Exercise: Annotate a Henry Moore Figure Sculpture, Part 4,Project 4

Annotate an image of a Henry Moore figure sculpture. If you can, choose one that you can actually go and see for yourself first - preferably one that's displayed in a public outdoor location rather than in a gallery.

Exercise:Annotate a Female Nude in the Western Tradition, Part 4, Project 3

This exercise asked me to:-

Choose one of the classic nudes in the western tradition, shown as the sole figure in a painting; so I decided to start with the one that inspired so many who followed - Giorgione's Sleeping Venus. This was the first time a Goddess had been shown sleeping, and the first time that Venus had been painted with dark hair, albeit with reddish highlights. 

The questions posed include:

Do you think this image invites the sensual gaze? If so, how has the artist used the formal elements of the painting to achieve this?

Compare your chosen image with this one by "a female artist", Maria Szantho. 

All of the discussion around feminism in the previous post perhaps made me notice immediately  the use of the phrase "a female artist" in this question, as if I am bound to find differences in these two paintings because they were done by people at opposite ends of the sexual spectrum. I must admit to being slightly put off when I see the preface "female" in front of someone's occupation. Art history language is extremely gender-biased, and the word "artist" refers to a man unless it is qualified by the adjective "woman".

 Is this relevant? Do you want to invite sexual sterotyping, OCA? Since I have trawled the internet and looked in every book I have without finding another copy or reference to this painting (date/size/medium/subject etc) I wonder why you didn't just write "unknown female artist"? After a lot of searching, I found one or two blogs that talked about this Hungarian artist, who was very well-known in her own country, representing it in the 1939 New York World's Fair with three of her paintings. So, not exactly unknown, but certainly hasn't stood the test of time like Giorgione.

Reclining Nude, Maria Szantho. Date unknown. Photo taken of image in OCA Course Handbook for this exercise.

Lastly, the exercise asks: Have you ever been to a life drawing class or drawn  or painted a female nude. Did you see this as a formal challenge or were you conscious of additional cultural factors at work?

I must say I found this exercise very hard-going. Instead of finding these annotations easier as I go along, I seem to be finding them harder and harder. Here goes:

Exercise: Annotatate a classical sculpture, Part 4, Project 3 - Aphrodite Crouching/Lely's Venus

The sculpture I have chosen for this exercise is one I have come to know well over the last few weeks, as I have attempted to draw it on two separate occasions (below right); both times made  difficult by the volume of tourist traffic in the more popular rooms of the British Museum. It is a beautiful piece, and well worth the interruptions and comments.

My pencil sketch done at British Museum

Lely's Venus, Roman,2nd Century BC

 Praxiteles' Knidian Venus,copy.

It would be difficult to overstate the importance of the naked and semi-naked Aphrodite/Venus as a mainstream subject of sculpture and painting in Western art. There are many variants,  of which the naked crouching Aphrodite is only one, but the attribution of the original subject is without question the Greek sculptor, Praxiteles. Praxiteles, as the first ever to show the Goddess completely naked, created a scandal by going against the social mores of Greek society and the sculptural traditions of the day which only allowed male sculptures to be shown naked. Not only was she naked, but she was doing something that every mortal did - bathing. This act of doing the commonplace brought her down from the Gods to a level where people could relate to her and she became more approachable. Placed in a shrine in her temple at Knidos in south-western Turkey, the Knidian Venus statue was later stolen, ending up in Constantinople where it is thought to have been destroyed in the fire of 476 AD. He defined the ideal which would influence how the female body would be depicted by artists for centuries afterwards, from the Romans to the Renaissance masters. The ancient writers Pliny and Lucian both describe in detail how the statue could evoke lust in her viewers, and the lengths they would go to see her from all directions; particularly admiring her soft flesh, her expression, her pose. 

Lely's Venus, as it is sometimes known, takes its name from the painter Sir Peter Lely (1618-80), who owned the sculpture after acquiring it from the collection of Charles I before the King's execution in 1649. After Lely died, it found its way back into the Royal Collection. The sculpture had previously been in the collection of the Gonzaga family in Mantua (northern Italy) for several hundred years, and was there in 1600 when Peter Paul Rubens first visited Italy. Rubens was so impressed by the artwork he encountered that he defined the style of the voluptuous nude in his paintings for years to come.  It came to England after being purchased from the Gonzagas in 1627 for Charles I, an avid collector of artworks.

