June 2016 – Angie Brooksby-Arcangioli

As the planet spins off axis in a flurry of bad news I’ve decided to tackle the subject of color.

I wanted to write about Eugéne Chevreul’s influence on the French Impressionists for my Masters in painting. But I never got a M.A. Oh, the shame. But who the hell wants to contract twenty thousands bucks in loans to get a M.A. in painting? Not me. At the time I lived in the U.S.A. and I didn’t know the Eurpoean universities were basically free.

Color in artworks has changed drastically since paeleolithic France. Back then some dude burnt a stick in a fire and drew a horse on the wall of a cave. Dude then colored it in with different colored rocks, kind of like drawing on a chalk board. Amazingly, artists still use charcoal to draw on paper. Others draw on subterranean walls, like Parisian catacombs, but with spray paints.

zezao4 — ZEZAO4 in action Photo courtesy of blog.vandalog.com

There are more than 180 paleolithic decorated caves in France. That’s seriously old. France has been through a few wars since then. Even a revolution. I guess there is a reason the government took all the guns away from a bellicose population and now spends money on advancing knowledge in science and the arts.

One of the most important scientists in French history is the chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul. From the photos of him, let’s say bad hair day didn’t matter.

Among other scientific writings Chevreul penned The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors (and their application to the arts) ©1987 based on the first English edition of 1854 as translated from the first French edtion of 1839. Here is the title in French.

De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs et de l’assortiment des objets colorés considéré d’après cette loi dans ses rapports avec la peinture, les tapisseries des Gobelins, les tapisseries de Beauvais, pour meubles, les tapis, la mosaïque, les vitraux colorés, l’impression des étoffes, l’imprimerie, l’enluminure, la décoration des édifices, l’habillement et l’horticulture.

In 1992 I wanted this book so badly after I saw it at an artist’s flat in Florence but it wasn’t available in any book stores and Amazon was yet to be invented, so was the internet. My lovely mother knew how to obtain it. She wrote to Shiffler Publishing Ltd. and I sent it across the Atlantic ocean.

M.E. Chevreul revolutionized the use of color. I’ll tell you more about that in the next post.

brooksby-painted-mannequins — Painted and naked mannequins in my atelier

Three naked graces arrived yesterday. I’d awaited anxiously for their delivery.

Before I can paint them, I have to sand down the surface because mannequins are coated with some industrial super-paint. Nothing sticks to it. This makes sense if you consider how abused they are during their lives. Shipped around, dressed, undressed, scratched and scraped. The super paint, whatever it is, makes them easy to clean, but a bitch to paint. Nothing sticks to it. Not even spray paint.

howtopaintamannequin — Royal pain in the butt, sanding is.

I never realized how ugly mannequins are. This is what we women are supposed to look like. This is today’s canon of beauty. Mannequins. They have monstrously long legs, toddler-sized torsos, male adolescent shoulders, and feet fit for a fairytail princess. Not the feet in the photo, those are mine.

Canons of beauty change through the ages and contemporary beauty canons differ from place to place.

The first time I understood what beauty canon meant, I was in Piazza Signoria admiring Giambologna and Ammanannti’s fountain of Neptune. Of course I’d never really looked at the nymphs. It was Neptune’s privates I admired. Those and his perfectly sculpted six pack abs. (I stole that line from a contemporary romance novel.)

My ex-husband, who stood next to me, said, “Guarda il collo di quello, è mostruoso.” Look at that one’s neck, it’s monstrous. He was looking at the nymphs. And probably watching me, while I stared at the rock hard privates.

We joked about the nymph coming to life. Rising from the marble basin and walking through the piazza. If she was human she would have been Frankenstein’s latest creation, the young Japanese tourists, who were photographing Neptune’s junk, would have run screaming, sure that Godzilla had returned.

Canons of beauty are not only monstrous mannequins. They touch everything and they evolve. What was beautiful yesterday is monstrous today.

Ever been to a dog show? Dogs have character. Man bred and selected them to work. Poodles were hunting dogs. They were shaved in certain places so they could move easily through the brush. Their coats were left long in specific places to keep them warm. In the advent of the dog show, dog breeds were selected for beauty and their looks were distorted.

Now I have some serious sanding to do so I can grace those three monsters.