Painting Figments and Fairy Tales

I’ve got two for you today, and a bonus. First, the figment and fairy tale, two paintings that I completed in 2020. One is on my wall, and the other on the wall of a friend. Maybe. (I mean, you can give a hostess gift, but you can’t control where it ends up! Hopefully, where someone will see it. Like in the living room! Or maybe the bathroom. Hmm. Better than the basement or a closet, I guess.)

This one on my living room wall, placed strategically near a lamp ( the title is Hacienda of the Rising Sun for obvious reasons) started out as a line across a canvas. I prepare my canvases with a rough wash of acrylic mustard color, so the white isn’t quite as in your face taunting you to try to paint something on the blank cold canvas. (Really, that’s how it feels. Daunting stuff.)

So I loaded up my paintbrush and drew the line that ended up being the mountain outline and the side and roof edges of the ‘hacienda.’ Unfortunately I didn’t take a photo of that line, but I remember it well. I spent HOURS trying to see the rest of the painting to go with that line. The challenge was figuring out what I could make from the line and then picking colors, shadows and lights that made sense. I overpainted this one, definitely. Over and OVER. But it still has one of my favorite spots, that little line of green next to the purple green in the shadow of the mountain. Whenever I do something like that, I end up having NO IDEA how it happened. A happy accident. But at least I knew enough to LEAVE it.

Where it started, and two middle shots. Hmm. I really wanted that tree in the foreground to cover up some of that fluorescent green, as you can see from the top photo. Maybe I shouldn’t have added in the branch shadows on the wall. Sigh. But I digress.

On one of my trips back to Germany, I bought a gorgeous antique photography book and decided it would be fun to paint and colorize some of them.

In my eternal optimism, I thought it was a great chance to pick and mix colors and figure out what works. And, more importantly, what doesn’t. My end product was a bit, um, colorful, and I added in some snow colored mountains on either side to shore up some egregious mistakes. So it ended as more Chitty Chitty Bang Bang perfect world than the actual pretty little area near Austria. Here are the takes and final result. It’s very, umm, fairy tale. Coincidentally, I LOVE fairy tales.

This one ended up with a good friend Erik in West Virginia who hosted us for a week of vacation during the COVID year of no overseas travel. Instead of eating wurst and schnitzel, our normal repast in October, we sat on his front porch and looked at the view – the mountains, his chicken coop, sweet dog Petey and our beer and wine glasses on the rail. Great way to decompress. His house is a large pine cabin, and I think this ended up next to his German cuckoo clock – perfect since we travelled around Germany together when all of us were stationed there. Or maybe it migrated to the bathroom. Or basement!

I am fortunate – married couple friends of ours PREFER my more colorful landscapes. I don’t think they were pulling my leg, because they saw all of them and picked this super colorful Regensburg one for their house. Jennifer said she liked cheerful landscapes and they were really hard to find. She hung this one in the alcove of her kitchen and it DID suit. Jennifer and Mike were also neighbors in Germany, when we lived about an hour and a half from this exact spot.

Hmm, should have had better lighting for that last show. Oh, well. Now this little painting is in Texas. So far, I have paintings with friends in Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Canada and California. I need to give some to our friends in Germany and New Zealand, I guess, then I can claim to be an international artist. Or does that mean I PAINT in all of those countries. Because that would be even more fun!

Books I Recommend

I have two books at the top of my list.  One is the extremely emotive World War II novel, Every Man Dies Alone,  based on a true story, by Hans Fallada.  (Aside – he took his pen name from Fallada, the noble horse in the fairy tale.  Do you remember when they cut the horse’s head off and put it on the castle wall?  He would give the Prince advice from there, but much was ignored, a la Cassandra of Troy.  The name fits perfectly when you read the story.)  Even for a military history buff like me, this book taught me so much more of what it felt like to be a German trapped in that society.

