Dancer clothed with light (Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense)

Edward G. Nilges, “Dancer Clothed With Light (Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense)”, pencil, pen, Conte, fuser and Gimp, 8 May 2011

The actual painting may be a nude since clothing seems to lack moral seriousness. This is the Soul, of each of us or the World, and I am not smoking anything when I say that. If I do the painting as a nude it shall be logged on Facebook at my page (Edward Nilges in Hong Kong) and visible only to the group on that page called “Can See Figurative Art”. If you’re interested in following the development of the painting and are at least 18 years old, apply to be my Facebook friend and specify in the message that you’d like this. Your own page must have your image and correct age.

Wish I didn’t have to go through this contortions but with the world as it is today you must be careful.

Reflecting upon the Islamic prohibition of graven images (as opposed to photography which doesn’t seem to fall under the ban as it is a natural process). There’s something to it, for the artist can so readily go off the rails and create a monster, whereas Allah, to the pious Muslim, can never fail, creating the hair on men’s faces and on women’s heads, and pleased with what Allah has created.

We Westerners are, I think, trying to share in Creation and we’re on a razor’s edge. But all I can say, is look at Michelangelo’s Pieta. The Christian learns compassion from images of Adam and Eve (the only image permitted to be unclothed in the Christian tradition) and Christ, who was crucified in a loin-cloth, His humiliation being part of the deal for Him.

But do my Fascistic nudes teach compassion? I don’t know. I do know that the words “Allah” and “God” have the same referent although Malaysian Muslims disagree: they wish Christians to refer to “God” as “Tuan” as if “God” were Lord Jim.

There oughta be a law. When any member of the human race uses his word for “god” he must be understood as referring to a Power greater and permitted to do so. Otherwise we’re going to kill each other.

Nudity as a protest.

The figure was drawn freehand from imagination and memory. I use my own kinesthesia to try to figure out where bones and muscle go. However, I did not learn en pointe in my ballet classes since guys may not execute this motion.

The line and black-grey chiaroscuro were done manually but the white highlights, ballet tutu, and all color were added with Gimp. Gimp is great since it makes it easy to experiment with color layers in the indirect method.

To me she is executing the en point rapidly and repeatedly as she projects herself across the stage, and is not maintaining the weight on the big toe.

She is Lola the eternal. In 1848 a revolutionary but in 1914 challenging the lads to defend Germany, and as such compromised.

Bit of Barbara Hershey in that new film Black Swan. Hershey plays the Ballet Tiger Mom. Don’t live through your kids, and don’t expect them to live in the upper West Side in your flat. It’s too small.

Hmm, I get the feeling that I need again to redraw the figure to eradicate the sharp edges of her face, feet and hands, to arrive at the final gracile curve of delicate bone, and put that into my hands. I’m thinkin’ of how Bach came out of the bones of Glenn Gould as if that might be some sort of secret of life or some damned thing like that.

My father’s awe as a doctor before the body and blood and brain. That shall have to stand alone as a noun phrase even as Bach could not finish Contrapunctus XIV.

Anyway, drawing, painting, listening to music and procrastinating my Sunday workout beats working or drinking my face off. Shame to him who evil thinks.

Grand Jeté?

Edward G. Nilges, “Grand Jeté?”, pencil, pen, Gimp, A4 size, 24 April 2011

Based on a nude figure study which is probably too “out there” to post on WordPress even with a warning. Actually, this type of “Jeté” is more characteristic of male dance (Corsaire & Spartacus): the female is a midair split.

Again, I use neither a photograph nor a model, instead memory and my own kinesthesthia based on my own sports and dance training. Figurative art today, to be considered of gallery quality in a major city, has to be hyper-quality, almost hypertrophied just to be acceptable to collectors.

This isn’t, but I need to follow the flaw as it were. Her forearms are too skinny and she has Scissorhands for a reason. Perhaps she’s that poor girl in Black Swan who was a 19th century artiste in a world that has “normalized deviance” – the movie basically accepts the idea that a male ballet impresario who is not gay will demand sexual favors of his girls, and the movie even shows how this could be integrated into the artistic process.

The guy in Black Swan isn’t a bad guy at all. Just a guy.

But Natalie Portman’s character will have nothing of it and is sacrificed to the machine which has produced her schizophrenia.

My take away is that I must keep on creating, writing silly poetry, taking acting jobs that don’t pay, and painting, as an end in itself. I am so “lamely and unfashionable” as a 61 YO white guy that I shall probably see no money and success from these efforts. My hope is that we all survive global warming and my sons benefit from post-humous fame as did Theo van Gogh’s children benefit from their crazy uncle’s work.

Another possibility is that like Picasso in th 1910s I overidentify with wretched traveling saltimbanques and eroticise my own troubles. Picasso’s student drawings show a rare facility and he could have made a comfortable living if he’d settled down in Madrid with a nice girl, and painted portraits of the bourgeois and nobility. Instead, he seems to have realized as did Mahler that his very skill with the basics of his art (representation in visual art, tonality in music) was an undeserved end-point of artistic-musical development commencing with Giotto and Josquin des Prez.

My goal therefore is to somehow preserve the pain of the flawed hand in a perfect hand.

Abstraction? Just too hard. I could never do what Pollock or Franz Kline did. I run out of ideas, I need nature. I’m serious. Doing a Pollock was brutally hard work, and I don’t blame the guy for smoking unfiltered Camels and boozing it up. Pretty girls by contrast are easy.

Just remember your anatomy, which I studied while flunking out of high school. The femur is buried in upper thigh musculature. The lower leg bone is visible and creates a shadow in front of the calf. And so on.

Hmm…when I do the Leonardo “mirror test” (da Vinci recommends looking at your drawing in a mirror to find flaws: on the computer, just use a drawing program to Flip Horizontal) the drawing looks correct but it also looks like she’s not leaping, but falling. We Americans are still trying to deal with September 11. But I’m going to stop right there. For now.