Christina's World

Poor Rousseau. The lion and the gypsy only stayed on the chalkboard wall for two weeks before they were unceremoniously wiped to make room for a pie menu for our pie party last weekend (verdict: seven pies = success).

My favorite of the night: Lemon Cheese, but the Cherry went the quickest

When it came time to put a new drawing on the wall, I debated a bit. I just went to the Art Institute and I love George Seurat's A Sunday on the Island of La Grande Jatte. At first I thought the chalk might do a good job mimicking the pastels, and then I actually looked at how riDICulously complicated it was and laughed and laughed and laughed.

Instead, I chose one of my all-time favorite paintings, Christina's World, by Andrew Wyeth. This painting is actually one of the first that I thought of when I decided to do art-inspired chalkboard drawings. I first remember seeing it in a book about composition, how to use natural eye-tracking movement to properly construct a scene. Christina's World was a textbook example of circular composition, from the curve of the woman's body up to the tire marks, the houses, the sky, and the bend of the fields.

I just love this--the dense, dry field, the stark farmhouses, the woman digging her fingers into the dirt to crawl across the field. It's amazing and beautiful and I was really excited to put it on the wall.

But, in retrospect, it was probably a little too late when I started and I was probably a little too tired to do it justice. Those big swaths of field made me a little crazy (hatch marks! so many hatch marks!), and my projector wasn't working right so the colors turned out a bit wonky (in the painting, her dress is a lovely pale pink, but my projector made it look like a Barbie convertible). I'd saved the figure for the last, thinking I'd get the the tedious stuff out of the way so I could concentrate, but after two hours of dink-dink-dink-dink against the chalkboard, I was exhausted and just had enough time to roughly block things out before bed.

So, my little chalkboard rendition isn't quite as fragile or subtle as the original, but I still like how all the elements came together in the end.

Dave's first-view reaction: Impressive! Don't erase it before I come home. [that would be in two weeks. Not, like, an hour]

 The houses took all of ten minutes, and I was very pleased with how much I was able to convey with four colors and a little bit of smudging

 And likewise

 She so extraordinary in the painting.

The real Christina Olson suffered from polio, and her body is incredible--thin and delicate but with these amazing, ropey muscles. 

Closeup of insanity

And the original. Amazing.