Ruskin's Rose

Venice casts a spell on most of its visitors, me included. After spending a week there four years ago I sought to recapture my feelings by reading many books related to Venice . That's how I came across Ruskin's Rose. Not only was this book about Venice, it was also about esteemed art historian John Ruskin, author of and Modern Painters and The Stones of Venice.

To say that Ruskin's life was colourful is an understatement. He had a string of misfortunes including his scandalously annulled marriage, his loss of faith , a greatly diminished fortune and the death of his much loved Rose La Touche. He continues to be a figure of great interest to writers who conjecture about the state of his mental health and sexual preferences. If this little introduction piques your curiosity and you research further, you'll reach your own conclusions.

Rose La Touche
John Ruskin, 1861

After Rose's death Ruskin went to Venice to heal. Ruskin's Rose uses materials from their letters and Ruskin's autobiography and other writings. It is beautifully illustrated with letters, maps, flowers, lockets and other artifacts. I'm a romantic at heart and quite liked this little book for its sentimentality in words and illustrations.

Although Ruskin fled to Venice to escape his pain, the city cast its usual spell on him and his time there actually intensified his emotions. He moved through the days without focus until he stumbled across the painting of Vittore Carpaccio, a 15th century artist and found his Rose again in the fairy-tale portraits.

And now for some of the less romantic facts which I discovered after reading the book. I admit the information deflated the fairy tale I had created while reading the book.

Ruskin fell in love with a deeply religious and high - spirited Rose when she was eleven and proposed marriage when she was 17 and he was 40. He met her while working at a girls' school. Rose's parents refused his request because of his coloured past and his atheism and Rose herself refused marriage when she came of age because of religious differences. Unfortunately Rose died in 1875 in a Dublin nursing home. Her death is credited with causing the onset of bouts of mental illness in Ruskin from 1877. He convinced himself that the Renaissance painter Vittore Carpaccio had included portraits of Rose in his paintings of the life of St. Ursula. Ruskin also took to Spiritualism trying to contact Rose's spirit.

All this information is needed to get to this artwork....

Ruskin's Rose (2009) mixed media on canvas (16 x 16)

Venice still flows through my veins after four years. I've compared every European city I visited since to it and none have matched the pull of Venice. The old section of Venice is small with all these little rabbit warren streets that go hither and yon. Every day was a new adventure where little things caused me to celebrate being there and being alive- textures on a wall, colouful window baskets, glimpses of ornate fabrics and house details, snatches of songs, the lyrical cadence of spoken Italian, children in a square, birds chirping, the water taxis moving their cargo, glimpses of water from the many bridges etc. I noticed the small things in Venice and every new day brought anticipation. I was never disappointed.

Venice is in my blood. Ruskin's Rose (my painting) celebrates my feelings about Venice and how the memories still flow through in the same way the canals flow through the city. You can't spend time in Venice without being attracted to the ways gold is used especially in churches and in fabrics. Venice is where Ruskin found his Rose again. I think Venice itself was also Ruskin's rose. I chose a red rose to symbolize Venice because of the history of red roses. Red roses mean "I love you", they also represent courage, respect and unconscious beauty.

Gains and Losses

Gains and Losses, 2006

Sometimes I create work that is a departure from what has gone before it. I never stop to question if I should pursue these ideas because I've learned to trust my instincts. It's also important to recognize what these departures mean in the context of your larger body of work. Gains and Losses represents a number of firsts for me in terms of technique and content considerations.

Technique

stenciling
obvious layering
utilizing floating patterning
forays into image transfers
use of elaborately printed papers and gold paint
change in colour scheme to rich browns and golds.

I had just returned from a long holiday in Italy and was influenced by everything I had seen. The colours of Italy remain with me even now and they obviously had an impact on the overall look and feel of this piece.

Inspiration

Italy
lavish gardens,
churches and art museums,
brocades, gilt, velvet, Venetian glass
ochres, rich browns, gold, copper and brass
history nodding to you at every twist and turn
producing a deep sense of how the world came to be
wondering how my world fits with this older, more exotic one.

In 2006 I was reading widely about the history of floral imagery in art, beauty and the passage of time. All have impacted this work. I chose to use split images to physically represent the passage of time . The left is much more focused and vivid than the right. I was going for lushness and that eventual slide into decay, again a reflection of the passage of time. The figure represents a time in the lives of women when independence and choice where almost non-existent. This was a lady of means who could afford to primp and beautify to please . Fresh flowers adorned her dress creating parallel representations of beauty caught at one moment in time but neither can defy the inevitable toll that time takes.

