Month: April 2024

Still life after Chardin, after Chardin

April 28, 2024

I admire Chardin’s still life paintings greatly. Others have too. This is a copy I did of what I thought was a Chardin, but it turns out (according to the internet) to be a pastiche of Chardin, done by a ‘follower of Chardin.’

Now that I know that, I am spotting all sorts of things that suggest the painting was not done by Chardin. In particular, the perspective seems a bit ‘steep’ for a Chardin. He seems to have painted objects that were almost at eye level, but this picture was painted by someone sitting at a height well above the objects being painted. As always, I learned a lot from copying a good picture, and now I have learned a lot after finishing the copy and reflecting on it.

I originally did this painting to fit a secondhand frame from the Op Shop. A happy result.

It is hard to get a bottle symmetrical. Harder still to make bread look ‘bready’.

Frame was $2.50. Why pay more?

Iron balls and an orange

April 21, 2024

Every share house I ever encountered seemed to have a set of Boading balls. They were as ubiquitous to share houses as a dusty rubber tree and a clingy couple who would cook delicious dinners that they would never share with the rest of us. But I digress.

This is a set of Boading balls that have travelled with me through more than ten houses. They just keep turning up. I have painted them here with a piece of fresh fruit. Not that I recall seeing fresh fruit much back in any of those share houses …

Horror under the sea

April 14, 2024

“Inside my copper helmet I felt something moving! Something was creeping through my hair. I was paralysed with the horror of it. I wanted to tear the helmet from my head, yet in the midst of my terror at the thing now moving with pin-pointed feet down my forehead was the driving thought that I must not – could not – spoil the film, that no matter what, I must go on.

Now the fearsome thing was crawling over my left eye, down my nose, I could see it! My hair seemed to stand on end. I felt cold all over. The thing was a scorpion!

In mental torture, I controlled a desire to dash my head against the inside of the helmet and try to crush the venomous creature. But I knew that at the slightest movement it might bury its poisonous sting in my flesh – even in my eye. Though I might crush it, it still could blind or wound me in its death throes.

No, I must be cool, must control myself. With unspeakable relief I felt the creature crawl back into my hair … And all this time, while my mind was numb with dread … I was going through my part, acting out the scene, while the cameras clicked away and the operators marvelled at the vivid realism of my acting.”

John Ernest Williamson, describing his disciplined underwater performance in the movie Girl of the Sea. As quoted in Trevor Norton’s very engaging Stars Beneath the Sea – the Pioneers of Diving. Carroll and Graf (1999).

The last place you would want to meet a scorpion. Oh, all right: the second last place.

Vespasian

April 7, 2024

A disembodied head of Vespasian, which you can see seemingly floating in a spotlit vitrine in the National Gallery of Victoria. One of the omens that Vespasian would become emperor of Rome was delivered by a stray dog: it picked up a severed human hand at a cross roads and dropped it on his breakfast table. Different times.

I suspect being emperor of the biggest empire in the world was not entirely straightforward. Those wrinkles on his forehead did not come from nothing. He seems, however, to have retained his sense of humour. A friend tells me that his last words were: ‘Oh dear, I think I am becoming a god.’ Funny thing: he did.

Vespasian – not the god, but a god.