‘Putting on’ – 30cm x 30cm – oil on canvas.
Muted colours for the heavy, still tired time in the morning, a whole day ahead, but what better way to start than with bright red stockings. I particularly enjoyed putting on the vermillion.
‘Morning’ – 18cm x 12.5cm – oil on canvas board
I wanted muted blue in this one, for the time just before the light comes, the warm colours are for the warm body, and the warm blankets.
After the bath – 18cm x 12.5cm – oil on canvas board
This work is ‘after’ Gustave Caillebotte, a contemporary of the Impressionists. His original painting is just so stunning that I made a sketch whilst in the gallery, and then adapted this work from that sketch, in the studio. I wanted to impress the contrast of warmth from the bath and the still wet, now cool skin.
In contrast this is ‘Cold shower’ I wanted to make the colours and lines hard and cold to make the painting itself ‘be’ cold. Oil on canvas board. 18cm x 12.5cm oil on canvas board
Avocado suite – 12.5cm x 18cm – oil on canvas board
The sketch was taken from a Pierre Bonnard painting, it has turned into a cool green, contemplative bath time, imagination taking the bather anywhere, away from the rest of the day, away from the avocado suite.
Ophelia in the bath – 40cm x 50cm – oil on canvas
To finish off a series of works describing the previously-painted bathing nude, I painted Ophelia, but in the bath. This tragic character from Hamlet who drowned herself in a river, was painted by John Everett Millais, one of the Pre-Raphaelites painters, in 1852. The original painting is full of the crisp detail of river undergrowth, flowers in the water, and of course Ophelia, with sodden dress billowing out around her. The model was Elizabeth Siddal, who was to becomes Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s wife, she posed for Millais in a dress, lying in a bath of water, heated by oil lamps from below, from which she caught a cold.
The pose here is specific to the Millais painting, and the bath is the connection, but there is no tragedy in this particular work, I wanted to turn it into something far more mundane.
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