March Notes - 2025
Receiving, 50 inches x 50 inches, oil paint and acrylic marker on canvas
Spring Cleaning
This winter I reworked some older paintings, in some cases creating completely new works. You can see those HERE. Another direction has emerged in the work. Mostly in a square format I have been making paintings with an all-over composition. There is motion in the paintings, sometimes reflective light, many details, but also a general gestalt. You get one painting when you look at it close up, a different one from a distance, and yet another when you move in front of it. The experience of the painting can’t be replicated in a photograph. You need to see it in person.
The Apron, 48 inches x 48 inches, oil, metallic paint, and acrylic marker on canvas
Professor of Energy, 40 inches x 40 inches, oil, metallic paint and acrylic marker on canvas
Bloom, 40 inches x 40 inches, oil and metallic paint and acrylic marker on canvas
HISTORY SPOTLIGHT: Suzanne Valadon
Suzanne Valadon, Portrait de famille, 1912. Gift to the Musées nationaux from M. Cahen-Salvador in memory of Mme Fontenelle-Pomaret, 1976. Paris, Musée d’Orsay, on loan to the Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne. Photo © GrandPalaisRmn (Musée d’Orsay) / Christian Jean / Jean Popovitch
Left to right, the people depicted are André Utter, her much-younger-soon-to-be-husband, Suzanne Valadon herself. her son Maurice Utrillo, and her mother Magdeleine Valadon.
FROM THE LIBRARY :THE VALADON DRAMA; the Life of Suzanne Valadon
In short, Suzanne Valadon, model, artist, mother of artist Utrillo, was a handful. She was admired by Dégas, who was the first to buy her work, lovers with Renoir, Satie, and Puvis de Chavannes, to name a few. Her son, Utrillo, who was mentally unstable, was a mediocre artist (in my opinion) who became very famous and consumed much of her life.
The book also givse a real sense of the bohemian life of Montmartre at the time. [See full review below]
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Suzanne Valadon, born in 1865 of an erratic mother and an anonymous father, was by the very circumstances of birth destined to live an unconventional life. Her volatile nature, her sensuality found fallow ground in the surging, twisted streets of Montmartre, where her mother, lost in an alcoholic fog, sought oblivion. Her early antics as an outrageous gamine did little to indicate the creative and emotional richness that were to distinguish the later life of this tiny and vivid person. By the time Suzanne was in her teens, she not only was a favorite model of the Montmartre artists, but had found a means of expression in her won passionate and spontaneous painting. As a close friend of Lautrec and Degas, as the mistress of Renoir, Satie and countless other artists, and as the wife of the much younger Utter, the fabric of her life consisted of two dominant threads -- the love of painting and the love of love. Alternating between extreme affluence and poverty, it was not until her son, Maurice Utrillo, was in his teens that she became obsessed by her role as mother. Convinced that her son was the greatest living painter, tormented by his maniacal urge toward self destruction, she attacked the problems of motherhood with the same intensity with which she pursued admiration. Her battle for Maurice's sanity and love, however, was waged too late, and she met her ultimate defeat in a lonely, wistful withdrawal into herself and the past.
A full and dramatic biography of a woman, her son, and the rich if confused climate which nurtured them. Of particular interest to enthusiasts of the impressionist and post impressionist school, John Storm's careful factual recapitulation is easily as dramatic and entertaining as the available fictional treatments of artists' lives. (Kirkus Review)
AT THE MOVIES: SATIE AND SUZANNE
To be honest, this film doesn’t do it for me. It is too much of an artificial construct. But if you like Cirque de Soleil you might find this tolerable.
“In 1893, French composer Erik Satie had a brief but passionate love affair with painter Suzanne Valadon. Seventeen years later, the river Seine breaks its banks, flooding most of Paris. Pursued by the surging waters Suzanne (Veronica Tennant) seeks refuge in an after hours cafe in Monmartre. There she encounters her former lover Erik Satie (Nicholas Pennell). As the floodwaters rise, the cast of trapped cafe denizens, including four exotic contortionists and a jester from the Cirque du Soleil, blend their expressive styles. The poignant story of reconciliatory love unfolds and we are entranced by the cafe patrons' fantastical machinations set against Erik Satie's mystical piano works. The choreography is by the Cirque de Soleil's Debra Brown.”
ART SPOTLIGHT: FALLING, FALLING
Falling, Falling, 30 inches x 74 inches, oil paint and acrylic markers on canvas
I started making paintings with these tiny circles that look like chainmail in my small paintings on panel, sometimes grouping several together to help me imagine what they might look like as large paintings. Now, I am making them large. You can view some of the small paintings HERE. And other large “chainmail” paintings HERE. More to come.