It is a sensual sculpture, the sculptor's ideal of what the perfect (human form) female body of the Goddess Aphrodite might look like in the nude, made between the the 2nd and 1st century BC in the Antonine period of the Roman Empire by Doidalsas of Bithynia, after the original by the innovative sculptor Praxiteles. Often, the crouching Venus-type statue was placed around a pool so that her reflection could be seen in the water.  

Ionian Aphrodite

 
Earliest Greek sculptures of Aphrodite are thought to have been based on the Hindu Goddess Laxmi, and were much more modest, celebrating her role as the patroness of natural growth. As shown in a copy of an Ionian sculpture (right), approximately 6th Century BC,Aphrodite was depicted wearing a close-fitting chitton and long robe, holding a dove/fruit or flower - all symbols of mating and fertility (Museum of Lyon).

Nude depictions of Aphrodite (Venus to the Romans) inspired slavish following and were a critical development in Classical sculpture, which reflected the rising social status of women and changing attitudes towards them in Ancient Greek and Roman society. So famous did the Aphrodite of Knidos become, in fact, that she inspired generations of artists across the ancient world to make copies. Statue after statue of Aphrodite was produced, which mimicked or played with the stance and position of the Knidian Aphrodite, and thus her sexual ambiguity.  Sculptors who succeeded Praxiteles created more and more sexual and erotic statues, teasing the viewer and opening debate as to whether she was modestly trying to shield herself or inviting attention. It is the Greeks and the Romans we have to thank for defining beauty in women in a way that would influence artists for centuries.

 

Venus of Rhodes

The crouching Venus pose, already popular with the Greeks, became even more popular with the Romans, with her sexuality emphasized more as time went on. Greek mythology states that Aphrodite was born of the sea, and she was often depicted with wet hair. The variant (left) shows Aphrodite wringing out her wet hair and not attempting to cover herself. This association with water inspired 18th century garden designers to include Venus in many of their most ambitious projects.

Lely's Venus, in particular, has had a direct effect on many artists over the last several hundred years and almost certainly inspired Marcantonio Raimondi in his engraving of Crouching Venus in 1505-6 (below right), Rubens in his Allegory of 1612-13 (below left) and the Irish painter, Adam Buck, in his watercolour landscape (below centre).

Marcantonio Raimondi 1505-6

"Allegory" (1612-13) by Peter Paul Rubens

Adam Buck (1759-1833) Man and Woman Admiring Venus

References:

Beard, M. and Henderson J., 2001. Classical Art: from Greece to Rome, Oxford Uni. Press

Gersht, R., Aquatic Figure Types from Caesarea-Maritima, Department of Art History, Tel 

                    Aviv University (available at: http://www5.tau.ac.il/arts/departments/images

                   /stories/journals/arthistory/Assaph6/03gersht.pdf )

Havelock, C. H., 1995,The Aphrodite of Knidos and Her Successors: A Historical Review of 

                   the Female Nude in Greek Art, Ann Arbor

Honour, H. and Fleming, J., 7th Edition, 2009, A world History of Art, Laurence King, 

                  Publishing Ltd, London

Morford, M.,Lenardson, R., Sham, M., 9th edition, Classical Mythology, Oxford Uni. Press

 

https://www.britishmuseum.org

http://www.fischerarthistory.com/aphroditevenus.html

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/greece/hetairai 

           /aphrodite.html

Exercise: Commission a Portrait, Part 4, Project 2

Pastel drawing of my husband for Drawing I

For this exercise, I have to imagine that I am  commissioning a portrait of someone and I have chosen myself. I have already commissioned two professional portraits of my husband and have even attempted to get a good likeness by drawing him myself for the Drawing I course (left), so I'd like to see what an artist would make of me as the subject. Why? Well, doing the research exercise for Project 2 on why artists make self-portraits was a great help in thinking about why I would want a portrait of anyone, (see post dated June 3rd, 2014), and I was particularly struck by Chagall's 1911 painting "I and the Village" (see below right) where the artist incorporated scenes from his early life in Russia with symbols of Christianity and folklore to bring together memories of his childhood, in a Cubist style. Would I want this portrait to bring back memories? 

