, “To the Unknown Helper as of 30 July 2010: Four Views”. Acrylic grisaille on canvas 50*60 cm.: photographs enhanced with Microsoft Office Picture Manager.

To the Unknown Helper #22: reflections on Mahler

A poor torn heart, a tattered heart,
That sat it down to rest,
Nor noticed that the ebbing day
Flowed silver to the west,
Nor noticed night did soft descend
Nor constellation burn,
Intent upon the vision
Of latitudes unknown.

The angels, happening that way,
This dusty heart espied;
Tenderly took it up from toil
And carried it to God.
There, — sandals for the barefoot;
There, — gathered from the gales,
Do the blue havens by the hand
Lead the wandering sails.

(Emily Dickinson)

Each painting session starts with using a small brush to “sharpen the contradictions” in the face, for Daniel V Thompson in The Practice of Tempera Painting emphasizes that in this medium (which I simulate in acrylic) “the light shines in the darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it not”: the mediaeval painter would shade the form all the way up to the highest lights and conversely spread a white that was neither opaque nor transparent down to the deepest shadows.

This was an application of Scholastic (anti-Platonist: Aristotelean) philosophy ideologically supported in the later middle ages by St Thomas Aquinas’ revival of Aristotle, for in Aristotle’s metaphysics, pure Forms exist only incarnate as in the “word made flesh”. Thus the Helper’s eyes are shadowed by her wild youth (perhaps she was a cocaine addled Bright Young Thing of the 1920s who became a missionary in the 1930s only to fall foul of the Japanese).

Major pentimento (correction)! The agony of da feet! I realized, d’oh, that Asian feelings of the sort Matteo Ricci encountered at the Ming court, that a teacher-helper would be paid just enough to afford shoes, could be reconciled with my desire, and hers, to cool her feet by giving her a nice pair of sandals, perhaps decorated with jewels. Oh dem golden slippers.

So, I did something I’ve always been afraid to do. I used Winsor’s titanium white to reprime the surface roughly and freehand drew her feet, and started to redo the wash shading.

At this time her farther leg may be coming in at the wrong angle and may need adjustment, and there may be a perspective issue in the nearer foot. You can make minor corrections to these angle issues because of mathematical necessity, a line drawn on a canvas, especially when inked with dark wash, is Heisenbergian/Bohrian: an expression of probability as to where the boundary is, which can be adjusted.

People who unlike me see with two eyes are forever seeing around these corners. I’d get the operation to restore full vision in my right eye, but I don’t have the money, and it might be disorienting.

Adjusting the child’s face with opaque black eyeballs, trying to match the almond eyes, and using horizontal shading. The devil of it being in the fact that the little girl has bone structure which is not completely obscured by baby fat, and she has a low-rising Asian nose which has to be modeled in subtle shades of white.

Looking at Asian Hair on the MTR to see how it catches the light, don’t have that right.

The magnificent robes of the Islamic world at the Dubai airport, the hijab, the head-scarf. The baring of one shoulder being the Helper’s affectation since it is not, in fact Islamic. It amazes me that the French want to ban head-scarves, for their Virgin Mary of their Catholic tradition was always portrayed in hijab.

A note on models. They are overrated and hard to get, as hard as girl-friends who aren’t psychos. I have to dig out “what she looks like” from my study of anatomy and my own kinesthetic sense from my own workouts, for my experience was that when I started to reduce my blubber through running in 1981, there was an ectomorphic crazy female which constituted my animating spirit.

But I realize one can make errors without models.

In the Tempest, Ariel is not subhuman. Instead, he’s pure super-ego made flesh: “you are men of sin”. Zizek writes that modern capitalism has replaced the super-ego with shopping and the worship of celebrities.

To the Unknown Helper #21 (reflections on Mahler)

I know, I know
It is like watching the Grass grow:
But this is my little song:
Life is short: Art is Long.

(Apologies to Emily Dickinson)

The painting is changing. I reach the edges, mindful of mon cher Maitre’s admonition, that of Poussin: all parts of the canvas must be painted.

The sky needs Darkening
And the feet need work
Regret I they are not Unshod?
So be it, say I, a tinpot God.

(More apologies to Emily)

The sands shall be golden, bordered by rock, because I have seen volcanic flows as well as rocks cast up of old (including one, which you can see on the wikipedia article on Lamma Island, shaped like a penis).

The sands shall be Gold
Ere I grow old,
And I promise you,
The sky…shall be blue.

But there shall be no false Halo
As in an ancient picture of the saint
She takes an aura with her where she doth go
Free of dross, free of taint.

(Even more apologies to Emily)

Looking at foliage this morning on the ferry. In Key West, the green is almost white at the tops of the palm trees. Here, it is an intense green which stores sunlight thirstily.

Mikhail Kalatozov’s 1964 movie, Soy Cuba, captures the light I saw in the Caribbean and Gulf (for which we mourn) while sailing in 1992, in black and white that was the absolute state of the art, especially in Communist countries, in 1964.

My goal to represent these extremes. I start a session by intensifying the purest whites and blacks on the face of the Helper, since she is a gal with a Past (like the memory of cigarettes) and must seem to want to protect the kid from all harms, knowing those harms.

A Witch, she now uses her Charms
To ensafe the children from all Harms.
She has no hope of a selfish Resurrection
But this is the nature of her quiet insurrection:
To love like Spinoza
That deus sive natura,
Which don’t love her
As far, that is, as we (who know so little) know
Love, minus zero, which weeps as it doth go.

But: my cheap assed cellphone camera obscures as much as it reveals. The only person to see the painting as it develops is my friend and Helper, my cleaning lady/household consultant without whom I’d live like a pig. But this is perfectly appropriate for my Helper to see the Helper.

To the Unknown Helper #11: Reflections on Mahler

“Study for To The Unknown Helper 8 July 2010″, Edward Nilges: Pencil, pen, ink wash, enhanced with Gimp and Windows Picture Manager: assembled with Paint.

Before I got my eye put out,
I liked as well to see
As other creatures that have eyes,
And know no other way.

But were it told to me, to-day,
That I might have the sky
For mine, I tell you that my heart
Would split, for size of me.

The meadows mine, the mountains mine, –
All forests, stintless stars,
As much of noon as I could take
Between my finite eyes.

The motions of the dipping birds,
The lightning’s jointed road,
For mine to look at when I liked, –
The news would strike me dead!

So safer, guess, with just my soul
Upon the window-pane
Where other creatures put their eyes,
Incautious of the sun.

Emily Dickinson

Running at Sixty

Listen! To an even better tune than Chariots of Fire, also by Vangelis: L’Enfant. Featured in Peter Weir’s film. The Year of Living Dangerously. The YouTube music will open in a separate window and you can come back here.

I know no other Heaven
And this, I know of Hell
The space I take when out of Breath…
This, my Angelus bell.

The Hill was there when a darkling Plain
Took the place of the wide wide Sea
The hill doesn’t care about such as Me
I take comfort in this Mystery.

The wounded Insect fills his wing
Again with what’s left of Blood
This is said to be a holy thing
As holy as the rood.

The pious Jain doth carry a Broom
With which to whisk away a fly
Lest he be shamed by corporal presence
Where each one is a soul, and an I

And so we come to to the top
Of a small hill: ’tis my Calvary
I miss Church each Sunday morn
But cannot ‘scape the mystery.

16 March 2010 Edward G. Nilges. Moral rights have been asserted, paradoxically enough. With apologies to Emily Dickinson for swiping her style.