Smoking Figure part 9

Tonight I took advantage of the long holiday break at my colleges to go to critique night at the Belmar Arts Council. This one is linked to a Member's Salon show, something we do every few years or so. Participants get to hang work in a show, and we meet one night during the exhibition to present the work to the assembled group. This time around they scheduled the discussion to coincide with the BAC regular monthly critique group, in an effort to boost interest in the group. Belmar's critique group just hasn't been as popular as the one we have going in the Studio, which is too bad, because those few who do participate find it just as useful for them as ours is for us.

Word had gotten around that they were allowing work in progress for the show, but I didn't want to put any unfinished blocks in the gallery. The other issue I had in selecting a piece to show is that most regular exhibitions at the BAC don't allow work previously exhibited there, and I don't have a lot of recent work that fits that restriction. And I'd like to save the few that I do have to submit to the big statewide annual show in the spring. So I selected an older figure/portrait print (shown above) that fit the criteria- available, framed, quality image, never shown there before, etc. It also served another purpose, to provide an example of a finished large scale figure print as I presented my real exhibit, the block for the Smoking Figure.

Many years ago I heard an often repeated story that the famed artist Titian would regularly turn his canvases in progress to face the wall for 6 months or more, so that when he looked at them next his eyes would be fresh and he could see better and more objectively what worked and what didn't. That wasn't necessarily my plan for this piece, but with a lot of questions to be dealt with and other deadlines to meet, I put it away last summer and hadn't looked at it since. When it was my turn to present to the group, I gave a brief explanation of the earlier finished portrait, and then put the block up where people could see it, as shown above. I chose to give no information about the idea at first, wanting to see what they made of the implied narrative.

The good news is that people generally liked the drawing, and no one felt that she looked angry, which is what the model saw in this and many other drawings I've done of her. Rather, they saw the expression as one of deep thought, appropriate for someone doing time outside until she finished her cigarette. Unfortunately, no one's first reaction was that she was an employee outside during a smoking break from work. Instead I got such suggestions as smoking outside a restaurant in Red Bank, outside a cafe in Paris, etc. So at least it's clear that she's smoking outside. If I decide that the employee idea is too significant to give up, I'll have to come up with ways to reinforce that idea. Hopefully before another 6 months has passed.

By the way, more photos and stories from tonight's critique, which included several other people who had been at our Monday critique in the Studio, can be found in a blog posting over on the BAC blog.