For someone who says she doesn’t paint the standard ‘head shot’ types of portraits, I certainly have done a few. Sometimes I take the commission, but just don’t post it here; as it’s not the type of work that represents what I do.
And yet, it does.
Sure, my paintings are usually animated or goofy or expressive, but I will sometimes take the opportunity to explore the more serious expression of contrasts between shadow and light — as with this latest commission. Frustrated with the lack of expression that this little guy offered, I fell back to what I love most. I suppose I could have emphasized the light more, but in this dark month of social distancing, hand-washing, and hand-wringing, the darkness came forward.
I’m one of those few people who loves turning the clocks back in the Fall to welcome the darkness descending into the afternoon. I read tarot and look to the shadowy aspects of the cards which (in more of a Jungian sense) reveal our darker urges and motivations, coaxing them up into the light. And so it is here, with Rummy, one eye obfuscated as we try to discern a hint of a lash or a lid as it peers out from its safe reclusivity.
I worked this up from an old photo I had, on an old computer. Rupert has been gone almost a year now, and the couch didn’t survive the move a few years ago to a smaller apartment. God, he loved that couch. After a long day in a busy city retail shop or a good hike on the trails, he would climb up into it and collapse into a glob, dripping off the sides like candle wax that snored. Sometimes, I wasn’t sure where the dog ended and the couch began.
I’ve been in somewhat of a state of simmering, sniveling discontent since about Nov 2016. It’s not that injustice didn’t exist before then; it’s more that it wasn’t waved so freely and incitefully in the faces of those with a moral conscience.
As I drove along winding roads passing motor lodges, diners, and pointy white steeples jutting upward from the valleys of trees, I enjoyed the occasional aromas of hay fields in the sun and wood-burning stoves. It occurred to me that the more I try to confront the sociopolitical reality of the country that I live in now, the more I recoil into the comfortable, the past, the notion that peace and harmony surrounds me. Eventually, I pulled in to a motor inn nestled in the pines, interrupted the very nice couple having supper, and I got my key – the old, clunky kind, attached to a big plastic key ring with the room number etched in big numbers – and settled in with my notebook and a book. Will my brain be more focused in the morning, after a quiet slumber?
I got up and headed out to a diner, where I sat at the counter with my coffee and eggs and ingested the arts section of the local paper (interesting interview with Zachary Wood about the need to listen to opposing viewpoints). Then onward my disheveled dogmobile wound, up mountains and around turns, past campgrounds and closed antiques shops, and we rolled into North Adams and turned in to Mass MoCA.
I pulled it out and saw the outline of a dog painting that I had started years ago, then painted over. Thing is, I had started the background in a sky blue, which had dried, and left the image of a dog standing in anticipation. I had moved on to a much better composition / canvas for that dog, and so after the background had dried, I painted over the whole thing in a different blue, and left it. I even used it as a practice canvas to squirt paint on (to get it just so for a shower scene… which sounds really weird for a dog painting) and smear painty brushes.
and tweaking, editing it for every gallery we contact and each show we submit to, but never truly satisfied with it, and always readying for the next rewrite.
how much I enjoy it. It tickles me to see dogs in bow ties or bowler hats (or both!). What’s up with that, anyway? (I mean, sure, I’m a woman in her mid-50s with no kids, but can’t I just love being a spinster?) Walking dogs in the afternoons, I see other dog walkers out there with dogs, and it occurred to me a year or so ago that they’re never talking to them. Other dog walkers don’t talk to their dogs. They just walk, in silence. I realized then how odd my conversiveness (which should be a word) must seem to other functioning adults, out in the world. Or kids, even. I was walking Barney and Frankie through a cleared path in a snowy sidewalk one day last week, explaining something to them (probably about the laws of physics and that they need to move over to let people pass) when a kid heading home from school, slouched under the weight of his backpack, stopped and straightened up and turned to me, saying “You know they don’t understand what you’re saying, right?” I immediately started laughing, and assured him that yes, I did realize that; but it also made me realize that there I was, out talking to dogs in public, again.
Nancy Anderson 