William Brymner, Girl with a Dog, Lower Saint Lawrence





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 protagonist from the setting. In the painting the pieces fit together well, but I still see some separateness. This feels psychologically true and meaningful to me.

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

Winter Hill Self Portrait, Stories from the Past

Image
Winter Hill Self Portrait, Stories from the Past I am currently working on two large scale paintings, one a self-portrait in a landscape setting, and the other a landscape. I am also in the process of wrapping up the fall semester, and preparing for my two classes in the spring. It has been a month since I left my job at Pygmalion’s Art Supplies. I am beginning to re-imagine myself as an artist and teacher as I work. The painting above is Winter Hill Self Portrait, 20”x20”, oil on canvas. I made it in 2005, three years after receiving my Certificate in Painting from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. The painting looks back to my life in 1987 living in the Winter Hill neighborhood of Somerville, Massachusetts. In 2005 I was living alone in the house I had inherited since the passing of my parents. It was the house that my sister and I had grown up in, a five bedroom, three story twin built in 1900, in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. I was painting...
Read more

Self Portrait

Image
I am now in the process of leaving my longtime art store job. Managing a store is a challenging job. There is much that I have enjoyed, and I have learned a lot. I have ideas about management, but lack the energy to implement them. The past 14 months or so have been pretty much non-stop, keeping the art store running during the illness and eventual passing of the store’s previous owner, while, for me, I worked on my painting and teaching as well. Now I am re-allocating what resources I have to my artwork, and teaching. And for me, I want to explore. The world is so interesting, I want time to process my understanding and reactions, thoughts and feelings. Now I am working on what I intend to be a series of large scale paintings in acrylic. Last summer I worked in acrylic to make three paintings for an exhibition at the City of Bloomington Utilities Department. The exhibition is coming to an end, and I am in the process of donating the paintings to the city. I am gratef...
Read more