Some time ago I subscribed to a site called Artwork Archive, one of a several available tools for managing artwork.
At first I just entered my drawings and paintings indiscriminately, using hastily made photographs, in order to keep track of the work I had, what had been given to people as gifts, and what had been sold. I never took the time or the trouble to use the multiple features offered, such as adding up expenses, generating invoices, or setting up a public profile.
The work can be organised as a portfolio, in the order of one’s choice, or sorted into collections
Then when I started entering art for online exhibitions or competitions, I kept getting asked for my website address, so I decided I now needed my own art website. After wasting numerous hours trying to choose between Word, Winx and Squarespace, and more hours attempting to navigate their sites, I belatedly realised the Artwork Archive Public Profile would do the job more than adequately.
It would save me from paying for another site, plus their client support is excellent.
Here is a random page showing the tools offered, and how the work looks in the portfolio mode
So if I have not posted anything here for a while, it is because I’ve been working on taking better photos, deciding which pieces to put on the public platform, and entering any relevant information. All this takes an inordinate amount of time…
Viewed as a portfolio
But here it is! Although it is still a work in progress, and will continue to be one as I make new work and improve my presentation and other parameters, I am now proud to reveal it to you.
Viewed as Collections
If you are interested in actually going on-site, here is a link.
Can one have a horrible life, punctuated by difficulties and tragedies and ending in extermination at Auschwitz, yet leave behind work that, despite its disturbing themes, is poignant, breathtaking and uplifting in its luminosity and colour?
This is the case of Charlotte Salomon, the only Jewish artist who died in the Holocaust to leave behind such a large body of work. It consists of 769 works painted between 1941 and 1943—a mere two years—while she was hiding from the Nazis in the South of France. In October of that year, 5-months-pregnant Salomon was captured and deported to Auschwitz where she was immediately killed.
Born to a prosperous and well-assimilated Jewish family in Berlin, Charlotte was 16 when the Nazis came to power. By 1938 it became too dangerous for her to continue her studies, so she left the art school she was attending, and after Kristallnacht she was sent to live with her grandparents in Nice; her father had been interned and, when her stepmother succeeded in freeing him, they left for Amsterdam. Her mother, suffering from depression, had committed suicide when she was eight.
After several attempts, her grandmother also succeeded in killing herself and Charlotte remained with her grandfather, who it appears was abusive. To escape him, she went to Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat where—in order to recover her mental sanity—she started painting; stating that she was driven by the question, “whether to take her own life or undertake something wildly unusual”.
Painting obsessively, in less than two years she produced more than 1.300 gouaches, amongst which she chose the 769 which she numbered and edited, adding text, captions and transparent overlays, to make a kind of autobiography outlining the main events of her life—speaking of herself in the third person, altering all the names and adding elements of imagination.
In 1942 she was obliged, due to her residence permit, to join her grandfather in Nice. Shockingly, shortly after, she poisoned him with a Veronal omelette, then drew him as he lay dead (the drawing exists). She made a 35-page confession which she sent to a former lover who, however, never received it; it remained a secret until much later.
In 1943, as the Nazis closed in, she packed up her paintings and gave them to a local doctor with instructions to forward them to Otillie Moore, a wealthy American who was her protector and sponsor. At war’s end, the package found its way to her remaining family.
In 1943, Charlotte had married Alaxander Nagler, another German Jew refugee, with whom she had been confined in Otillie Moore’s house for a while. Soon after their marriage, they were both deported and murdered.
I find it beyond me to talk about her work, which is based on film-making techniques and is extremely layered and complex; and one must also follow the narrative, in its dream-like dimension. It is, in some ways, a precursor to the graphic novel as we know it today. Although Salomon has always been classed as a Holocaust artist, her work—save for very few drawings—is not about the Holocaust: it is about her childhood, her very disfunctional family, her life and her loves. In the final pages of her book, two sentences stand out. She writes, ‘And with dream-awakened eyes she saw all the beauty around her, saw the sea, felt the sun, and knew; she had to vanish for a while from the human plane and make every sacrifice in order to create her world anew out of the depths.’
I have seen her paintings live in a couple of exhibitions, and they are simply wonderful. I have a book published by the Royal Academy of Arts, with colour reproductions, which I highly recommend.
More information:
Charlotte is a biography by David Foekinos, which I have not read yet, but which has excellent reviews. This is the Amazon link to the English version (the original is French).
