Portrait of Berthe Morisot

I finally finished the Berthe Morisot portrait that I wrote about a few posts back. It's somewhat large (about a meter tall). I'm happy with it. However I was slightly disappointed with the texture of the paper for charcoal (it's meant for etchings, I think) because it didn't allow me to manipulate the charcoal as much as I'd like once I laid down the original lines. Next time I'm going with something smoother. Suggestions are welcome (not that toothy Ingres texture though please. The physical sensation of drawing on that gives me the heebie-jeebies).

The finished portrait of painter Berthe Morisot, by Ciana Pullen.

The original photo of Morisot that I worked from. I also looked at other photos of her over her life to get a better idea of what she looked like, since I had to fill in and make sense of a low resolution image.

A detail of the shoulder. I like the texture of the erased lines.

Detail of the face and hand.

Detail of the fringed blanket. The blanket didn't exist in the original photo but the composition needed something black in that shape. I suppose I could have made it anything; a backpack, a roofing shingle, a large sheet of nori. But I went for the obvious. The fringe was fun, especially the white spaces between the threads which took on an unexpected stained glass effect.

Sketch in Progress of Berthe Morisot

I mentioned a few days ago that I was having some trouble in the studio and planned to simply draw a portrait of Berthe Morisot from a photo. It's been slow going; first, because it's quite large, and second, because I had to build myself a support wall for my studio space, and I don't have a car. Which meant walking down to Bauhaus (which is like Lowe's, except they don't finance the Republican Party) and carrying back my supplies in 2 trips. I'm proud to say I built a strong support out of foam, which I can easily disassemble when/if I move studios. I'm making only one change, and that is to replace the very squeaky top foam layers (the blue stuff) with a cheap roll of cork (which is sold to go under wooden floorboards to stop them from squeaking).

The back of the support wall in my studio space (look at the cool arched ceilings!)

The support wall with the very beginning of the Berthe Morisot sketch stuck to it with bulldog clips and enormous staples that function like tacks. The system works!

Anyway, here is a detail of the portrait in progress.

Portrait in progress of Impressionist artist Berthe Morisot, drawn from an old photograph. By Ciana Pullen / St. Rhinocéros

A Horrible Day in the Studio

I thank my lucky stars to have a studio. It's been a long time coming, but two months ago I finally (FINALLY) secured a small space to work. A basement space with dim two windows that I share with another artist, and a honeycomb of other studios leading off in either direction. I wouldn't say it's a "community," because no one seems to talk to each other, unless it's about the rent. Which is ok I guess; after all, not all communities are a blessing.

But I've been avoiding my studio space because Friday I had a really, really bad day painting. The promising piece just got worse and worse, and now I'm very much stuck. Things snowballed, I felt like I couldn't do anything right, and all my art ideas were stupid. Which makes it difficult to regroup and try something else, no?

Saturday and Sunday rolled by, and I reasoned that since it was the weekend I didn't need to go in and work. Right? Then Monday I tried to gather source material to go in another direction before heading off to the studio, and instead I had a bit of a breakdown. Feeling awful about my art was piled on top of a steady drip horrifying world news, and to top it off I got some pretty bad news about the German tax system-- that is, the amount of money that I could expect to earn with art if I work my butt off is exactly the amount of money you can't make without going into debt to the German government. You have to earn either less than $4000 or more than about $25,000. What is the deal with that, Germany? What are you trying to do? I ended up crying, then spent the evening fixing some old broken CSS on my blog.

Today I'm ready to head to my studio again (after posting this). I'm gearing up to do a big charcoal portrait of the Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot from a photograph (with a few other old photos, for reference). It's almost too basic. I don't usually draw from one photo; drawing from life is best if I can manage, but I usually form a composite from several photos or draw from a video snippet to avoid simply copying someone else's flat image like a human Xerox machine. And there's no particular concept, it's just a portrait, which is What I Do Best. But maybe that's what I need right now.

Berthe Morisot.

When I was a Junior in art school, a Senior got pregnant, which really derailed her thesis work. She got pretty stuck and panicky, so she started knitting a lot just to get her mind back to basics. Her thesis ended up being a massive abstract sculpture made of yards and yards of knit fabric. It was pretty good, too. That has always stuck with me.

So, here I go. Wish me luck!