Second round of miniature paintings for your viewing pleasure

Last month we put up a bunch of miniature paintings over on Etsy, and lo and behold we sold two of them.  Who’d a thunk it?  Jim is continuing to make miniatures of this plague year, but the most recent painting he is working on is a much larger one, perhaps 30″x18″, and is much too complex to make into a miniature.  He is planning to take certain parts of it and make miniatures from it, but this particular painting has everything – Indian goddess barflies, drunk or dead patrons, heads in bottles, and a bartender of Death.  Here’s a picture.

And here are the latest of his miniature Death paintings.  For this batch, he went a little further afield than the first time.  He’s still doing dancers, but they’re not all bellydancers.  He’s got ballet dancers, and a bunch of modern dancers, as well as a couple of paintings featuring our local cemetery, and a very disturbing lynching.  Personally, I hate that last one, but he saw the need to make a commentary on that particularly heinous form of death, given the times we’re in, and the recent upsurge of violence against people of color.

The painting titles have links to their page on Etsy for a larger photo and more details.  Because they’re miniatures, they’re quite small – the picture surface measures no larger than 25 square inches.  There is a lot of detail in them because Jim is working in egg tempera, with absolutely tiny little brushes, and using magnifying glasses in order to see and work on the surface.  The paintings are very delicate in their attention to detail, and they all bear a closer look.  Enjoy them, and please let Jim know what you think in a comment.

Dance Troupe of Death

This painting is unusual for the series in that all six figures are skeletons.  Usually Jim paints at least one human, presumably being infected, or marshaled toward death, by the skeleton(s) in the scene.  He actually derived this particular composition from a larger painting (not in this series) with many more dancers, including a self portrait.  But that composition was far too complex to attempt at miniature scale, so here we are.

Death in Costume with Funerary Urn and Birdcage

This scene was inspired at our local cemetery, and features a magnificent Victorian urn.  BITD the Victorians had a thing for death, and visited their cemeteries for picnics and celebrations.  People got dressed up, and paraded around admiring all the richly decorated tombstones and monuments.  So of course Jim thought of Death promenading past this enormous urn we found, and wanted to make a painting of it.  This painting is unusual, again, for lack of live human figures.  But perhaps for Death, the thought of a big urn stuffed with souls is enough.

Belly Dancer of Death with Sword and Head (Self-Portrait)

Okay maybe he didn’t intend it as a self portrait, but it totally resembles him.  Jim often puts quite a lot of himself into his figures, such that all his men look like him, and his women don’t look like anybody in particular (and certainly not the model).  His unconscious self portraits appear in many of his paintings, and he doesn’t seem to recognize them as such until they’re pointed out.  At that point he just shrugs.  I think it’s funny.

Belly dancers often use props such as fire and swords in their dancing.  Jim has painted this theme several times.  This painting combines ritual sword dancing with one of my favorite subjects – judith and holofernes.

Happy Dancers all Unaware –

In this painting, the dancers toss silk shrouds as if preparing to throw nets.  But there is Death, dancing with them, turning every movement into a threat.  Another eastern dance theme, something Jim has gone back to time and again during his entire 60+ year career.  When we finally visited India, we didn’t go to see any dance performances, and saw only ancient carved dancers on ancient stone temples, but he’d studied the tradition so closely he almost knew their names.

Death Attends a Lynching

This is not my favorite painting.  An old fashioned lawman has just finished stringing up some poor guy, attended and egged on by the angry, violent mob.  Death stands at his elbow, not just encouraging him, but preparing to drag him off next.  Evil people die too, and neither their righteous pretense, nor the trappings of authority, does them any good.

Dragon of Death

This is more my taste in paintings.  A group of dancers totally freak out when their ornamental dragon head comes to life and threatens to eat them.  In this painting there are no skeletons, as Jim felt that an avenging dragon is symbol enough of death and destruction.  The dancers start out thinking they control the dragon as merely a prop and a symbol, but they soon realize the power of the dragon unleashed, and try to flee, but we can guess how well that’s going to turn out…

Dancer to a Fatal Tune

Jim once again cheerfully mixes genres to make his point.  A woman in bellydance costume stands in an arabesque as men play stringed instruments behind her; death plays a mean cello, and some guy perhaps far enough away not to catch the rona is playing a violin.  I get the impression that this moment went on like this forever – she standing there waiting to catch her death, while the flute player edges off the stage to get away from the cello player.

