A Sargent Attribution

I have just been prompted to attribute this painting of mine (from an old blog post here) entitled "Flamenco" to John Singer Sargent.  This I gladly do and apologise for not entitling it  "After Sargent" in the first place. 


I have been back to the original painting which is in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston  

and in the course of googling it I came across the impressive and invaluable John Singer Sargent Virtual Gallery  for which I am most grateful for Sargent's studies for the painting:

Dog Watch*

*Dog watch, in  marine or  naval terminology, is a watch, a period of work duty or a work shift, between 1600 and 2000 (4pm and 8pm). This period is split into two, with the 'first' dog watch from 1600 to 1800 (4pm to 6pm) and the 'last' dog watch from 1800 to 2000 (6pm to 8pm) (there is no 'second' dog watch). Each of these watches is half the length of a standard watch.  [Wikipedia]

Staying  with old friends in  Cornwall  at the weekend, we were greeted by this charming little sentinel on our return from a walk.  When I suggested to the wife that I might email her husband with this photograph, she said "Why?  He sees it every day."  It made Finny's lone vigil all the more poignant, I thought.

Here she is on my husband's lap feeling much more at home.  

Images © Rosie West 2013

BACK from the Blue

If you thought I had committed blog suicide, so did I, yikes - having posted nothing since August. So I am just back from the brink with  a desperate offering of random leaves from my sketch book until I get some more inspiration.  Hello to all my old chums whose blogs I've neglected to read as well. Why?  I dunno. Sorry!

 Flamenco after El Jaleo by John Singer Sargent

 Pakistan

 Peep Toes

RW

Sunsuit

Toy horses

Bridle

All images ©  Rosie West 2012

What I'd like for Christmas ..

A plaster cast from the Parthenon Frieze

to go with the hand I bought in a specialist Paris art shop 

and the foot from the Sir John Soane Museum

All images © Rosie West

Nature Morte

Please look away now if you don't like ex-animals (below).  I painted them  at The Prince's Drawing School  in Shoreditch under the tutelage of Henry Gibbons Guy who  gave them a poignant Chardin style setting in the changing light of our fourth-floor studio.  

The artists' prey was contributed by the wonderful Delia, one of our fellow students, who brought it from Norfolk via her London deep freeze.  Where a squirrel or a rabbit needed  post mortem first aid, as it were, she would gently bathe it and then blow dry the fur with her hairdryer.  As a gesture towards students who might be squeamish, it was a fine one.Nobody could say that our models didn't look pristine and peaceful.

All images © Rosie West

Tallyho! The Adventures of Little Miss Jodhpurs

My virtual world of horsewomanship ..

All images © Rosie West

Giddy UP

In haste before pushing off for a week's holiday. It's that horsey thing again.  Fascinated by them but still pretty scared of them.  I did the first four sketches at one of London's greatest inner city patches of countryside, Mudchute Farm on the Isle of Dogs.  It's attractive, clean and lacks officiousness - great atmosphere.

Marvellous stableyard with over a dozen horses sticking their heads out to be drawn, nicely framed by the darkness of their boxes.  

And some were  patiently being groomed

Others a little impatient to be out

There were young women and little girls were busying themselves in the way that always fascinates me: that slightly self-important way of pushing wheelbarrows, bossing noble creatures around as if they were toddlers and negotiating the hierarchy between themselves.

Finally, my tribute to Stubbs and Ucello from drawing at the National Gallery the other day. It's free!  I recommend it.

The Bearable Lightness of Being

Mindfulness Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, me?  Well oddly enough, yes.  I signed up for the course only because I like and admire Steve Wasserman who takes it. (Try anything once

except folk dancing and incest, I agree with Woody Allen.)  Steve is the author of the comic strip Prozacville here which is wickedly funny, neurotic, obscene and brilliant.  All the things I love.  Disappointingly, but understandably, he has a much gentler persona as a therapist. Who could fault him for that?  Anyway he's still clever, amusing and articulate.

I'm afraid I told him I could think of nothing more ghastly than achieving serenity in a group but they turned out to be a very agreeable bunch and I'm now majoring on the serenity in my daily homework - or 'practice' as I think it should be called. It involves listening to another gentle chap giving instructions through my computer.  So this is what happened on my first attempt.  I tried to  imagine breathing out through the top of my head amongst other things and when I woke up I felt refreshed and determined to be 'mindful'.

Next day, the bell went ding and my computer launched into 'Sit Down, Sit Down, Sit Down,

Sit down! Sit down you're rocking the boat!'   I suddenly thought 'But I WANT  to rock the boat!'  Clearly it's all doing me a lot of good.

Find out more about London-based Steve Wasserman and MCBT here

Secret Desires

Now that London's Royal College of Art's Secret Sale (in aid of student bursaries and support) is over, I can reveal my contribution.  Over 2,800 postcards are illustrated by artists and students and exhibited anonymously.  Each costs £45 and the game is to pick one by an expensive artist like Damien Hirst or Grayson Perry and not get landed with a Rosie West.


Artists generally don't like to pin down the meaning of their work.  I suppose mine are supposed to be seductive as little pictures in themselves and then remind one of the gross price of property; they glibly juxtapose the tradition of painting with nasty material values; or simply stand as a painterly documentation of a common phenomenon like the property ads blah blah blah..


They are possibly rather sketchy but you have to take a run at them since you only get given
three postcards and there's no room to mess up even more.

I have no idea how many of them sold but I know that my son pointed out one of mine to his girlfriend not realising his old ma had done it.  Needless to say he didn't buy it.  

All illustrations © Rosie West

In Berkeley Square...

A nightingale sang...

And in Moscow.  I always wondered how a nightingale really sang.  Wait for its sublime little voice to
develop..