Chaim Soutine "Arbre Couche"

Arbre Couche , copy Mary Payne , oil on canvas 60x81 cm.

This is my rendering of another of Chaim Soutine's quixotic paintings, many of them done in the South of France.   

Arbre Couche, 60x81cm Musee de Orangerie, Paris

Here is the print that I worked from issued by L'Orangerie in Paris where the painting hangs owned by Jean Walter and Paul Guillaume. I can see that I got carried away on the details.  His painting was probably done in a whirl of activity and finished in little time.   Whereas I over "thunk" mine.  I still enjoy seeing it though and will go back and look again at the original next time I am in Paris. 

The Woman in Green by Chaim Soutine ( copy by Mary Payne)

The Woman in Green ( copy) original by Chaim. Soutine, oil on canvas ,73x54 cm.

This is my copy of the "Woman in Green" done by Chaim Soutine in 1919.   It was difficult to copy and I am not satisfied with the hair and face.  It reads like an abstract painting when one tries to decode it and the elements of those types of paintings are almost impossible to copy. The most one can do is get the spirit of the work.  Still, I could have probably gotten a better likeness if I hadn't been working on rough jute which is "unforgiving".

I took a fancy to this artist's work when I visited the permanent collection of L'Orangerie in Paris.   I have copied two of Soutine's works.  This one is lighter in saturation than the photos show as it is painted on burlap like the original.   Soutine was a fascinating painter , often rendering dizzying, turbulent paintings.   Here is a good article about his life and art.  His story is unusual and fascinating .  http://www.litvakworld.com/lt/gallery/chaim-soutines-art-exhibition

The original painting of the "Woman in Green" is in a private collection and I have not seen it.  My working image was found in a book on the artist issued By Museo d'Arte Moderna in Lugano ( 1995).  Here below is a copy of the original.  In my copy I saw blue in the background so that is how I worked .  I don't see it in this copy at all. 

Cliff at Dieppe: Copy of a Claude Monet

Cliffs at Dieppe(original painted in 1882) , Copy by Mary Payne , oil on canvas

Before I did original art work, I started out by doing copies of famous master's works in oils.

I sold many but I kept about half for my own collection .  This is a copy I did before I realized that doing landscapes was missing the  incentive of being out in nature.  For me, it is more difficult and unsatisfying to copy an outdoor scene than any other kind of painting.    

All of the copies I have done served me in teaching me technique and composition.   Many that I sold have only a record with film, not pixels, so those I will not be able to share.

Below is a copy of the original painting  by Claude Monet posted on "how stuff works.com".

The Cliff at Dieppe by Claude Monet is an oil on canvas (26x32-1/4 inches) housed at Kunsthaus Zürich in Switzerland

The Cliff at Dieppe by Claude Monet

Claude Monet painted The Cliff at Dieppe in 1882. Through the course of the summer, Monet regularly made the short journey north along the Normandy coast from Pourville to Dieppe.
The sheer rise of the white chalk cliff, crowned by an old stone house with a red tile roof, intrigued Monet in its contrast to the placid shore below. He painted the beach in pale tones of pink, blue, and celadon green, roughing in the forms of the bathers with no more than a single stroke of black or gray.
Claude Monet continued to be intrigued by nature's rugged cliffs.

Amazonian Woman

Oil on Canvas, 55x73 cm.

This fanciful oil painting was influenced by my time studying the work of Tamara Lempicka and making copies of many of her paintings.   

    This is my Amazon woman, but as you can see she has no trouble in the city either.  She is modern woman personified.  She has an all seeing Egyptian eye. 

 I am thinking I might do a lino-cut of her since a sculptural painting such as this might lend itself to that technique. 

The Doughnut Eater and other stories

My sketch of Baba Yaga

About five years ago I did an exhibition entitled: The Doughnut Eater and other stories.  The centerpiece of the exhibition was the following collection of mixed media paintings. 

  They arose from a sketch I had done of Baba Yaga at the suggestion of an art teacher.   We were asked to take a personality from a childhood story and do an art project.  Monsieur had, at that point, told me about the tales of Baba Yaga, a Russian witch and she struck my imagination.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baba_Yaga 

So I chose what I imagined a modern Baba Yaga would look like and one thing led to another…..

 I ended up depicting some creatures who seemed to have been chomping on a jelly doughnut with raspberry filling.  So I started calling them " The Doughnut Eaters".

  Here in France it was the "mangeurs de beignets."  I also call the grouping " the monster series" as one of my friends dubbed them thus. ( Did I just say thus?)   I sold the last one to the well known street artist who comes to Nice every year, Omar Logang.   He says it reminded him of "the scream" by Munch.   He is a very good painter so I was flattered.

Mixed media on oil paper, 50x40 cm

 

 

 

 

"The scream"  sold

Back to basics…

Maybe I told you that I got some new gouges from Monsieur for Christmas.  I hadn't known that I wanted them!

   It was a great surprise to see how much more accurate it is to cut wood and lino with tools that stay sharp for a long period and some that get into tight corners.

  So I am back to drawing and experimenting with a very basic type of design which allows for hand coloring with watercolor afterwards…. using only one block.   

Here are the results of my first forays into a new material:  I used a thicker (4 cm) and lighter colored lino which makes it easier to see the design but also has the disadvantage of crumbling often when certain kinds of cuts are made.   Thicker linoleum also means that I won't be able to use the best roller press in the studio as no one else is using this size. 

Nevertheless I was able to print these black and white prints on our smaller, (and inferior) press at school and now I'm having the innocent pleasure of coloring them each by hand.  

 Maybe I am regressing to the desire of a coloring book ( which wasn't allowed when I was growing up).

In this one the frog is done with gold watercolor which doesn't show up in the photo.  I thought it would introduce a playful element which seems in keeping with my naive design.  Someone asked me what my theme was and I heard myself say: "enchanted forest".   Sometimes it feels good to be a kid again. 

You can see that I altered the design on this one slightly with a black pen after the print was made. (See the borders on the left. ) The biggest leaf at the top is done with silver gouache but the slight sheen does not show up in the photo.

For this one I used brown ink as the main color for the design.

Despite the poor background colors in these photos, all of the prints are done on cream colored DFK Rives archival paper.  

So which colors do you prefer?   This is a personality test!