 

The other is by Stephan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, described here by Amazon:  “Written as both a recollection of the past and a warning for future generations, The World of Yesterday recalls the golden age of literary Vienna—its seeming permanence, its promise, and its devastating fall.

Surrounded by the leading literary lights of the epoch, Stefan Zweig draws a vivid and intimate account of his life and travels through Vienna, Paris, Berlin, and London, touching on the very heart of European culture. His passionate, evocative prose paints a stunning portrait of an era that danced brilliantly on the edge of extinction.

This new translation by award-winning Anthea Bell captures the spirit of Zweig’s writing in arguably his most revealing work.”

It was a beautiful book with a superb translation from the German.  Stephan Zweig restarted his life twice – once after World War I, when he had to leave Vienna, and again as a Jew after World War II.  By the time of the Second World War, he was so famous that Hitler could not have him out and out killed, but tortured him in degrees by systematically searching every house over and over while he tried to write. Zweig couldn’t face that second start and walked into the ocean with his wife and committed suicide several years after the War.  Don’t worry, that doesn’t spoil this story or the wonderful descriptions of his life as a child.  As he described the stuffy heater, the smell of old socks and the wriggling of little boys on the bench bored by their old school teachers, I could see it, smell it and feel it.

 

 

Kathe Kollwitz

Kathe Kollwitz was the first artist who made me find HER!  I saw some statuary in a World War I cemetery and I had to find the artist.  I knew there was a story.  Here’s what You Baroque My Heart put up about her life.  Some of her expressionist drawings are at the link.  Fascinating!  Look at the body shapes and the faces.  I think these grieving parents look even more tortured from the back.

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Käthe Kollwitz was a German expressionist artist who lived from 1867 – 1945. She is a very well known and respected female printmaker who captured life’s sorrows in her work. She began etching in 1880 and eventually taught at the Berlin School of Women Artists from 1898 to 1903.

I scanned the images above from the book “Käthe Kollwitz: Works in Color.”

In 1891 she married Dr. Karl Kollwitz. The couple moved into their new home in a section of Berlin that was filled with poverty. Witnessing the lower class life, Kollwitz developed her socialist and pacifist beliefs which became obvious in her later work.

Kollwitz outlived most of her family. Her son died in World War I and her grandson in World War II. When speaking about her son’s death, she told a friend, “There is in our lives a wound which will never heal. Nor should it.” These loses greatly affected her beliefs even more. Her art work repeats themes of poverty, hard working people, the lives of women and war.

During World War II the Nazis labeled her work as “degenerate” and forbid her to exhibit any of her art. Other artists had fled the country yet Kollwitz stayed in Berlin, despite the Nazis’ censorship.

As Kollwitz was reaching the end of her life, she knew she was going. In a letter she wrote, “War accompanies me to the end.” She passed away two weeks before the end of World War II.

 

 

Wall Street Book Reviews

Every day, I check the A section of the WSJ for a book review.  Great one for Mark Halperin’s book this week, and that’s on my “to read, perchance to buy”, list.  But this one comes before it –  Into the Fire, A Firsthand Account of the Most Extraordinary Battle in the Afghan War by Dakota Meyer.

Check this quote, and if it doesn’t make you want to read more, you have ice water in your veins.  So there!
“Once the ambush was under way, the Americans pinned down in the village were shocked to find headquarters denying their requests for artillery and close air support.  Mr. Meyer had not better luck.  Constrained by restrictive rules of engagement tailored to the perceived needs of COIN, he faced a frustration all too familiar to our soldiers today.  With his team trapped, and supporting forces efffectively unresponsive, Mr. Meyer reached within himself:  “I wasn’t scared or angry.  I was beyond that.  I didn’t think I was going to die; I knew I was dead.  There wasn’t anything I could do about it.  I wasn’t a thinking human being.  I had gone somewhere else.  I wasn’t firing the machine gun; I was the machine gun.  Rod wasn’t driving the truck; Rod was the truck. . . . Rod and I planned to keep driving east until we were obliterated or we found my team.”