Chagall: I and the Village, 1911

I was also struck by aspects of Courbet's "The Painter's Studio - A Real Allegory of a Seven Year Phase in my Moral and Artistic Life" (1855) where he includes many of the people who have influenced his artistic life. Do I want my portrait to say something of the people/ideas/events that have influenced my life?

Courbet: The Painter's Studio - A Real Allegory... ,1855

Do I want this portrait to say anything of my inner self, or just to be "the glove" that Dali describes, which concentrates on the recognisable characteristics that define what I look like at this age and stage? Does immortalising myself in canvas and paint come into this? And how about the style? I have so many photographs of myself that I definitely don't want a photo-realist image with every pore visible. Mmmm.....complex, when you get down to it. I want there to be included something of Courbet's idea of the influences in my life with some of Chagall's storytelling but in the style of David Hockney when he was experimenting with photo-montage or that of the Dadaist Hannah Hoch (below) with her combination of newspaper cuttings, photographs and print.

Hannah Hoch: Self-Portrait 1971

Hoch produced a collage towards the end of her life (left, 1971) which included photos of her at various ages. Good idea but very busy. I would want her to include some references to a country I have lived and worked in - the more than twenty five years I spent in India, Turkey, Canada and Holland - and the influences/freedoms I have enjoyed being born in the latter half of the 20th century. I would like this portrait to celebrate life in general and my life in particular, but to be selective - not as busy as the collage on the left - perhaps more like "Roma" below.

Hoch, Roma 1925

   
I definitely want her to understand how much I enjoyed the visual impact enjoyed in countries where life is lived outdoors - the colours, the sounds, the light, the aromas and the flora and fauna of these areas (especially India and Istanbul, but also the winter blue-sky-white-snow- blinding-brightness of Canadian winters) and how they have formed such a rich tapestry of memories for me. But including all of these place is difficult, so I have decided I want my portrait to be a memory of 2005-2012 and to concentrate mainly on my time in India.

My photo images to help Hannah Hoch

To help, I am going to give Hannah a small sheet of images from my photo collection that she can look at and make reference to in her work, but I don't want to dictate the final work - and I definitely don't want her to include everything. I am excited to see what she makes of it. Just creating the contact sheet of images gives me a good idea of the colours I would like to see in the final portrait.
There should be the blues of the sky and the ocean; the purples/pinks/oranges of the sunset; the dark contrasts between indoors and outdoors and the filtered light through elaborate stonework; the greens of the palms and the pinks/oranges of the bougainvillea; the warmth of the skin tones and the contrast of the saris. It should exude calmness - it is the sounds of the early mornings and sunsets that stay with me when I think of my home in India, not the frenetic roads and bustling stations that are part of every city anywhere on the planet.

 

What she chooses to do with the images is the exciting part. I don't want a portrait that is so predictable that there is no mystery, and I would like the result to be one that holds my interest for a long time.
 

David Tierney Self-Portrait 1985

A painting on my wall at home in London (below) is one I bought in Canada from David Tierney. It is a self-portrait, in colour tones that I really enjoy. There are a lot of warm tones, but with lots of blue. I will hope that Hannah picks up on the theme of the pictures I have given her as nature-history-spirituality-health and that they tell her a little about the things which give me pleasure.


Perhaps Hannah will come up with something like this photomontage (below), which I have made using cut and paste technique and Adobe Photoshop, as an example of how she might incorporate various images from my memory bank into a portrait of my time in India. I shall call it "Journey" as it represents many changes I had to go through in order to work and live happily in such a different culture. Many of these are changes of routine, change of workplace, change in diet, change in dress - what I would call "easy" changes, many of which we all make when going on holiday - but the really challenging changes are those that involve changes in attitude and those that involve managing to remain upbeat and optimistic when missing people/things and living with a degree of isolation in a very different culture. I hope Hannah Hoch can allude to the psychological and behavioural "journey" that I have gone through while in my years in India.

