Miranda Grace Makes Interiors

My eldest child, Miranda, is quite the artist (on top of being intense, defiant, powerful, passionate, and smart). Recently she’s been making these very interesting flattened interior spaces.

Miranda, the artist. Aged 10 and a half.

The drawings show an interest in categorization and organizational meaning, which are two interconnected ideas that Miranda has always been focused on. Placement and scale appear to be very important to her right now, too.

Grandma Valerie’s Tea Party
Colored pencil and ink on paper, 11 x 8.5 inches. 2020.

There is also a straightening and flattening of space in these new pieces. This is a little different for Miranda as she does understand perspective to a degree and has shown knowledge of recession of space in the past. However, these works seem to me to be more about the idea of the scene and less about naturalistic space or light.

Aunt Clarice’s Dinner Party
Colored pencil and ink on paper, 11 x 8.5 inches. 2020.

The way that forms extend unnaturally or terminate on two dimensional lines are unique aspects of these drawings. Above, see how the door extends into the floor or how the shelves stop right on the separation between the floor and the wall. These characteristics make the drawings function more as tableaux rather than structurally “correct” space depictions.

I’m interested to see how she combines the symbolic spaces of these drawings and the more expressionistic and observed spaces from her other drawings/paintings. I think that the organization and delineation of objects in her recent drawings are related to a desire for control. When she’s feeling more tense and uncertain, she wants to establish control. When she’s feeling more at ease and free her creates much more expressionistically and with fewer hard lines and forms.

I’ve taken Miranda on solo dates to museums a couple times (see most recently below) and she loves to do sketching from the master works and take in the quiet, calm spaces…

I am sure Miranda will keep growing as an artist and hone a unique way of making her experiences take shape in the world. ❤️

Visiting The Milwaukee Art Museum with Marcus

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My good friend and former student Marcus met up for a day at the Milwaukee Art Museum today. While there, we took in the wonderful and hilarious Thomas Sully exhibition that was on view. We visited old favorites, like the two Richard Diebenkorn works they own. We also enjoyed a couple new friends, like the Audubon piece below:

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While taking in the Thomas Sully: Painted Performance exhibition, I decided to do a number of quick sketches. I spent between 30 seconds and two minutes on these pieces. If you click on my drawing, you’ll see what the original piece looked like.

They really reminded me of the fantastic Kyle Staver’s work. Staver, who just recently had a show at Tibor de Nagy in NYC, often uses classic themes and large, dynamic compositions in her work. She also manifests a unique sense of the shaping of forms, particularly in how she develops the figures in her paintings. Sully, though very different from Staver and far removed from her in time, also had a feeling for the strange shapes that flesh may take on. What he lost in correct anatomy (foreshortening, proportion) was gained in drama and formal structure. The strange figures he painted often loom from the surfaces in terms of their abstract shapes rather than their representational effect. In some way Sully feels like a progenitor of Staver.

Anyway, here are the sketches – click to see the originals. Enjoy!

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Sketch of Thomas Sully’s Self Portrait, 1807.

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Sketch of Thomas Sully’s portrait of Mary Ann Paton, 1836.

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Sketch of Thomas Sully’s portrait of Major Thomas Biddle, 1832.

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Sketch of Thomas Sully’s portrait of Mary Siddons Whelen, 1812.

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Sketch of Thomas Sully’s portrait of Rosalie Kemble Sully as The Student, 1848.

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Sketch of Thomas Sully’s portrait of John Terford David, 1813.

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Sketch of Thomas Sully’s portrait of Mrs George Lingen, 1842.

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All in all it was a pretty nice day. Here’s one more shot of Marcus for the road…

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