My mother used to say that she couldn’t remember when I wasn’t in coloring books. Then came private art lessons, then drawing and painting classes in college, a 30+ year commercial career that often required drawing, more painting workshops and classes than I have room to mention, and now a career as a fine artists. And I am still learning how to draw. I’m learning better how to critique my own work. Take this nude, for instance, I need to forget it’s a human, and to dissect all its parts. I can couple the torso with one leg. Are they aligned the way I see them on the model, I might ask. How about the triangle created between the two feet? Is it wide enough? Is one nipple taller than the other, or are they perfectly horizontal as I have them here?

Knowing how to draw is knowing how to be your own worst critic. Like life, it’s not about the destination; it’s about the journey. Maybe we’ll get there, maybe we won’t. We need to focus on the correctness of each step along the way.

“Black and white study 1”
9x12” watercolor pencil

I do not associate Albert Handell with nudes, or even with figure studies for that matter. Several years ago I had the benefit to attend one of his workshops. For years, like many artists, I’d been following Richard Schmid, and trying in vain, to find a workshop with him. Alas! I read that an oil and pastel painter by the name of Albert Handell would be offering a workshop in Putney, Vermont, and that participants could hang around an extra day to paint en plein air with the famed Richard Schmid. I signed up immediately.

I signed up for the workshop because of Schmid, but my admiration upon my return home, was focused on Albert Handell. This is not to minimize the greatness of Schmid. But there was something so profoundly intellectual about Handell’s approach to his artwork. Many of his incredible landscape paintings border on almost abstract non-representational paintings. I bring this up with the study of my nude, because Handell also does studies that are very accurate. He does studies, however, of trees. I don’t mean simply tree studies; I mean tree portraits. With the same discipline and observation that a great portrait artist might give to the likeness of his/her subject, Handell does tree studies. I find this amazing. I’ve been drawing trees, like many artists, since I was a kid. And if there is ever a place where one might get by drawing something willy-nilly (to fake it, so to speak), trees are it! Not Albert Handell!

I am beginning to believe that all representational artists, regardless of how loose their style, must have it in them, the ability to draw realistically, to observe to the point of obsession. As every respectable painting must have a good abstract underneath it, every respectable abstract painting must have as its base, a solid skeletal structure. I’m still working on this conclusion, so please share with me your thoughts.

Yesterday, I left you with the question, why would I paint a red amaryllis on a gold background when something so similar has already been done? First, what I thought was a painting by British artist William Say is actually a reproduction of his hand-colored botanical engraving. Who put his engraving on a gold background, I do not know. There are hardly any new ideas out there when it comes to art. If it’s brilliant enough to be done, chances are, it’s already been created. This may explain how the concept of avant garde art came into being.

Furthermore, I went ahead with yesterday’s red amaryllis only after I’d decided to paint today’s pink amaryllis. It made for too good a pair, not to do both, but also, the pink flower, I wanted to see on a mid-tone background before I completely left it. Followers of my Brenda’s Gallery 100 newsletter have the full story behind my quest to paint the perfect bloom of Amaryllis Hippeastrum. If you’re not familiar with Gallery 100, you’ll find there, four more renditions of the flower commonly known as amaryllis. Just click here to enter the gallery.

Strange, where we might find the inspiration to do a painting in a particular way or technique. Sometimes, we artists can’t even explain this. Having completed four other red amaryllis paintings, I was not anxious to do another one. However, I kept seeing images in my head of this beautiful red flower on a gold metallic background. I’ve done oils prior to this where I’ve used a gold metallic for a base coat, so this was not new to me. But to use it as a solid gold field behind a sharply defined shape was not yet in my repertoire. And then, just after the New Year when we start receiving all kinds of after-Christmas catalogs in the mail, a catalog arrived in the mail that succeeded in confronting my creative muse. The Metropolitan Museum of Art offers a beautiful holiday card with a red amaryllis by British artist William Say (1768-1834), and wouldn’t you know it, his botanical depiction is reproduced on a solid gold background? See the card (now on sale, incidentally) by clicking here.

You may ask why I proceeded to do a painting so close to what I know has already been done. Please catch my blog post tomorrow and I’ll proceed to explain.