This month gardening has taken priority over most other activities as the fine warm weather has meant progress has been made in tidying and planting on our relatively small patch of land at the rear of the house. There has been time,however to start a couple of new paintings and I’m finishing off a portrait of Helena Bonham Carter and an abstract which will probably be called Tonal Contrast 2.
Helena Bonham Carter
My interest in Helena Bonham Carter was triggered by a recent documentary television series covering a number of artists including Stanley Spencer, John Singer Sargent, Holman – Hunt and Dora Carrington who became part of the Bloomsbury set and was famous for her association with the author Lytton Strachey whose biography of Queen Victoria I read when studying for my A Levels at school. Dora Carrington (29.3.1893-11.3.1932) was something of a free spirit and it seemed appropriate that Helena Bonham Carter should admire this female artist as their characters probably have much in common. The concept of the series was that each programme featured a guest who visited the places where each of the artists grew up, lived and worked, following in their footsteps accompanied by a presenter giving an informative guided tour. Helena Bonham Carter has played a variety of roles in films and is very much her own person whenever she appears in public with her hair, make up, clothing and demeanour. It seems that Carrington too did not conform to convention in the way she dressed and behaved particularly in her unusual romances.
Tonal Contrasts (2)
This abstract is another of my paintings based on music and in particular is related to the works of the Viennese School – the composers Schoenberg, Webern and Berg who were behind the shift from late Romantic melodic music to that which contained dissonance and sounds less easy on the ear – the twelve tone system.