Death in the Confederate Cemetery 2

Death as a confederate soldier, having a good set in the shade with old comrades.  This scene is taken from our cemetery, which has quite a few civil war graves.  Jim imagines, as we walk past the gravestones, the ghosts of all those soldiers stirring, watching our tumultuous present with bemusement.

Death in the Confederate Cemetery 1

While not framed in the same moulding as the first in this duo, the subjects are so similar that I’m at a loss what to call them.  IDK, maybe Death is waiting for someone to come along walking their dog off the leash or something.  Who can say what goes on in the mind of an artist when they’re painting – not the artist themself, that’s for certain.

There you go, Jim’s latest miniatures.  He’s going to do more, but right now he’s distracted by the idea of making a youtube video to show people how to make things the renaissance way – like egg tempera, and gesso, and clayboard, and encaustic medium.  I’ve taken a test video of him making egg tempera, and so far i’ve researched the various editing software for my computer, and just have to find one that works and that i can figure out how to work (two different issues)

In the next blog post, i’ll be showing a bunch of larger paintings that we’ve got up on Etsy.  The water paintings.  They’re just all the paintings i’ve cataloged that have water as their theme (there are loads more that haven’t yet been cataloged).  Jim has painted a whole bunch of water in his years – koi paintings, ponds and pools, beaches, submerged and distorted figures, and I wanted to start getting them online so people could appreciate them.

Delivering the paintings – 9

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Monday.  Almost ready to deliver paintings.  This week has been a flurry of activity as my studio assistant and I get ready to take the paintings off to Marietta/Cobb Museum of Art for the show in just under a month from now – opening January 12, 2013, from 6-8 pm.

First the spreadsheet.  I’ve got almost everything filled in at this point, everything but the prices.  Like I said, it’s bargain time simply because I can’t draw as many 0’s behind the number as I used to.

First, using the map of the galleries I made (little squares representing each painting (to scale), stuck to the brown paper map with tape), I drew up a list of each painting.  Then I located the actual painting.

Several paintings were sold long ago, which I’m borrowing back for the show.  Which means I had a lovely morning with the owners.  Several others were in a local shop, so I had to find replacements and swap them out.  A bunch of the paintings were at the gallery, and I had to have help getting those back.  Finally, some of the paintings are hanging around my house on display, and even more are either in the studio or up in the attic.  So I had to go around, find them, measure them, and take pictures of them.

This took a lot longer than I would have imagined.

Then I had to think up something to say about each painting, for the wall card.  I’m not sure wall cards are a good idea, because in my experience, when you’re reading a description of a painting, you’re not looking at the painting.  Also, I’ve seen many people read the wall card and then walk away without having seen the painting.  However, there is an interesting story wrapped around each painting, and people might be amused to know it.

Tuesday.  Now that it’s time for the movers to come get the large paintings, and for the rest of them to go in my truck – two days from now – I’ve been assembling all the paintings in the main floor of the house, making sure the frames are in good shape, making sure there’s hanging hardware on each painting, making sure the measurements I took at first are still the measurements of the paintings (they change remarkably), checking them off on the printed-out spreadsheet.

In the middle of all this are the etchings.  My esteemed curator chose several etchings that had yet to be framed, so I had to spend several days framing nine etchings.  Fortunately, I’m used to framing, and have all the equipment, and a glass company literally around the corner.  So I measured each etching, added three inches on each side, cut matboard and foamcore backing board to go around and in back of each etching, and cut out the opening for the etching from the matboard.  Then I whipped out the table saw and poked thru my stash of picture moulding, picked a bunch of suitable sticks and cut them according to the backing boards.  Then I got out the vises and glue, hammer and nails, and put the frames together.  When they were built, I took them around to the glass shop for glass, and now everything’s on the clean table upstairs, waiting for assemblage into finished framed etchings.  It takes a couple of days to do all this for nine frames.  But tomorrow I will put the etching behind the mat and the backing board behind that, clean the glass one more time, then sandwich them all together and staple them into the frame, add hanging hardware, stack them in a corner of the room, and scratch them off the list.

