Olive

This is Olive, she's an Australian Cattle Dog.  We don't know what her original situation was, but a rescue organization placed her in a program whereby inmates in a correctional facility foster and train dogs,; a benefit the dogs and themselves.  Currently she lives with her loving human parents, outside the PEN, and loves to play fetch with stuffed toys.  This is what she looks like when expecting you to throw Mr. Ducky for her to fetch and bring back, and again look at you with those big eyes.

Another "not a pet portrait'

Mom and I

oils on paper

7" x 10"

My mom keeps asking me to send her pictures of my recent work and I keep deferring; one, because, as she does not use the internet, I would have to make a lot of prints (my latest pieces only make sense when seen serially), and two, because showing her my recent work would engender questions that I don’t want to have to answer.  Questions that would yield words such as “appropriation”, “ready-mades” and “Duchamp”; words that render me extremely tired when I imagine them in the context of trying to explain them to her.  Mind you, my mother loves art, and she is not close-minded about it either; for instance, she loves Georg Baselitz, but Duchamp might be a stretch.   

We often go to museums together and I “lecture” on the stuff we see, and she loves that.  I really would not mind showing her my work in person and explaining it as we inspected it physically; but as she lives in a different continent and no longer travels, that’s not going to happen, and the thought of doing it by phone just... well... tires me.

My mother does paint.  She started late in life; and for an untrained person, her eye-hand coordination is impressive.   Ironically, her subject matter consists of images she finds in art magazines or postcards which she then copies free hand into much larger formats and paints in gouache using tiny brushes to change the colors in ways that please her.   The irony comes in the fact that although I don’t want to explain the concept of postmodern appropriation to her, for all intents and purposes what she does is a form of, if not conceptually based appropriation, certainly a kind of formal and emotional appropriation.  She calls it original work (and who’s to say it isn’t...).

My mom is getting on in years, and because I am being a little shit by not sending her pictures of my work, and because I know it will give her immense pleasure (though ex-post, I was actually wrong about this), I decided I wanted to give her a painted piece.  In my view, it is so much more fun to receive one of those rather than a bunch of little incomprehensible facsimiles, though she will keep asking for them, and maybe one day I’ll relent.  I am sending her a small portrait (pictured above in digital facsimile) of the both of us.  I chose to paint it on paper and to make it no larger than eight by ten inches in order to easily send it through “the mails”.

 

The image I cropped from an old low resolution and, unfortunately, fading analog picture my husband took of us when we were all a lot younger on our first outing together a year after my dad’s passing.  The passing of my father was a huge turning point in the family dynamic, for as an only child I always thought of the family as a unit of three, and now there were only two.   

I hope she likes the picture; I had fun painting it.  I chose the image for the subject matter but as I painted it, it became a meditation on reds and blues even though the coat my mom is wearing and the enormous bag she is sporting are purely black. “Olfactory masturbation” as Duchamp called it, or not, painting for me always boils down to color.

Not a pet portrait

7" x 6"  Oil and Acrylic on board

It has been a while since I have painted portraits of people; but when my mother-in-law's father died at the incredible age of 101, I decided I wanted to paint a portrait of the two of them to give to her.  All I had to base it on were a few pictures of a Thanksgiving dinner we had a few years back.  I chose one, modified it some, and set out to paint this tiny portrait.

Just as I do when painting pet portraits, I thought I would have to confront the anxiety about "getting it right" that always befalls me when starting a portrait (pet or not).  But as I set out to paint this, the usual doubts did not surface.  Laying down the paint and forgetting about matching everything to the photograph came easy to me.  

As I got the paint down in one wet-on-wet go, I kept wondering if I should later go in and add layers of transparent glazes to the faces; but I liked what I had, and remembered how my father used to like my work better when it was "raw" than when I "finished" it.  Being unable to control myself, I did add a few bits of glaze here and there, but made myself stop before I changed the character of what I had captured initially and liked as was. 

I totally understand the need that Giacometti had of revising and re-revising his portraits until he had all but obliterated his imagery; and one day I will have to give in to that part of my instincts and see what happens.  For the time being, I leave this one as it is and hope my mother-in-law likes it too.

Maddie

Maddie
oils and acrylics
8" x 9"

This is Maddie.  Her owner adores her, and the painting was commissioned by friends of his to be given as a gift.  Maddie's owner is a member of the armed forces and has done tours of duty in all our "fun" theaters....  His history of valiant service to this country was the inspiration for the portrait's backdrop.  I used some of his medals to come up with the pattern in the background. 

 I was loosely thinking of Blinky Palermo's paintings at the time.

Blinly Palermo at Dia Beacon

I was also told that Maddie can be a rambunctious dog; so from the pictures I was given, I chose the one that best expressed that.  In that particular picture, Maddie is sitting on a grass field full of clovers, hence the clovers in the portrait.  Maddie might not understand about medals, or the bronze oak leaves attached to them (not depicted on the painting), or Blinky Palermo; but I am sure she knows all about clovers.  Also, I chose to paint the clovers because I was thinking of how lucky Maddie and her owner are to have each other. 

I've been painting these pet portraits for a while, and in another blog of mine I have expressed a certain trepidation about doing them because of the amount of time it takes me to let go of the idea of representing the pets photographically and just getting on with painting. For some reason I did not encounter that initial barrier while painting Maddie and was able to get into the materiality of the medium immediately.  I am not sure why that was; perhaps it was because the background I chose was so busy and so flat and so very different from previous ones that it loosened my preconceptions. Or it was because this was a close-up of a face and the patterns on a German Shepherd lend themselves to being easily abstracted without my paying too much attention to depicting hair too precisely.  Or maybe it was because I used to have a Shepherd whose features are imprinted in my brain, and thus could paint hers, which are similar, more instinctively.  Whatever it was, I had fun with paint!

Penny and Libra

Penny

oils and acrylics on board

8" x 8"

A friend of mine commissioned me to paint portraits of her mom's cats, the one above is Penny and the one below is Libra.  Penny got adopted after Libra passed away.  Their owner loves orchids and I tried to allude to that on the pattern in both sofas. 

Sofa: a cat staple, like tuna.

Libra

oils and acrylics on board

7.5" x  8"

I usually make these by painting the backgrounds first in acrylic over a mask of the animal and whatever else I have in the foreground that I want to paint in oils.  When making these this time, I put a lot of paint coats on the ground to get the images the way I wanted them to look.  I did so especially on Penny, since I had painted colors I did not like at first and decided to change them.  Because of the way I paint these, the backgrounds become flat but thick, and I really like the physical boundary that forms between animal and ground.  As flat as the backgrounds are, the boundary renders them tactile.  I tried to capture that with the following pictures.

Hidey and Scruffy

Scruffy

oils and acrylics on board 

3.5" x3.5"

Hidey
oils and acrylics on board
3.5" x 3.5"


Hidey and Scruffy were my cats who died recently, Hidey in January and Scruffy last spring. I miss them both.

(follow the links, in gray, to read about them)

Jaz and Rosebud

Duet

oils and acrylics on canvas, 10.5" x 9"

Jaz and Rosie are Standard Poodles.  They're graceful and gentle giants.  Their owners love plants and have a magnificent garden.  I tried to capture some of that.