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 Sleeping Gypsy

Although I really liked having Les demoiselles on the wall for the past month, we're having a lot of visitors to the apartment in the next few weeks, and several naked prostitutes is not really the "welcome to our home" look we're going for, especially in regards to our three-year-old nephew and one-year-old niece.*

So, I wanted something kid-friendly (sorry Frida Kahlo) but nothing too boring, and I thought immediately of Henri Rousseau's The Sleeping Gypsy. I've always loved how bright and colorful this painting is. It almost feels like something out of a picture book, but it's quite a complicated painting with really interesting colors.

Oh, colors. Sometimes I feel like I should quit trying to replicate oil paintings with my little chalkboard and just stick to works rendered in chalk--it's just tougher to blend colors together. Although here I was pretty happy with how it turned out, the original sky is just so lovely and I was disappointed I wasn't able to capture it exactly.

Still, it was a lot of fun to draw, especially the gypsy woman's multi-colored robe and purple hair, and I loved taking a closer look at the details, like her peaceful expression or the lion's big, wide-open eye. Here's hoping the kiddos enjoy it too.

Dave's first-view response: (Hmm... I don't remember, because he was in the apartment the whole time I was drawing. Actually, he was asleep on the couch and at one point I looked over and saw our dog standing over him and sniffing his face. It was pretty surreal/awesome)

*I told Dave I wanted to avoid a "Have you ever seen a grown man naked?" moment. The reference was greatly appreciated.