The mock-up of "Journey" which I made from my photos, to celebrate the years of living and working and India.

I have really enjoyed this exercise. It made me smile; and it made me ask a lot of questions about what I would want to be included in a portrait, helping me focus on what the important elements are that would give me satisfaction.

I cannot imagine not enjoying whatever my chosen portraitist, Hannah Hoch, comes up with, but if anything would disappoint me it would be if she produced a work that was very small. I would like this to be large, at least 1m x 1.5m and I hope she incorporates a mixture of media.

Exercise: Annotate a Self-Portrait, Part 4, Project 2

Self-Portrait as a Soldier (1915), Ernst Kirchner, 69 x 61 cm

The painting I have chosen for this annotation is Self-Portrait as a Soldier by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, painted in 1915 in oil on canvas, when he was thirty-five. As a driving force of Die Brucke (The Bridge) in 1905, Kirchner is one of the major artists of the 20th century - intense, passionate, neurotic and expressive - and a prolific self-portraitist.  “I paint,” Kirchner said, “with my nerves and my blood.  The heaviest burden of all is the pressure of the War and the increasing superficiality. It gives me incessantly the impression of a bloody carnival. I feel as though the outcome is in the air and everything is topsy-turvy.. All the same, I keep on trying to get some order in my thoughts and to create a picture of the age out of confusion, which is after all my function."

• In this portrait, Kirchner wears the uniform of driver in Field Artillery Regiment No. 75, for which he volunteered to avoid having to face the worst of the fighting in WW1. (He was in hospital at the time, recovering from general weakness and lung problems exacerbated by alcoholism and drug abuse, and would likely be anticipating a return to duty.) In a specific sense, it illustrates his worst fear; that the War would leave him mutilated and unable to paint; but in a general sense, the painting is voicing the angst of his generation - that civilisation would be destroyed and art would cease to exist. This topic was typical of the Expressionists at his time, but Kirchner added his own personal fear to the condemnation of war. It has been compared to Munch's "The Scream" (Springer), as the best example of the expressionists' style, although the evidence of planning in the composition led the painting to be described as "controlled expressionism" (Klaus-Peter Schuster) as the eye is led by careful placement along the horizontal and vertical axes to the focal point - the bloodless stump.

• The two figures in this portrait, artist-soldier and model, display tension in their body language. Both show unseeing eyes, Kirchner's without pupils and the model's without direction. Both also show mask-like faces, Kirchner's drawn and vacant-looking, with eyes reflecting the colour of his uniform; and the model gazing out as if waiting for instruction about a pose. The  artist  is without a brush or palette; both figures are unable to do the job the scene demands. 

  

  Artist and His Model (1910)

  This painting is in contrast to his earlier work, The Artist and his Model (1910), where Kirchner is smoking a pipe while confidently wielding brush and palette with his model seated in a scene that hinted at power and eroticism. In Self-Portrait as Soldier, Kirchner needs to hold on to the cushion/chair back on his left while he holds up his bloodless, gangrenous stump - his painting arm - and his cigarette dangles flaccidly from his mouth as if it symbolises his sexual impotence. It is as if the War has reduced him to a number, stopped his creativity, and left him powerless to engage with the opposite sex.

• Kirchner had studied architecture in Dresden, followed by brief technical studies in Munich, where he was exposed to a wide variety of creative influences, and decided to change course to a study of painting.  Although he denied being influenced by any other artists - he even repainted some works and changed the dates on others to "prove" that they predated Fauvism - his use of colour is reminiscent of Gauguin and his wild brushstrokes of van Gogh. He did openly admire the woodcuts of Durer,  and revived the tradition of woodblock printing. The lack of superfluous detail (typical of expressionism) in his work has its roots in wood-engraving. (For a more detailed look at the techniques and influences of Expressionism, see my earlier post on 16 Dec., 2013)

• 

  Street Scene, 1913

  The vivid pinks and reds which in previous paintings have hinted at excitement are here used to illustrate blood and skinless flesh, while the acidic greens which hint at decadence in his paintings of street scenes (as in Street Scene, 1913, opp.) are used to illustrate decay and putrefaction in Self-Portrait as a Soldier. Both his mental state and his artistic output were severely affected by WW1. His worst fears of injury or death were never to come true, as he never returned to the front; nor did he ever fully recover. Depression was to return in 1926 and he committed suicide in 1938. Although he saw himself as someone who worked in the German tradition, he became a victim of Nazi campaign against degenerate art and was eventually ostracised from mainstream German art.

