Well hello there! Thanks for stopping by this inaugural blog post where I’ll be sharing a little bit of the story behind the painting, “Perseverance”. I’ll start by deconstructing the concept and then go into more about the actual nuts and bolts of painting the piece.
This one, like the majority of my more elaborate or conceptual pieces, is result of several (often disparate seeming) ideas and timelines coalescing rather than one sudden “a-ha!” moment where everything is realized. The following is a rough outline of the threads that wove together to make this painting come to life…
Let’s start with the summoning beauty and dignified strength of the woman depicted, Miriam Peretz. Miriam is a profoundly masterful dance artist who I became familiar with via Pomegranate Garden Dance, an online platform for Persian and Central Asian Dance classes started by Natalie Nayun, also an incredible dancer! Miriam’s practice has taken her through North America, the Middle East, Central Asia, North Africa, the Mediterranean, and beyond…sharing her version of devotional dance which is rooted in many years of training in Pan-Central Asian, flamenco, and contemporary dance as well as martial arts. Beyond aesthetic, her work is highly intentional - to build bridges between cultures, foster a sense of community, and communicate positive virtues to her audience and students. Experiencing her dance the first time deeply touched my heart, and since then I have wanted to paint her! (Miriam’s site is https://www.miriamdance.com/ and she offers awesome classes online regularly, there’s also a video interview with her at the bottom of this post)
Then, there were a couple of excellent books that I was reading at the time: The Lizard Cage, by Karen Connelly and Prisoner of Tehran by Marina Nemat, both dealing with themes of resilience and political imprisonment/prisoners of conscience in the context of revolution in Burma and Iran, respectively.
These, along with a bit of lingering malaise from winter á la Covid, were in my noggin when I was invited for the first time to attend Passover at a friend’s home. (For those unfamiliar, Passover is a Jewish holiday which commemorates the journey of the Hebrews’ liberation from enslavement by the Egyptians). The ritual and symbolism of the meal were fascinating, as well as the hosts’ interpretation of the religious history in which they probed into old stories in a metaphoric way to find meaning in the present. At a certain point, the question “What is your personal Egypt?” was posed to all those around the table - in effect, “What is ‘enslaving’ you or exerting power over you?”. The question reverberated viscerally in me, highlighting how enormously privileged I am in contrast that my personal Egypt would be my own Ego or perhaps the pull of a society and era that feels grossly maladjusted to the natural order. Meanwhile, whether through trafficking, labour, incarceration, etc. there are millions of people literally enslaved by monstrous systems that exert a very physical, immediate violation of freedom. Systems that can feel daunting to influence as an individual. Art being my favoured method for processing bitter truths and my humble tool for bringing what little goodness I am able, the haze of my composition started coming into focus.
For reasons I won’t get tangential with here, I tend to avoid iconography and religious references in my work like the plague (biblical pun, anyone?). However, an image came to mind that Miriam had shared of herself, beautiful and sun-glowing while holding a tambourine from Cairo… a little text about how she was named after Miriam, the elder sister of Moses, who led the Hebrews through the Red Sea to freedom while playing a tambourine. (Just want to point out some serious erasure of the feminine in how this story is generally told, with Moses generally getting all the credit *__* ) I realized that despite the religious subtext, a painting of this scene would give me an opportunity to express beauty & hope, paint Miriam, practice perspective/colour theory/anatomy/landscape… so I bent my own rule.
The thesis of this piece is to inspire strength and perseverance, one step at a time, amidst the terror and tumult of adversity by using ancient symbolism. Safe to say that most of us in the past couple years have experienced some form of adversity and could use a few sunbeams, no? I hope that it makes you glow on the inside….
If you’ve hung on this far, thanks! Now I’ll share a bit about the actual process of making the painting.
I started this one with a bit of a wash and underpainting in Burnt Sienna, to help harmonize the colours, figure out the values of the composition, and to make everything pop just a bit more. From there, I went on to blocking in by layers with plenty of time in between (since I work in oil, things can get a bit mucky if you try to do too much at once). I’ve been enjoying using a wider variety of brushes, in particular befriending some of the stiffer ones which helped me to get the ocean spray to a nice mist, or admiring how efficient it can be to use an angled brush for wide and thin strokes without having to swap in between.
When the painting was about 80% complete I tried a product called Liquin for the first time, a fast-drying medium for thinning colours when glazing, and the awesome results made me a bit glum that I didn’t know about it when I was working on the waves! Previously I would thin with dry brushing, oil, or terps and found that the opacity and drying time were pretty underwhelming. Although now I am using Liquin regularly in other paintings to glaze, in this piece it was only used to get translucency on the layers of the tambourine and sun beams.
Despite the simplicity of the composition and perspective, I still found it challenging to wrap my head around how the water and clouds would respond to light and can see that there is plenty of room for improvement in that regard if I’m setting realism as a goal.
For finishing touches, I did some impasto brushwork on the waves washing up on the path and used some of Gamblin’s gold paint (underneath thin glazes) to get a bit of luminance on the cymbals of the tambourine. Alas, both of those are more visible in person than in the photo.
Although I feel like I’m starting to shift from the saturated and straightforward colour palette of this piece, which has been a tendency in my work, I like the dreamy intensity that it lends to the scene.
Overall, the piece turned out almost the way I was envisioning it!
Thanks for reading this first post and feel free to leave your impressions/feedback in the comments :)