After doing two in gouache, there wasn't much time, so I did one fast, small watercolor just to have the day in my journal as well. I was missing line and wanted to play with my green ink a little too. The two gouaches are on freestanding Kraft brown paper. It's always fun to sketch Elizabeth in her nifty sketching hat. 
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  The weather has been delicious for getting out and sketching lately. Memphis Urban Sketchers met at Elmwood, the historic cemetery in Memphis, which is one of my favorite places to go. I love the enormous magnolias paired with the angels and upright monuments. And then the Memphis Urban Sketchers exhibition started at Dixon, so for a third time, I have art in that beautiful museum. I went to check it out and see the large show of the usually in storage permanent collection there (they have much more than they can show regularly and still have traveling exhibit space). Of course I had to sketch While I was there. I’m always drawn to Ceres. I just can’t resist her graceful curves. And the tulips are fabulous right now.   My friend Melanie was visiting from France, and a huge part of Memphis history is the civil rights movement. The National Civil Rights Museum is a powerful and beautifully designed trip through that period. Last time I went through it had been redone, and I just digested it. This time I found myself wanting to sketch and bear a little witness to the brave people it celebrates. I worked in fountain pen with a brush pen that had a very light gray wash in it. I think I need to go back again. I was still pretty overwhelmed at the whole experience and didn’t manage to sketch in the old Lorraine Motel section, the last part of the museum. I’d like to go on a quiet day when I wouldn’t be in the way and focus on that sometime.  
A marvelous small gallery in Paris specializing in works on paper (always a fast way to my heart) has a marvelous exhibition of up American mid century prints. They had a fabulous selection. I’m a huge fan of Jim Dine, and I loved the pair of enormous etchings (enormous for etchings, anyway — there were plenty of even larger prints in the show), both from the same plate, with a number of extra brushes added in between printings. I love the way you simply draw into a plate and can change it so radically like that. For the prints I do, once you cut something away, it’s just gone. This is like magic to me. The other thing I totally loved about the Dine pieces is that he had two also enormous prints of his bathrobe that he titled self portraits. I have a profound relationship with my own favorite bathrobes (both winter and summer), and this was genius to me. My 20th century art knowledge is considerably less than what I know about various other, earlier periods of art history, so I was unacquainted with Rauschenberg’s “Stoned Moon” series, done in the 60’s and based on the Apollo missions. I was blown away and will have to do more research into them. Rauschenberg, Dine, and Jasper Johns were all painters who got into printmaking by collaborating with print shops that could offer their expertise and large equipment and assistants to help these artists. I felt the same relief on learning that tibit that I felt when I learned that those exquisite floating world Japanese printmakers largely worked in watercolor and then had professionals to both carve and print for them. I feel like my work is clunky next to some of the professional printmakers out there, but doing it all by hand myself is satisfying. It may not be as perfect, but it is fully mine. I saw other, more contemporary printmakers that I would like to learn more about, including Al Taylor, whose “Hanging Puddles” charmed me. I did a small study of it, and I also did one of Wayne Thiebaud’s exquisite sugared aquatint “Candied Apples.” The sugar technique adds a gorgeous texture in person. I’ve loved Thiebaud since college, and it was fun to see a couple of his prints in person. These were all I managed to sketch on my first visit, but I think I may well have to go and see this show a second time before leaving Paris. I walked home feeling inspired to make more art, which is always the sign of an excellent show for me.
I was so inspired I did two pieces before I even got home. I started with one page in my smallest journal of the abstract sculpture by the Solferino metro station. This was what I had hoped. I kept the watercolor to a light wash and then mixed graphite and ink (the heavier tree branches) for the foreground. It was uncharacteristic restraint for me, and I was excited.
 There’s a flat out marvelous exhibition of the Impressionists in London at the Petit Palais. My friend (Memphis urban sketcher and now a denizen of Paris) has a dual membership and kindly took me — and then left me to make my way at the glacial speed I travel through museums. Double kindness. I loved the show not only for the art but also for the history. It centers around the end of the Franco Prussian war when Paris was first under siege and then in the hands of rebels for a while. Needless to say, no one much buys art under dire, wartime circumstances, so a number of French artists (and citizens) headed for London for a while, and a few stayed permanently. It was good to read how the early arrivals assisted later comers, introducing them to patrons and getting them teaching jobs. There is such press about how cutthroat the art world is, and likely there are aspects of that in the high market places, but I have found such a supportive and warm environment in Memphis with people sharing opportunities and rooting each other on. It felt good to learn about this group. There were a number of gorgeous things in the show. There was one small room of three exquisite Whistler nocturnes, and there were many truly lovely works on paper (which I’m always excited to see), both watercolors and prints. I did a copy of one understated portrait etching by Legros with the lightest and most delicate of horizontal lines, just a bit varied, as the background. He also left the shirt almost completely white, except for a few lines, bringing all the attention to the face. The grey of the patterned background played nicely against the open space and against the strong detail of the features. But what truly gobsmacked me was the five Monet renditions of the Houses of Parliament gathered together for this show. Usually they are scattered across continents. Monet did them all from the same vantage point, the window of his room in the Savoy Hotel. As an artist, that is a stroke of both luck and genius, to be able to set up and paint from the ease of your room. He had been unsuccessful when he first went (as a refugee from the war), and two decades later, he wanted to return and show London what he could do. I loved that as well. I always look forward to spending time with Monet’s five versions of Rouen Cathedral at the Orsay, and seeing these together was a similar experience. I tried to sketch them, but my small and dirty travel watercolor palette didn’t handle the pinks and yellows well. It was still a good exercise for me to sit and study them and truly see the variations and differences. Even when a drawing doens’t turn out as you had hoped (which is often, even for professionals), you learn a lot from the doing of it.