Also there is a very interesting article in the New Yorker with more information than I have given on both her life and her work, and great images. Link below:
On a trip to London my fondness for portraits drew me, first, to the refurbished National Portrait Gallery. A few highlights below.
The Duke of Wellington, by Sir Thomas LawrenceHenry James, by John Singer SargentLucian Freud’s portrait of Irish writer Caroline Blackwood, after they had eloped to Paris together.A wonderfully quirky self-portrait by Raqib Shaw, The Final Submission in Fire on Ice. The detail is amazing if you zoom in.The beautiful Zadie Smith, by Toyin Ojih Odutola
Onwards to the National Gallery, to see the Franz Hals exhibition. One of the most important 17th-century Dutch artists, Hals was a portraitist par excellence, a virtuoso who painted mostly a la prima, without a preliminary sketch (this is difficult to imagine, given his assured brushstrokes and beautiful detail.)
His portraits possess a unique liveliness of expression, and he painted his subjects smiling or laughing, something few painters dared to attempt.
The Laughing Cavalier, one of his most famous paintings
He also portrayed people in informal positions, especially his friends…
…and was sought after by couples and families for his seemingly casual, yet carefully posed compositions, where the affection between the subjects is apparent.
The portrait of the young girl below was one of my favourites, due to the sweetness of her expression.
He was also great at painting hands, one of my predilections.
The lace cuff, the pearl bracelet…
My one caveat is that his sitters are not particularly attractive, if I may be permitted to say so. A fact impressed upon me as, going out of the exhibition, I came upon a portrait of a young man by Titian.
And another by Bronzino. Were Italians better looking than the Dutch, or did the painters idealise them more?
I then wandered into a small but stunning exhibition of the idiosyncratic painter Jean-Etienne Liotard. Born in Geneva, he travelled widely and was a master of pastel, a very delicate and subtle medium.
In 1754 he produced a masterpiece, The Lavergne Family Breakfast, which he sold to William Ponsonby, Viscount Duncannon, for the then princely sum of 200 guineas. Upon the latter’s invitation he went with him to Constantinople, where he stayed for four years, growing a long a bushy beard, adopting Turkish dress and calling himself the ‘Turkish Painter.’
I really find this lovely – the detail, the expression on the faces…
Having not seen his painting for twenty years, he then went back and made an exact replica in oil. This is the first time the paintings have been exhibited together.
On the left in oil, and on the right the original in pastel
Liotard sounds like a very amusing fellow, as well as being a most accomplished artist. However, having met the love of his life, he shaved off his beard, this being a condition of the marriage. He made numerous portraits in pastel, such as the one below of Lady Anne Somerset, looking much older than her fourteen years, with her cascading locks and plunging neckline.
I will end this post with the portrait of a horse, the beautiful Arabian stallion Whistlejacket, by George Stubbs. One of my favourite pictures in the National Gallery.
When I was fourteen, my school entered one of my paintings in a competition in India, The Shankar’s International Children’s Competition. How my—very inspiring—art teacher, Mrs Orfanou, came upon this competition, I have no idea.
I won a ‘gold medal’ in my category, for my painting of racehorses. I think it was done in gouache.
I don’t remember having actually received a real gold medal, but I must have had some kind of certificate and also a copy of the book the organisers published each year.
There are 17000 entries from 83 countries! There are twelve pages of photographs of the gold medalists, for every category. Along with the paintings, there are also short stories and poems.
Look how old-fashioned some of the suggested subjects are—I wonder if kids today even know what a pedlar or a hawker is.
Interestingly, I googled the competition, and it continued until 2019! Having been set up in 1949 for children in India, the next year it was opened to kids from all over the world. Sadly, I could not find anything more recent than 2019, so I assume it is no more.
In an unexpected turn of events, via the competition I acquired an Indian penpal named, if memory serves me right, Rajesh Malhotra, with whom I corresponded for a number of years. No idea what we wrote about, I suppose school and hobbies etc. We also practiced our English! (This was before the internet, and Facebook, obviously—people actually wrote letters.)
Footnote: When you decide to sort out the bookcases, the unexpected might turn up.
Seeing as my studio is also my kitchen, I had been confining myself to work on paper: pencil and ink drawings, charcoal, collage, mixed media, and aquarelle. Easy to store, easy to clean, and the food does not smell of turpentine.