There was a problem with part of the list.  This is what happens when you have a blank spot early on, and you think it’s going to magically fill itself in.  When I went out to Bob’s to finalize which paintings were going to go in, and he had different ideas than I had, I attempted to alter my map to show his choices, which I was prepared to do, because they were only taped on, and I had lots of extra little squares, and we sat and cut up a lot of little squares to scale and marked which paintings they represented and taped them to which spot on the wall they were intended to go.  The trouble came when I got back and tried to work up the spreadsheet.  My list included a bunch of dancer works on paper, and said “dancer i, dancer ii, dancer iii, etc.”  Bob had printed out a compilation of the paintings he was referring to, and had further starred a bunch of paintings he especially wanted, but somehow these pastel studies (for the most part) never got names, and never got selected out of the stacks.  But this evening it finally got resolved, and I now have all the spaces in the spreadsheet filled in.  Except, as I said, for the prices.

There were problems with several paintings, either because they got purchased and delivered, or because they were in not so good shape and needed reconditioning I wasn’t willing to spend time on, so there have been a couple of substitutions for the paintings I’m pretty sure Bob selected.  Plus a painting I realized Bob meant to include but that never got stuck onto the gallery map.  Plus an etching I think helps define the nymphs and satyrs series.

Right now I’ve got 73 items in the spreadsheet.  They’re mostly in stacks around the bedroom at the moment.  Tomorrow is a day for putting hanging hardware where it needs to go, painting edges black, touching up frames, and finalizing prices.

And then there are the sculptures.  Not the big bronze sculpture, but the 20-inch tall acrylic sculptures, and the smaller skeletal sculptures, and the little edge-of-a-shelf figurines.  They all had to be cleaned of years of dust collected by sitting around the house, which in most cases meant a dunking in borax and ammonia and a good scrubbing with a brush.  with the two mostly-clothed figures, however, I had to use a damp cloth and a cosmetic brush.

Oh yes, I forgot.  I still have yet to write something coherent for the large wall cards, the places I can wax philosophic about the process of painting, or tell the story of my life, or in this case, talk about how I paint and about my materials.  These will unfortunately have to wait until after all the moving.

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Finishing up the paperwork – 8

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One month before the opening of my show, and it’s busy busy busy here in the studio.  But first, a word about the showcard, which I scanned in and joined back to front.  Isn’t it a lovely card?  It’s all the work of Michael at Steem Creative, and I love what they settled on for a title.  I was thinking of calling the show ‘Jim Yarbrough, various unsaleable paintings,’ or ‘recent artshow rejects,’ but this puts it really nicely.  And a very kind sentiment it is, too.

Right now I’m busy making frames for eight etchings that we selected for the show.  Then I’ll have to make sure the proper hanging hardware is on each painting, and then I’ll have to go around and make sure the frames don’t need touching up or repairing.

one of 12 ‘nymphs and satyrs’ etchings

Then there’s the paperwork.  The lovely folks at the Marietta / Cobb Museum of Art emailed a spreadsheet asking for various bits of information, some of which is easier to come by than other bits.

Artist’s name, I got that, no problem.

Name of work, I can fudge that.  I’ll go around at the last minute and think up fancy names for everything.

Medium the work was executed in, if I can tell.  Sometimes I start with one medium and segue into another one without even realizing it.

Size – width and then length.  We had a little issue with the convention at first, but luckily I know which way is up on most of my paintings.

Then a few words for the wall card.  This is the hard part.  If left to myself, I’d just say look at the painting, but my friend Bob Meredith put down extensive verbiage on each painting when he had his show last year, and I’m trying to satisfy everybody by coming up with something meaningful.  And in fact, I’m working up mini-essays for several large wall cards, covering such subjects as my painting methods, my studio equipment, my relationships with my models, and my periods and series of paintings thru the years.  That is, if I can get around to writing them before time’s up.

Year painted.  Well, I can typically narrow it down to decade.

Sale price and insurance value.  Which is something I let my dealer handle, usually.  In this case, I’m fudging, so snap up the bargains before he gets his hands on the price list.