 I love the Orsay. One of the benefits of being here for the month of August is that it makes sense just to join the museum and go frequently. The last several years it has fed my work, sitting in there and drinking in Odilon Redon, Vuillard, Van Gogh, Manet, Klimt. Yesterday was my first day on my own (without meet ups with lovely friends), so I headed straight there. Sadly there is little Redon this year (they constantly change up their exhibitions, which is another reason to keep joining — it’s a different museum every summer), but they had a huge Vuillard donation recently, and there’s a whole section devoted largely to him that is absolutely exquisite. Including one of my favorite pieces of his that is back on display after a couple of years of missing it. I mostly just wandered and looked, but I did a little sketching late in my stay. I stumbled on a lovely Swiss piece by a painter I didn’t know, and it’s got the same feeling I’ve been exploring lately of a sole person in a large world, so of course I sketched it.  Nearby was a room of Pompon’s sculptures. He’s the one who did the enormous polar bear that is the mascot of the Orsay, but there are a number of charming, smaller pieces upstairs as well.   I went to see this exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum yesterday, and it was a beautifully done show. Well arranged and documented with a spread of works across Wyeth's career. I learned more about him, which made me want to know even more. I had loved the Helga exhibition years ago but hadn't seen much more of his work in person. It truly repays up-close examination, with the minuteness of his brushstrokes. The thing that truly struck me was the radical nature of some of his compositions and viewpoints. It's easy, in this age of minimalizing realism, to discount Wyeth as the safe art of dorm room posters. That would be a mistake. Many of the strongest pieces had truly unexpected and dramatic viewpoints or compositions, the kind that make you reconsider how you see the world. Below is one of those. I loved the almost absence of sky with the strong abstract nature of the land and the water it held. The layers of darkness and detail in this piece are far greater than I could capture with a brush pen standing up in a crowd and balancing sketchbook and watercolor kit in my left hand. But I wanted to spend a little time with it and look more deeply, and sketching a painting helps me do that. The piece I was most gobsmacked by was the top one here of the home with drifting feathers. It struck me as Wyeth's version of Redon's drifting flowers or Chagall's pair of lovers in the sky. Mysticism within the artist's own recognizable language. I've been drawn to the surrealists the last couple of years, but without much idea how to make that work within my own vocabulary. This piece really stayed with me, and I hope it will help me see a new way to do this in my own work.  The show was a mixed bag for me. The best were transporting, with the exquisiteness of texture and detail adding to the subject. Some, however, I found to be lifeless, drained by the too painstaking style. The watercolors, with a bit more freedom, were more successful to my eye than the tempera ones (to make a broad generalization). There were several early and loose watercolors in the show that took my breath away. I loved his color and style, and they reminded me of the looseness and lushness of Sargent's watercolors. Apparently Wyeth, in spite of a huge success with them in New York, found them to be insufficiently challenging to make a career of, and he moved to the much more detailed style instead. That grieved me a bit, but it was also heartening to see a realist making a successful career in the midst of an abstract age. Landscape painting gets little respect these days, and while he painting many people as well, I loved seeing how he took his home landscape, unremarkable by the standards of dramatic landscape beauty that seems so common in art, and translated his love of his place and his vision of the earth to others. It was encouraging to see him make such a respected career out of the bones of his home spaces. Coming as I do from a visually unremarkable but much loved place of my own, I always hope to be able to translate that beauty for others to see and appreciate. His wife Betsy helped tremendously on the marketing and selling side of things. Any artist would be lucky to have such a helpmate, since business sense and creativity are not necessarily paired talents, but it was still encouraging to see him be able to be so successful on his own terms.
 I had a couple of quiet days on my own at the end of my Paris trip. Some of that, of course, was packing madly, because I acquired too many art books plus a framed print plus a little bit of breakable tea crockery, so it was more challenging than usual. I knew I would be coming home to working hard on my fall shows, so I gave myself permission to really have a little bit of vacation --- sleeping in and lingering over tea in the beautiful apartment I stay in and going to the Musee d'Orsay to sit with my favorite pieces. I also had tea a couple of afternoons in Le Lithographe, the cafe just across from my building there. I'd been wanting to paint inside (usually I would sit out on the sidewalk to watch Paris go by) where there was a lovely tiled Art Deco piece next to the bar. I painted it small the first day, and since I'm thinking about Art Deco ornamentation a good bit at the moment (thanks to one of the art books I bought), I went back and painted a second time with more detail.  I also did a couple of more sketches in the Orsay. They move their paintings around a lot and swap things out. One of my favorite Odilon Redon pieces was gone (one of my favorite pieces period there), but this double panel was new to me this year, so I sketched it. As was the Vuillard, who painted a woman sketching with that hallmark "sketch face," as a friend of mine calls it.
One other thing I did was got myself one last cup of Angelina's hot chocolate and carried it into the Tuileries to sit and drink and (apparently) sketch. It was a lovely send off from a city I love and hope to return to next year.  |
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Martha Kelly is an artist and illustrator who lives and works in Memphis, Tennessee. To sign up for my emails (show notices, occasional news, and resources I find helpful), fill out this form: To subscribe to this blog, by email: 
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