I am working compulsively on something for March's up-coming Group Show, I hope all the Mad and Noisy artists are into this..... there is enough scope in the theme for everyone I think.
I am trying to produce a "kind of self-portrait" in pastels on paper, representing my childhood years, but done in the manner of portraits created by itinerant artists in Canada and the U.S.A. who took likenesses of men, women and children in a time before photography, in the early 19th century. Their work was often very stylized, and simple in concept as it probably didn't take more than a day to produce. And perhaps unskilled in academic learning, but showing the sort of details that people liked to see in the end product.
It is not easy to put myself into this mind-set, and I have produced a number of failures so far, but I have a couple of weeks still, and I will keep at it, and select the best one.
I have been reading THE ENGLISH FACE by David Piper ( by coincidence ? ) and find it really fascinating. Not just all the English gossip from the 18th and 19th centuries, but his comments about paintings that I have known for years.
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