Selz, Peter. "Kirchner's Self-Portrait as a Soldier in Relation to Earlier Self-Portraits." Allen Memorial Art Museum Bulletin 14, no. 3 (Spring 1957) - See more at: http://www.oberlin.edu/amam/Kirchner_SelfPortrait.htm#sthash.TpY6esB2.dpuf

References:
Springer, P. (2002), Hand and Head: Ernst Ludvig Kirchner's Self-Portrait as Soldier, University of California Press Ltd., London, UK

Laneyrie, N. (2004), How to Read Paintings, Chambers Harrap Publishers, Edinburgh, UK

Selz, P., Kirchner's Self-Portrait as a Soldier in relation to earlier Self-Portraits, in Allen Memorial Art Museum Bulletin 14, no 3, Spring 1957,pp 91-97

Wolf, R.,(2003), Kirschner: On the Edge of the Abyss of Time, Taschen Basic Art, Cologne, Germany

Selz, Peter. "Kirchner's Self-Portrait as a Soldier in Relation to Earlier Self-Portraits." Allen Memorial Art Museum Bulletin 14, no. 3 (Spring 1957) - See more at: http://www.oberlin.edu/amam/Kirchner_SelfPortrait.htm#sthash.TpY6esB2.dpuf

Selz, Peter. "Kirchner's Self-Portrait as a Soldier in Relation to Earlier Self-Portraits." Allen Memorial Art Museum Bulletin 14, no. 3 (Spring 1957) - See more at: http://www.oberlin.edu/amam/Kirchner_SelfPortrait.htm#sthash.TpY6esB2.dpuf

Exercise: Analyse a Formal Portrait - Part 4, Project 1

Tony Blair (2012) by Alastair Adams, Oil on Canvas

The portrait I have chosen for this exercise is a fairly recent one of ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair, painted in 2012 while the Olympic Games were going on, and on show to the public for the first time at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters Annual Exhibition at the Mall Galleries in London from May 8-22, 2014. As it is owned by the artist, Alastair Adams, and has never been shown publicly before, there is little written about it. Adams states that he painted it with Blair's cooperation when he was doing an official portrait for the National Portrait Gallery, and wanted to catch the more informal side of the international statesman that he had come to know. I had the chance to see if for myself at the Mall Galleries exhibition, thought it was striking, and felt it would be a good idea to attempt to analyse a portrait without the help of the experts.

Tony Blair (2011) 4' x 3'

The style is quite different from the official portrait Adams did (opp.) which can be seen in the National Portrait Gallery, and has no props in it. In Adams' informal version above, the eye is  drawn immediately to Blair's relaxed face, framed by the slightly pop version of the flag around his head, and the militant slogan above it. It is painted in the realist style and is, technically, very good, with lots of background detail that can be interpreted both literally and figuratively. For me, living through the years of the Troubles, massacres in Africa, genocide in Bosnia and the ever-present threat of Middle East crises, the painting is strangely discordant. On the one hand the subject is relaxed, but the background seems to be saying Be Wary. There are a lot of threats in the world to peace.

It shows a youthful-looking hands-in-pockets Mr Blair at home in his house in Buckinghamshire, wearing jeans, an open-necked shirt and a jacket that looks slightly like the sort of bomber jacket that his friend George “Dubbya” Bush favours. There is a strong white uneven mark on the right side of the jacket which looks like a paint splatter, but is possibly a logo or a printed map of some area. Perhaps the jacket was given as a memento to those who took part in a conference he was attending. (It looks very like the collection of t-shirts, baseball caps, baseball jackets, pens  and knick-knacks that my husband amassed in attending conferences as part of his career in international business .) Blair is standing in front of his office desk, a traditional mahogany one with brass rosette drawer handles, which holds two phones and some family photographs; the former suggesting that he is a busy man who sees himself as a communicator (he is Britain's Middle East Peace Envoy after all), and the latter suggesting that his family are just one of his priorities. A blue electrical cord crosses the desk, perhaps attached to a lap-top or tablet computer.