And then I put in a thumbnail of each painting.  Just so the museum folks don’t go crazy trying to figure out which conte crayon dance figure is which.

one of three conte crayon dance drawings.

The spreadsheet was actually due in a month ago, but it was a crazy month, and I got cleared to be a little late with it.  So I’m working on it now.  And, as I said, the descriptions are the hard part.

Checking my measurements twice is also crucial, because they will use this part of the spreadsheet to determine how far to space each painting from each other, which I understand is a major curatorial problem, and has destroyed many art professionals.

After all this preparation is finished, I will be pulling all the paintings into one place from wherever they’ve been (in the basement studio, in the attic racks, on display elsewhere, in the collections of others).  That means from now until next Thursday, the spare bedroom will be stacked with paintings, and there will be paintings in my bedroom, and paintings in the front parlor.  The huge paintings (the six to nine foot paintings) will have to be wrapped in blankets and set out for movers from the museum, who will be here bright and early next thursday.  I’ll transport the rest in the back of my truck.  Maybe in several trips.  The paintings all go in to the museum on December 20, even tho the show doesn’t open for three weeks.  Much of that is Xmas and New Year’s, so it’s really not all that much time.  I will, of course, document the hanging, because I plan to go in and touch up paintings and frames at some point before the show opens, and really wouldn’t want to miss the zoo that will be varnishing day at the museum.

At this point, there are 70 pieces in the show, from drawings to pastels, oils, acrylics, encaustics, giants to miniatures, with sculptures and figurines for all.

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Going thru Jim’s paintings, chapter 2 – 4

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spoiler alert:  evil clowns.

The fabulous Robert Meredith made a second visit to Jim’s studio yesterday, in search of the important paintings this time.  Last time he came out here for the small works, and got distracted; this time he was distracted by Jim’s etchings and prints as well.

They started in the bedroom, where the light was good, and Jim showed him some of his prints that he has been keeping in the studio, mostly recent studies for larger paintings.

Here is Bob taking a picture of one of the studies for the graphic novel Jim will be working on in the near future.  Jim is still eating his breakfast.  In the background is a painting Bob absolutely hates.

Up in the attic, where most of Jim’s work is stored, Bob took a picture of Jim with the plaster statue of a water-bearer.  He has the mold made from this plaster statue, and has arranged to borrow back the bronze made from it, so he can show the process.  Bob wants to show only the masterworks, but we also discussed showing the process of making art, in recognition of the Marietta/Cobb Museum of Art‘s tradition of visits by kids.

These are a few fragments from a tableau Jim did 30 years ago, that has been partially dismantled.  We were considering putting it back together and using it in the show.  It depends on whether we can get hold of the mirror/glass that used to go around the outside.

Here is the source of Bob’s distraction.  Jim must have several hundred prints and etchings in the attic, most of them uncatalogued.  Once Bob found them, he couldn’t contain his enthusiasm.  He calls Jim the best etcher in the Southeast.  It was funny seeing him go thru the stacks and exclaim and gesture.  Every stack has better work than the last, and we had to keep him from venturing into dangerous parts of the attic to look at more stacks.

Then he moved to the stacks of paintings that fill three sides of the huge attic space.  He was entranced by this painting of Moses.

This triptych of the labyrinths of Minos is especially interesting.  It’s egg tempera.

Most of the works you see here are likely to be in the show.  We only took pictures of the ones Bob was particularly enthusiastic about.  But he took 60 pictures the last time he was in Jim’s studio, and about the same this time, and there are only 14 walls in the museum, so it’s likely that many of the pictures you see here won’t be represented in January.  However, that’s the process.

Bob could hardly contain himself when he saw this koi painting.

And he loved this one of Jim’s model Margaret with a fan.  Unfortunately, Jim spotted some mold damage that looks like it’s in the paint, so he’s not really sure what he can do about it.

This is a very old painting, done in the ’70s.  But Bob loved it for its impact from across the room.  He wants the paintings in the show to reach out and hit the viewer.  According to him, the problem with Jim’s work is that it’s so detailed and impactful that if you bunch it all together you get overloaded too fast, so he wants to use a balance of busy and big.

After awhile Bob had to get off his feet.  We were up in the attic for hours, and it got hot after awhile.