This was not a hardship, since I love paper—its texture, feel and smell—and I am always on the lookout for different kinds: I especially like handmade paper made in India and Nepal. Regular readers are often bombarded with photos of my work.
However, I go to a local art workshop on Mondays, and our new teacher, a young artist named Josepha, has been encouraging us to try new things, including live model, printing and street art.
We are pretty free to choose what inspires us, and I have always had a yen to try my hand at portraits—difficult but interesting. This seemed to inspire everyone else, too, so Josepha had us doing the following exercise: using a photo of a person or of a painting, we had to paint in oil directly on paper, without a pencil drawing and without waiting for layers to dry.
My Renaissance gentleman does not look like the photo, but so what?
Then, we had to paint the same person four times, but in different colours, and a restricted palette (two colours, plus white and black if needed). Here is mine:
And here is my friend Nadine’s:
She remarked the first one (top left) looked depressed, so I told her the second looks like a crook, the third is Satan and the fourth (blue) a vampire! As you can see a lot of teasing goes on, interspersed by coffee breaks involving cookies and sometimes cake. As a bonus, we have a studio dog, Josepha’s spaniel Odin.
Wating for arrivals
Fortified by these experiments—plus the jokes, the encouragement and the cookies—I am at the moment obsessed with portrait painting in oil and, you guessed it, my kitchen smells like turps.
I have always been fascinated by hands, so have tried to include them in my portraits. I also like figures of people reading.
There is more inspiration—and, hopefully, progress—in the pipeline, my aim being to go on to paint friends and family. Apparently one should not do that in the beginning, because one becomes obsessed with the likeness to the detriment of everything else. We shall see.
Peter Doig is an exciting artist—in fact, he is one of the most celebrated and important figurative painters working today. Born in Scotland in 1959, he moved with his family to Trinidad, then Canada, and later studied in London. In 2000 he was invited to return to Trinidad with his friend, artist Chris Ofili, and was so inspired he moved there permanently with his wife and children, until relocating recently to London.
His paintings focus on both landscapes and the human figure, melding them into evocative and often haunting compositions which are painterly and almost abstract. “I’m not trying to make paintings look like photos,” he has said of his process. “I want to make paintings using photos as a reference, the way painters did when photography was first invented.”
Painting on an Island. The setting is the prison island of Carrera, off the coast of Trinidad. Learning that some of the inmates were painters, Doig helped organise an annual exhibition of their work in Port of Spain.
I went to see his newest work, which is exhibited at The Courtauld in London. These are paintings that have evolved over a number of years, as he explores a rich variety of places, people, memories and ways of painting. Perhaps they are not his best work, but there is still that haunting quality, stark imagery and wonderfully strong palette to admire.
House of Music (Soca boat) Based on a photo of fishermen holding up their catch, Doig painted the men as musicians.
Their location at The Courtauld is also interesting because the permanent collection contains wonderful works that have been important inspiration for the artist, by artists such as Cézanne, Gauguin, Manet, Monet, Pissarro and Van Gogh. It was interesting to consider Doig’s contemporary works in the light of these masterpieces.
This painting was started in the Alps, but is inspired by Doig’s time in Canada
The Courtauld is also showcasing the artist’s work as a printmaker with a display that unveils for the first time a series of prints Doig made in response to the poetry of his friend and collaborator, the late Derek Walcott (1930-2017).
Portrait of Derek Walcott
As a footnote, I will add that Doig’s works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Tate Gallery in London, and the Goetz Collection in Munich, among others. In 2007, his painting White Canoe sold at Sotheby’s for $11.3 million, then an auction record for a living European artist.
White canoe
The Morgan Stanley Exhibition at The Courtauld is on until May 29
Cement Dinosaurs
I have been occasionally coming to London since childhood but I have only just discovered, thanks to my niece who moved to the area, a weird and wonderful exhibit I had never even heard of before: the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs.
These are Victorian cement statues representing extinct animals, which reside in the Crystal Palace Park. The sculptures are, due to the incomplete information available at the time, wildly inaccurate, which lends them an aura of fantasy and a sort of steampunk aesthetic, reinforced by natural erosion which has given them a crumbling patina.