But it is the painting behind him on the wall with a Union Jack in the centre of it that makes this portrait so powerful for me. As it is in Mr Blair's private collection (bought in 2008 for £26,250 from Christie's) and located in his study, it gives the first impression of him being very patriotic. However, this painting on the wall is not quite what it seems at first glance. Painted by Ken Howard R.A., who was appointed official artist of the Imperial War Museum in 1973, and spent time documenting the Troubles in Northern Ireland. it shows a Loyalist mural bearing the slogan "NO SURRENDER". What are we to make of this? No-one who lived in the UK from the late sixties could avoid knowing about the Troubles. Tony Blair worked hard on the peace process in Northern Ireland in the 1990's. Later, in his work in the Middle East, he said, "To bring people together you have to understand in a genuine sense why they feel as strongly as they do. This is not a matter of reason but of emotion."  "Many of the hundreds of hours I spent in discussion with the parties were not simply about specific blockages or details of the negotiation, but rather about absorbing and trying to comprehend why they felt as they did and communicating that feeling to the other side. In this way, they became my friends, because I then had inside me something of the passions they felt inside them." I notice here he makes no mention of Mo Mowlam or John Major - a huge oversight!

Was his purchase of the Howard painting part of his attempt to understand the depth of emotion felt by the Loyalists and resulting in so many acts of terrorism? Did he believe both sides were right? Is he somehow disloyal to Britain by owning a painting like this? Or is Alastair Adams showing us that Tony Blair believes deeply that, with mediation, conflicts can be resolved. Does Blair believe he is the only one who can solve them (the much-written-about-Messiah-complex) or does Blair the pragmatist believe that people create conflicts and people will solve them; the key being understanding?

I am in the latter category. No matter what history will make of Tony Blair the politician, I believe the man is deeply committed to the idea of world peace, even if he does manage to put himself at the forefront a lot of the time and take a disproportionate amount of credit when things go well;  and I also believe that Alastair Adams has captured this dedication beautifully in this portrait.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/24/tony-blair-northern-ireland-peace-process
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/tony-blair-portrait-britpop-union-3496713
http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/474072/Commissioned-portrait-by-Alastair-Adams-reveals-Tony-Blair-s-Loyalist-painting

Exercise: Annotate a Portrait - Part 4, Project 1

The portrait I have chosen for this exercise is one that I have seen for myself in the Tate (London), by one of my favourite painters, David Hockney. Called simply "My Parents" it is a large canvas, almost square, with the two subjects portrayed almost life-size.

The Tate describes Hockney's style in this painting as changing towards a "closer study of human behaviour". The question I would like to address in this annotation is "Whose behaviour - Hockney's or his parents'?" as the painting is not of the personal space inhabited by Mr and Mrs Hockney but that of Hockney himself.

"My Parents" (1977), David Hockney, 183 x 183cm Oil on Canvas,

• The first things that strikes me about “My Parents” is that portraits are normally of the subject's own surroundings, in their study or in their formal sitting-room, but this is a portrait of a couple on their son's turf, with their son's furniture and books and not their own.
  
  
• It seems like quite a calm scene, yet I feel a bit of tension. The parents are quite far apart, one reading intently and the other being very well-behaved and co-operative. Did they get along? Are we to read differences in their personality here – one being placid and the other not?
  
  
• The colours used in “My Parents” are mostly on the cool spectrum, blues, greens and lilacs with touches of reds in his father's clothes and in the areas of flesh on both of them; as well as the vivid yellows and pinks of the tulips. This helps the painting feel calm, quiet and orderly. There is a similarity with the background colours of “Oath of the Horatii (1784) by David.
  
  
• David Hockney is on record as saying that he believes, like Picasso, “you can't have art without play”. He believes a sense of playfulness is essential to all activities, as he equates it with curiosity. In an interview after his father's death, he said, “In a certain sense, one only makes pictures for oneself. I work on the assumption that if something I am doing interests me it might interest someone else; but I can't be bothered too much if it doesn't, as long as it interests me.” 
   