But it was really good to see old friends having fun together, sharing their favorite subject in the world – art.

But enough was enough, and we all had to take a coffee break after awhile.  So while they’re resting, let’s look at some of the prints Bob pulled.

This is actually a drawing on brown paper, a study for an etching that he’s not really sure where is.  From the early ’70s, the first one of the big etching he did.  It would be interesting to stumble upon a proof of the print.

One of a series of six etchings of antique dolls that Jim did for Transart Publishing in the early ’80s.  Their customers bought up the entire edition and it was sold out, but Jim still has a few proofs.  Somewhere.

Fairy tales being a kind of mythology, Jim has had some interest in those, and done several paintings and etchings over the years based on fairy tale stories.  Dig the textures on the frog.

This image was eventually printed as a color etching, and worked out nicely.  It gives people nightmares.

All the boy clowns are having a great time, but nobody’s paying attention to the partially nude girl.  Maybe they’re gay.  Gay clowns, geddit?

Many happy figures.  This finished etching was made as a very long scroll of both etchings and woodcuts.  Early ’70s.

A variation on a renaissance style crucifixion, but it’s done with all scarecrows; there’s not a single living person in it.  Etching, mid ’70s.

Both this and the one below were done as a series of decorative landscape prints for Transart in the mid ’80s

A fair number of Jim’s etchings are in color, not as many as his black and white etchings, but they really stand out.

One of a large series of monoprints based on circus characters that Jim did in thruout the ’70s.  An image is painted directly on an unetched plate and then transferred to paper with the etching press.  Jim always pulled a single print and then washed the plate off.

This color etching, also reproduced by Transart,  Many of these girls were members of the Atlanta Ballet, where Jim would go to do studies several times a month.  ’70s.

This is a large, full sized paintings.  One of the most complex of the ballet paintings he did, based from images drawn from both the Atlanta Ballet and the Sandy Springs Ballet companies.  Pastel on board, late ’70s.

This was to be a full-sized wall mural, but the commission was never finalized, and so he has this painting instead.  There are several walls around Atlanta that still have murals on them from this period of Jim’s work.  Late ’80s or early ’90s.  A lot of costumes were borrowed (and returned freshly laundered) from woodcuts by Albrecht Durer.

In gothic imagery, it was understood that frogs spewing out of a person’s mouth represented heresy.  Jim still finds it a fascinating symbol.  Acrylic on panel, early ’70s.

This mermaid was made in the mid ’80s, just because Jim was having a really good time working with found objects as well as creating acrylic figures.

This is one of a number of mermaids Jim did trying to think out the image of a very large mermaid sculpture that he was asked to do for a hotel in the Caribbean some designer asked him to do.  The finished sculpture was six feet tall, in bronze, and completed in an edition of two or three.  These little studies were thinking out the process of what the mermaid should look like.  Since it took a lot of room to do a six foot plaster sculpture, he did it in the kitchen of his newly bought house, and then sent the plaster out to a casting studio in Canton, GA to do the actual mold and sculpture.   Done in the mid ’80s.

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The rest of the paintings

We found some more completed paintings, mainly ones that usually stay at Erin’s gallery.  And here they are.  If you’re interested in any of these paintings, please contact Erin Wertenberger.

Venice Carnival

Asha

 

the painting below is the only one exhibited in this group that has not been painted in the last four years.  it was painted in 1974 and is part of an estate collection Erin is handling.

 

 

Paintings – Asha and Venice Carnival

These are the finished paintings on canvas or board that Jim will be exhibiting at Mason Murer Fine Arts, on February 12th.  Media range from acrylic to pastel to egg tempera to encaustic.  The two previous posts contain Jim’s works on paper, which are also on exhibit at the gallery.  If you are interested in purchasing one of these works, please contact Erin Wertenberger for more information.

the artist at 190 years old

ASHA

VENICE CARNIVAL

Works on Paper 2 – Asha

On Friday February 12, from 7-10pm, Jim Yarbrough is opening his new exhibit at Mason Murer Fine Art, 199 Armour Drive, in Atlanta.

Below are some of the works on paper he will be showing.  They are drawings and preliminary paintings of his friend Asha, a belly dancer of renown.

If you are interested in any of these paintings, please contact Jim for more information.