Content

figure
observing me through history
calling attention to fleeting beauty
questioning efforts to control the passage of time
wondering what women have gained and lost in the pursuit of beauty

And what does all this have to do with pattern and decoration you might ask?
The patterning and decoration help me establish a point in time and build a suitable environment in which to pose my visual questions.

New work - Postcard series

In my Postcard Series I think I have found a format that will serve me well for many years. I like to have something to revert to when I am working on a larger series which I classify, rightly or wrongly as" more serious." I always grade what I create on a continuum that ranges from serious and worthy to fun and frivolous. At the back of my mind every time I create something , I question its worth in the larger scheme of art that is created around me. I often wonder if other artists see their work in this way. Perhaps it comes from my teaching background where everything is constantly assessed. I know that there are times this constant rating is affecting how I see myself as an artist.

These images will be part of my Reading a Garden series too. I'm attracted to the idea of sending postcards from places you visit as a way for loved ones to participate in the experience. What they receive is the result of several selection processes. The original place photographed was created through a series of decisions by one or possibly many people, the photographer who created the postcard selects views from many available, from these some are chosen for reproduction. The sender of the photograph selects from those available in one store or gift shop and further refines the visual information by adding comments. Each step along the way is a form of "reading" a place. I think the postcards fit in very well with the Reading a Garden theme.

In an early post I wrote about one of the magnolia trees found in Birr Castle Demense and I'm still thinking about it. The combination of realism and abstracted backgrounds is a challenge but I think I pulled it off.

Art Smarts

I recently spent 4 days in a local elementary school working with grade 5 students through the Arts Smarts program. Schools can apply for special funding to bring artists into the school to work on a specific project that encourages students to meet outcomes in various subject areas through the arts. This is the second year I worked with Goulds Elementary school. The previous project in 2007 was with grade 4 students. Check here to see what they created. The current work is not up on the website yet. It was enjoyable to be in a classroom again and look at the world through the eyes of a child.

This year students created books about animals found in Newfoundland that would be shared with younger students. Two classes made foil embossed paintings that were stored in 4 portfolio scrapbooks. The other two classes painted background scenes and embellished them with different papers. Their animals were created separately and attached to the scenes using velcro. These paintings on bristol board were then compiled into four accordion style books with pockets on the back for the detachable animals.

I'd like to share several of the backgrounds depicting trees. There are a lot of commonalities from work to work that I thought were interesting. The programs supports a specific number of contact hours and there's never enough time to do all the things you would like to after the work is created. I didn't have time to speak with the children about their work, so I can only surmise why they represent trees in this way.

Working process

The process I am using to create the work in my Reading a Garden series physically reflects the erosion of memory we all experience with the passage of time.

I begin each piece with photo transfers of a particular place in the garden. I consider this "the real". Then through a series of manipulations using paint and papers, I combine and alter the photo transfers into a blended "summary impression" of a place, feeling or event experienced in the garden. While the work still looks highly realistic when completed it has strayed greatly from the initial transfers and morphed into a composite of photo images and remnants of frayed memory. As more time passes and the details in my memory are less distinct, the nature of the work is also changing subtly. There transfers are less visible and the invented sections are taking over.

I began with the wildflower meadow because I've had an intimate relationship with meadows since my childhood. The wildflower meadow at Birr Castle Demesne had a wildness and simplicity when compared to the more controlled and cultivated Millennium Garden where I always felt slightly out of my element. The meadow was nature left wild and wanton; I felt free there.

When I start a mixed media work I never know how it will look when it is finished. The process of adding things moves the work along in its own direction. It is as if it is leading me and not the other way around. The end result is always a surprise for me. I would love to say I have it all figured out beforehand, sketched, with a tonal study completed etc. While I am very organized in most aspects of my life, I cannot imagine working in that manner. I love surprise of what my conscious and unconscious mind produces!

In this piece, I began with roughly 30 image transfers from photos I took in the meadow. Different sections of the meadow had different wildflowers and different feelings. Some photos were close up, others more distant. I laid out all available transfers and begin to sort and resort them until I had ones that I felt worked together. They produce more of a hybrid of the meadow area than an actual representation of it. I then use medium to attach some of them to the board.

In the next step I connected the transfers with a dark background that gave me a working surface with lots of contrast to fill in or connect the disparate sections using papers and paint. These areas represents my" sense" or memory of the meadow and could be considered invented when compared to the photo transfers.

I work back and forth without too much thought and the painting slowly emerges. I like to combine abstract elements with the realistic imagery. The small circles are reminiscent of seeds and also infinity. I've played around with certain letter representations in Morse Code that are created using dots. They allow me to insert messages in the painting without using text.