Portraits

When I was 7 years Miss Finnegan asked the class to produce a picture illustrating something we had done over the Christmas holidays (in Australia this was the summer holidays, an 8 week break). I had joined my brother and the neighborhood kids to build a cubby house. Without labelling specific gender assigned roles, my brother and his friends build the structure and me and my friend put up curtains and installed purloined furniture. It was built at the back of the vacant lot next door and used our fence as one of the sides. Its height, therefore was limited by the height of the fence. My picture showed our cubby along with me and my friend standing by it. We all had to stand in front of the class and present our pictures. Miss Finnegan said to the class – very nice but can everyone see the mistake? The children are the same height as the house!! Well duh… we were the same size as the house. Still back in the day one did not backchat or even correct the teacher, one burned in shame and nursed resentment for nearly 60 years now. Ha ha, time I let it go I guess… Nevertheless, she made me think that I couldn’t draw.

Fast forward a couple of years and Mr Compton asked his grade 7 class to draw a self portrait by looking in a mirror. He was full of praise for mine and hung it on the class wall with the other “good” ones. Later that year I drew a pencil sketch of an old man and called it “old Jed” (I never saw this man and didn’t know anyone called Jed, but I had imagination in spades) and it got a commendation in the municipal art show. From then on I lost my fear of drawing.

Fast forward again to a few years back when my son received paints and an easel for a bar mitzvah present. It sparked a renaissance of my love for painting.

Bubbie & Leona

The first painting I did was of my husband’s mother and her mother (since passed away, may her memory be blessed). I used a photo taken at a family wedding.

Quite a few years have passed since this painting and I can see how many things I did wrong – firstly the eyes are too big (a common problem with my drawing) and by making the background light instead of dark I have washed out the luminosity of their faces. I also was not faithful to the position of their heads, or even their complexions. This is a portrait I need to re-visit.

Bar Mitzvah Boy 1

Not long afterward I decided to paint something to celebrate my son’s bar mitzvah.

I painted on a small 9 x 12 canvas in acrylic. I was pretty pleased with the tallit (prayer shawl) folds but I see now that my perspective on the torah (bible scroll) was not faithful to the photo perspective and the relative size of the finials is all wrong.

Bar Mitzvah Boy 2

Of course I loved my subject so well that I thought to try again, this time with all the male relatives in the frame. I was going great guns until my son the critic pointed out that “Ima to torah is floating off the table” My son is 24 now. Bar Mitzvah age is 13, so I doubt this picture is ever going to get finished.

Miriam

Around the same time as I was painting the first bar mitzvah picture one of my very good friends passed away. She was quite elderly and had been bed-ridden in a nursing home for a couple of years. Her name was Miriam, may her memory be a blessing. She was an amazing woman, surviving the holocaust and escaping from Romania after the war. She was 18. The ship which was supposed to bring her to Palestine (as Israel was called then) was captured and she was isent to a camp in Cyprus. She was able to leave there posing as a 12 year old during a humanitarian release of children. As she arrived off the boat in Palestine all the “children” were immediately drafted into the Hagana (Jewish people’s army) to fight for the country during the turbulent years up to and after independence. She married another soldier and after the birth of their 3 children made their way to Canada. She and I used to swap novels and she was very proud of her self-taught English. She spoke Hebrew fluently but could not read or write it.

Miriam and I spent many a Vancouver shabbat afternoon together walking to the women’s Torah class. When she visited me in Israel about a year before she became ill she told me how much she loved the Sea of Galillee (called the Kinneret in Hebrew). After she passed away I was sorting through old mail and found a photograph she had sent me. I decided to paint her.

There is a story that when the Israelites were wandering in the desert for 40 years their water supply came from a well which rolled along with them in the merit of Moses and Aharon’s sister Miriam. The story goes that when the Israelites arrived at the Jordan River pausing ahead of entering the land of Canaan, Miriam’s well rolled on into the Kinneret and you can see it at sunrise if you know where to look. My son and I got up early one morning and went looking but we didn’t find it. For years I drove to my work in a lab in the Golan Heights and every time I crested the hill near Migdal I saw the Kinneret and hoped to see the well. Obviously not early enough in the morning. It supposedly has curative properties. I used the Miriam’s Well and the Kinneret as a motif in my painting of Miriam. I see that I still have the large eye problem going on in my portrait. I also completely ruined the color of her hair. I always thought her hair was too brassy blonde, but now that I see it, it must have been my faulty memory. Nevertheless it doesn’t detract from my love for this lady and my admiration for her courage as a young woman and her good deeds and kindnesses to me and to others an older person when I knew her.

The Hebrew writing says – “this is the sign of the well of Miriam which can be seen in the sea of Teverya (Tiberias) before the rising of the sun.”

Beautiful Boys

At one time there were two very special boys, brothers, whom we fostered for a while. I won’t include their photos but these are two sketches I did. They boys were polite enough to let me hang them in their room. Again I have the big eyes thing going but no apologies this time. Both boys had huge liquid brown eyes that you could drown in. They also both were keeping the tooth fairy penniless at the time, but they have grown into wonderful young men, both super handsome with perfect teeth.

Coffee with Friends

During the first shut down of COVID in the spring of 2020 my son was sent home from work for a few weeks. Although he had his own apartment in the city he chose to spend the lockdown with us, rather than alone. He slept late and moped around the house in his pyjamas. Never mind that he was not working he spent a lot of time on the phone with colleagues helping them with questions about his area of expertise. He also kept in touch with friends. I called this sketch “Coffee with freinds” (spelling mistake mine).

My first attempt was abysmal so I discarded it and started again. I realized that the phone was not prominent enough which pushed the whole sizing of the other elements off.

I decided to cheat on the second attempt by marking key points on the drawing by tracing (not the whole thing just key points like the end of the nose, edge of lips etc and most importantly the top of the phone. The finished product is not perfect but is a lot better. My son says that except that he knows who it is he would not recognize himself.

Selfies

My husband has been teaching himself to draw from an excellent book called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. It comes with a companion companion work book, although it is not really necessary. When my husband wasn’t using it I began doing the exercises in the book with varying levels of success. She teaches how to regard spaces as shapes, both the empty ones and the full ones and how to draw to a grid. I recommend it highly to anyone who wants to learn to draw, especially if you feel you can’t. Betty and her son run workshops as well as write books and she has her own blog at her website below.

https://www.drawright.com/

One of the exercises in the book was to draw a self portrait – then after completing the exercises in the book, to draw another one. Here are my two before and after attempts. The first I did with the mirror as instructed, the second I did from a photograph. I also see that although I was brutal with my neck rolls, I was generous with the neck length and gave myself slimmer shoulders. I notice now that I still have the big eye thing happening – more work needed on that!

Well that’s it for portraits. I hope that you enjoyed reading it as much as I did writing it.