Month: February 2009

Right now I am taking two painting classes, and in one of them, the teacher has asked us to practice by copying from Old Master paintings–not aiming for a reproduction by any means, but working in our own styles. She has also asked us to bring together figures from different artworks. I am working on a painting that includes the most prominent female nude from Manet’s Dejeuner sur L’Herb, a Cycladic doll, and two figures from Velázquez’s Las Meninas. It’s going to be called “Rex, Victoire, Kora, and Maribárbola Take the Afternoon Off.” Stay tuned.

In the meantime, here is a large study I did of Maribarbola’s face.

And here are some proto-Renaissance saints. Much to my surprise, I feel like they are very much at home among the inhabitants of my artistic imagination.

I have been using Google Earth to look at super-high-resolution version of selected paintings from the Prado in Madrid. Most of the time you can zoom in so close that you can look inside the cracks in the paint, but there’s this one section of the Garden of Earthly delights, a lumpy blue ball with spikes and screws sticking out of it. There’s a fissure at the bottom, and hairy, animalized humans are scuttling in and out on all fours. And the darn thing won’t come into focus no matter what I do. I couldn’t figure out why–there didn’t seem to be any special significance to this part of the painting–and then it occurred to me: Dick Cheney must have moved there.