• What does this painting say about Hockney's sense of playfulness, his curiosity? Certainly there are plenty of clues. The vase of tulips, as in a traditional vanitas painting, may be an acceptance that life is finite; that his parents were coming to the end of their lives. (He wasn't to know that his father would be dead within six months of this sitting), or it could have been placed there to tell us something about his mother's love of flowers and home life, in an homage to Dutch Still Life paintings. 
   
• The books on the shelf of the artist's studio table could signify that he likes to keep these books on hand (the table is on castors and can be moved around). By including all the volumes of Proust's “Remembrance of Things Past”, is Hockney remembering all his own memories of life with his parents, or is the placement of this book an acknowledgement that his parents have many happy memories of a life they have described as “rich”, I wonder. Proust was also interested in descriptive space. He viewed the study of the things we surround ourselves with as the way to understanding our inner life. The book on Chardin, famous for his depictions of people in their intimate spaces rather than the usual-for-the-time narrative allegories may be there to show that Hockney wanted this portrait to say more about how he viewed painting than about being an intimate one of his parents in their own space. Was the use of precise measurement and geometry in the painting also emphasised by the choice of the painting hanging on the studio wall and visible in the reflection from the mirror – Piero della Francesca's “Baptism of Christ” (right).
  
  Piero della Francesca was known to be an authority on perspective and geometry in his time, but he was also noted for being one of the first artists to paint descriptive space rather than pictorial space.
  
  
  
• The book being read by Hockney's father is also significant ( Aaron Scharf's “Art and Photography”) as Hockney made his own views on the subject clear in his 2001 book, “Secret Knowledge”. He makes the connection between the development of optics and the development of representational painting, and stresses that it was not so much a connection as a condition.
   
• In conclusion I feel that this portrait of his parents says much more about what David Hockney thinks about art and painting than it does about his parents; because it is his space that his parents are inhabiting, his studio with his books, his paintings on the studio wall and his chairs. It is Hockney's inner life that we learn about here, what is important to him, not an intimate look at the behaviour of his parents.

Exercise: Looking at Cartoons, Part 4, Project 1

 

With an upcoming referendum vote in Scotland about independence from the rest of the UK, it is not surprising that Alex Salmond has come under a lot of criticism; especially  for his lack of information on exactly what independence would mean.

In the cartoon above,  he has been portrayed as a jovial, isn't-this-fun Loch Ness Monster, rising up from the Loch to "rock the boat" of the United Kingdom, with Prime Minister David Cameron and Labour Leader Ed Milliband looking quite shocked by the tartan monster's size and threat. David Cameron has the last word, indicating that he is the more powerful of the two in the boat.

 David Cameron himself is often the subject of satire in the newspapers, as can be seen from this recent comment by Dave Brown in the Independent on Cameron's attempt to placate the eurosceptics in his party and stop the voters from going over to UKIP by promising a yes/no vote if he is re-elected in 21015. The cartoon below is a metaphor of what might happen if Cameron's plan doesn't work - i.e. the UK could be left out in the cold with no hope of re-admittance. Nigel Farange (UKIP leader) is represented here by a toad, while the British bulldog represents the eurosceptics.

 

The Royal Family are often the subject of profile cartoons, especially Prince Charles, who is instantly recognisable by his large ears, close-together eyes and receding chin. In this cartoon below, the addition of the ceremonial jacket with epaulets makes it obvious who is being lampooned. The cartoon shows the difference between a sketch of someone and a cartoon, as it is the exaggeration of the features that makes all the difference.

 

Another figure who is often the subject of cartoons currently is Mayor Boris Johnson, who is instantly recognisable by his blonde, slightly unkempt thatch. After the 2012 Olympics, Boris was seen as trying to be a crowd-pleaser and the subject of many gentle jibes. 

His plain speaking is also commented on, though and in the cartoon on the right, he is being likened to the dog that features in the advertisements for Dulux paint because they are both shaggy, but his forthrightness in using a certain word is alluded to in the changed name on the can. This is a very simple but clever mechanism that is also very economical. The picture says it all.