Philadelphia



The other night I had a dream that was set in Philadelphia, or in some dream-altered Philadelphia-like place. Part of it was set on Cricket Ave. in Ardmore, where my parents, sister and I lived for a few years in the early 1970’s. It was kind of like Cricket Ave., except, oddly, the sidewalk had a curb that was about two feet high, stepping down to another sidewalk, that had an 8” curb to the street. Who knows why one imagines or remembers such things.

I had been watching John Thornton’s videos on Philadelphia artists, and thinking about my time there, at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and afterward.

The image above is a two page spread from one of my sketchbooks from PaFA, with preparatory studies for my painting Portrait in a State Park. I was rehearsing the pose, and thinking about the setting for the painting. My fellow student at PaFA Christina Kelly was kind enough to pose for me. I wanted to make a life size portrait that would fit on a 68”x48” canvas, which was a size that Christina used for some of the figure paintings that she did at PaFA that I admired.

In order to fit the portrait on that size canvas it needed to be a seated pose. I liked the idea that the figure was waiting for a bus, an activity that had been part of my Philadelphia experience, and my previous experience in Boston.

I grew up in the suburbs immediately to the west of Philadelphia, but had been exploring parts of the city to the east, Mt. Airy, Chestnut Hill, Melrose and Elkins Park. In one of those places I came across a sidewalk that was made of large pieces of slate, instead of cement. I loved the colors and depth of the slate, and took an entire roll of photos with a film camera, before I had a digital camera, of the slate sidewalk, that I was thinking about using for the painting.

For the background, I was remembering a landscape painting class that I had taken at PaFA a couple of years previously, when we went out to Valley Forge State Park to paint. Painting there was one of my enjoyable and memorable experiences at PaFA. I liked having a figure waiting for a bus, in the rolling hills of Valley Forge.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Am I Doing This?

Image
Why Am I Doing This? I have decided to write a blog about art and travel. Things that I like to think about, and talk about, tend to fall under these categories, so it seems to make sense. Why am I doing this? One reason has to do with something that contemporary artist Vincent Desiderio has said about art making in general, that it is a process of self-enlightenment for the artist. Bo Bartlett, another major contemporary artist, with whom I had the good fortune to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, spoke of an idea that I think is similar: making art is a way to wake up. But art serves the viewer, as well as the artist. I hope that this blog, like my artwork, may be interesting and useful to other people. I am working to link this to my Facebook account, which will, I hope, help more people see it. This calm little interface on Blogger that I am now using is more to my taste than is the dense web of information that a Facebook page has to offer. So if I
Read more

Birthday

Image
This is a detail of a painting I am working on. That rectangular shape is the start of a birthay cake. My mother made a cake for me when I was three or four, at the end of the 1960's, or five months into the 1970's. There is a photo of me sitting at the table in the apartment my parents were renting on Montgomery Ave. in Ardmore, with my mother standing nearby and another young person, who I cannot now identify, looking off to the left. The photo is square, the original Instagram, but black and white, not murky 70's color.   In this painting I started painting the cake and the white table cloth in green because I felt like it. I wanted to have my feeling supersede any intrinsic requirements the subject may have presented, for the sake of my ongoing connection to my work. Sometimes when this allowance is made surprising connections are made, or depths are revealed that feel true to the subject. And sometimes the self-satisfying decision can just express my feeling, whic
Read more

William Brymner, Girl with a Dog, Lower Saint Lawrence

Image
This is a sketch from William Brymner’s painting Girl with a Dog, Lower Saint Lawrence, from 1905, and a reproduction of the painting.  The piece caught my attention during a visit to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2017. The subject matter was unusual. A girl sits on the sand, or dirt, wearing what I guess was everyday dress in 1905, and holds a stick in front of her dog. Is she restraining the dog from greeting the viewer? Or is she protecting the dog from us? In the painting she has an expression I would describe as angry or frustrated. I find that my sketch adds more sadness. In the original work she faces the viewer more directly. In the painting she is connected to the land by similarity in value and color, and is held down by a horizontal land form in the middle ground. In my sketch I lightened the light on her hat, separating it from its surrounding values and perhaps connecting it more closely to the sky. I like the comma in the title, separating the protago
Read more