The sculptures represent the first ever attempt anywhere in the world to model, from fossil remains, extinct animals as full-scale, three-dimensional, active creatures. Of the 30+ statues, only four represent dinosaurs in the strict, zoological sense of the word ( two Iguanodon, a Hylaeosaurus and a Megalosaurus). The statues also include plesiosaurs and icthyosaurs discovered by Mary Anning in Lyme Regis, as well as pterodactyls, crocodilians, amphibians and mammals, such as a South American Megatherium (giant ground sloth) brought back to Britain by Charles Darwin on his voyage on HMS Beagle. And Irish Elk, which at the start bore actual fossil antlers.
This section of the park was landscaped by Joseph Paxton in 1853-1855 and the sculptures remained largely in the places we find them today. They were designed by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, a natural history illustrator and sculptor of international reputation, whose work combined the pursuit of technical accuracy and animate expression.
Experts in the 1850s had different interpretations of what the animals really looked like. The story of these evolving interpretations demonstrates how scientific ideas evolve when new evidence comes to light. For example, some of the sculptures have four legs, whereas later fossil discoveries suggest these animals were bipeds.
The statues were commissioned in 1852 to adorn the Crystal Palace spectacular glasshouse after it was moved from Hyde Park at the end of the Great Exhibition. They were unveiled in 1854 when the park opened as a commercial amusement.
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were fascinated by the dinosaur display in Crystal Palace, and they visited the site several times.
Hawkins set up a workshop on site at the park and built the models there. The dinosaurs were built full-size in clay, from which a mould was taken allowing cement sections to be cast. The larger sculptures are hollow with a brickwork interior.
The models were displayed on and around three islands, and given more realism by making the water level in the lake rise and fall, revealing different amounts of the animals. To mark the launch of the statues, Hawkins held a dinner on New Year’s Eve 1853 inside the mould of one of the Iguanodon models.
Engraving of the dinner. Must have been fascinating!
The statues are now Grade I listed and funding is being obtained to restore them before they crumble away completely. I only hope this is done sensibly, because their decrepitude adds to their charm. Some of the restoration done so far on a few makes them look a little fake.
I urge anyone within reach to visit—very original and definitely worth it.
What do you do when you are parents, and your daughters want to embark on a perilous journey in order to have a future?
This is a film recommendation: The Swimmers tells a true story, of sisters Sara and Yusra Mardini, who were normal teenagers in Damascus, training to be professional swimmers. They left Syria because bombs started falling, and practically ‘swam’ to Greece.
This is the story of their journey; eventually Yusra fulfilled her ambition to swim at both the Rio and Tokyo Olympics. As for Sara, her story is ongoing—but I will leave you to discover it for yourselves.
I had followed the sisters’ saga via The Worldwide Tribe Instagram feed and Podcasts. You can listen to an interview with Sara, here.(highly recommended)
Often biopics can ring false, striving for a heroic bias, but I found this well done, and the actors are excellent. The two are played by real life sisters Nathalie and Manal Issa, which gets the sibling chemistry across really well. The film has its flaws, depending on different points of view—for example, it annoyed some people that the actors spoke mostly in English instead of Arabic—but I thought it gave a good insight into the wider humanitarian crisis facing migrants, and what it means to be labelled a refugee.
It is also a story of family, determination, guts, human frailty—and never giving up on your dreams.
Here is a trailer.
Footnote: See what you think about the traffickers—they are the villains in this story.
Every year I find it fun to participate in the Inktober challenge, where for the whole month of October artists post ink drawings onto their Instagram feeds. There is a list of prompts to follow each day, but of course none of this is obligatory—it is a fun thing, no prizes to be had. (See My Inktober 2019 here.)
I never follow the prompts, unless some inspire me along the way, and usually I do not manage to post every day. This year, though, I challenged myself—I would post a series of drawings, one every single day.
I chose to draw on A5-size paper, so I bought a pile of handmade cotton sheets, quite thick, ivory-colored and with deckled edges. I drew in ink and added gold, silver or copper leaf.
The drawings were for sale, and the first person to comment got the day’s drawing. Most sold, and the rest will do very well for Christmas presents!
Most importantly, I really enjoyed the challenge, and am proud of myself for managing to get to the end, despite work and travel that happened this month.
Also, practice makes perfect, and my control of the medium employed and my hand-and-eye coordination in drawing improved by the day.
As you can see, most drawings are of animals or birds—but I did have some trees, a thistle, a pineapple and a Haloween pumpkin!
If you want to see the lot, my Instagram handle is @athensletters
Letters from Athens 