1. Autorretrato, 1928 / Oil on canvas / Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain
2. Autorretrato, 1943 / I was unable to find further information
She looks maybe a little confined by the role society expects of her?
I wonder what the story is behind her expression….
Is she bored? forlorn? disinterested? hopeless?
Maybe some music will help.
~Sunnyside
Some great sketches here!
Pierre Bonnard taught me how to like the shape my thoughts take. Well, actually I already liked the shapes my thoughts took (at least some of the time) even before I had ever heard of Bonnard but using the great old painter’s name lends a tincture of authority to the claims that follow. Or at least I think it does…. (Do others love Bonnard as much as I do?) Does the general public love this man who drew like someone who is talking to himself?
If you like the shapes your thoughts take or are willing to let thoughts take what shape they will, then drawing becomes a very different game. You can go deeper and deeper into a subject, despite “mistakes,” adding more and more visual information or
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Totally amazing structure!
A wonderful painting and so full of feeling.
“I’m now working on the portrait of a postman with his dark blue uniform with yellow. A head something like that of Socrates, almost no nose, a high forehead, bald pate, small grey eyes, high coloured full cheeks, a big beard, pepper and salt, big ears.” Vincent van Gogh
READ FULL ESSAY: Christie’s
“While Roulin isn’t exactly old enough to be like a father to me,” Van Gogh described to Theo in April 1889, “all the same he has silent solemnities and tendernesses for me like an old soldier would have for a young one. Always—but without a word—a certain something that seems to mean: we don’t know what will happen to us tomorrow, but think of me in any event. And that does one good when it comes from a man who is neither embittered…
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I really liked his “The Glass Room” and enjoyed the film too. A very interesting writer.
Although I have a tempting pile of new Australian releases waiting for me, I’m continuing my holiday reading from the TBR, with an added reason to take up Simon Mawer’s Prague Spring from 2018, because I have just bought Ancestry, his most recent one — and I really should read what I already have first, right?
There’s a review at The Guardian which recounts how in 1975 Mawer was caught in an avalanche on the North Face of Ben Nevis and had to cling to an ice ledge for 22 hours. Whether this experience informed his ability to capture the suspense of existential moments I do not know, but while Prague Spring is not a cliffhanger, it becomes unputdownable as the pages move towards their inexorable conclusion.
It is history that makes the conclusion inexorable. Set in 1968 when Czechoslovakia enjoyed a brief taste of freedom under Dubček before…
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penwithlit 