Ella Rose Muse: the story: Postcards

Monday, 7 May 2012

Postcards - an exhibition

As some of you will know, I am in love with the 'Zen Habits' blog, and when writer Leo Babuta featured the quote

~‘Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.'~

at the top of today's post I couldn't help but scribble it out and add it to the mounted collection of phrases and art postcards (picked up from galleries/museums) hanging above my desk. One of my all time favourites is 'Creativity is unexpected connection' - I think it applies so well, and so surprisingly, which is fitting, to many different areas of life! I also have 'The big secret is the ability to stay in the room' above Holbein's Erasme écrivant.

My board of postcards was originally inspired by a similar one which hangs in the bathroom of a painter I spent a year modelling for, who is exhibiting later this week (9th-26th May) at Messum's on Cork Street in London.

You can find information about Robbie Wraith's show here and browse the artworks which will be on display here. I will definitely be going once I'm back from Scotland to look at some I haven't seen before - over the course of a year, there amassed quite a few!

It seems a fitting time to reflect on my first ever experience of art modelling when I am, three years later, busier than I've ever been, being sent booking enquiries so frequently I can hardly keep up, and so incredibly lucky that I am offered work in different countries across the globe that I am able to travel and see so much. I am so grateful! Upcoming trips include Scotland, Ireland, Germany, Paris, Cornwall/Devon, Stockport and more, plus a possible booking in a part of the world I would perhaps never have the opportunity to visit otherwise (but I won't mention before it's confirmed just in case), and from October onwards I am planning some international travel that will take me to some exotic locations, similar to last year (but different places!). I've updated the 'travel' gadget on the right hand side of this blog, to let anyone interested know about a few forthcoming trips.

Anyway, back on topic, I really fell on my feet with this first foray into posing - Robbie's talent is extraordinary and the whole experience influenced my first novel hugely. At age 16 he was invited to study in Florence under Pietro Annigoni; since then he's painted the Queen, Nelson Mandela and accompanied Prince Charles around Africa as travelling artist, and had works displayed in the Vatican amongst other places.

Here are some things we did, available to see at the show in London (click on the images to enlarge them):

Profile
Oil on panel
40.6 x 31 cm (16 x 12 ¹⁄₄ in)
(I absolutely love this painting; as well as being brilliant, hey, why not just paint 29 other famous paintings from history??! Might as well... And the postcards are so cleverly positioned!)

Portrait Study I
Red chalk
30.5 x 23 cm (12 x 9 in)

Yvonne
Pencil
25.4 x 20 cm (10 x 7 ⁷⁄₈ in)

Study, Black Veil
Charcoal
45.7 x 33 cm (18 x 13 in)

Figure Study V
Charcoal
25.4 x 46 cm (10 x 18 ¹⁄₈ in)

Blank Canvas I
Watercolour
30.5 x 41 cm (12 x 16 ¹⁄₈ in)

Contraluce
Watercolour
30.5 x 40.6 cm (12 x 16 in)

... And here are a few more of my favourite paintings by Robbie Wraith, also to be found at Messums...

Alexandra
Oil on panel
30.5 x 17.8 cm (12 x 7 in)

(An amazing portrait of a friend of mine; Hello Alex!!)

Artist & Model
Oil on panel
18 x 30.5 cm (7 ¹⁄₈ x 12 in)

Bougainvillea, Rajasthan
Oil on panel
14 x 20.3 cm (5 ¹⁄₂ x 8 in)

Hanging by a Thread
Watercolour
30.5 x 40.6 cm (12 x 16 in)

Mr. Wraith's Footsteps
Oil on panel
22.9 x 31 cm (9 x 12 ¹⁄₄ in)

Lungarno Corsini, Florence
Oil on panel
22.9 x 31 cm (9 x 12 ¹⁄₄ in)

Palazzo Corsini Gardens
Oil on panel
20.3 x 25.4 cm (8 x 10 in)

Leica, Bird on a Wire
Oil on panel
20.3 x 25.4 cm (8 x 10 in)

Puppet Shop, Rajasthan
Watercolour
21.6 x 30.5 cm (8 ¹⁄₂ x 12 in)

The Frome below Wareham, Dorset I
Watercolour
21.6 x 31 cm (8 ¹⁄₂ x 12 ¹⁄₄ in)

Twenty-Seven Afternoons
Oil on canvas
76.2 x 122 cm (30 x 48 in)
(This painting formed the majority of the view during much of my own modelling; I love the position of the wrist.)

If you like what you see, drop by the exhibition sometime!

Walter De La Mare, 'The Listeners'

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,

Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses

Of the forest’s ferny floor:

And a bird flew up out of the turret,

Above the Traveller’s head:

And he smote upon the door again a second time;

‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.

But no one descended to the Traveller;

No head from the leaf-fringed sill

Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,

Where he stood perplexed and still.

But only a host of phantom listeners

That dwelt in the lone house then

Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight

To that voice from the world of men:

Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,

That goes down to the empty hall,

Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken

By the lonely Traveller’s call.

And he felt in his heart their strangeness,

Their stillness answering his cry,

While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,

’Neath the starred and leafy sky;

For he suddenly smote on the door, even

Louder, and lifted his head:—

‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,

That I kept my word,’ he said.

Never the least stir made the listeners,

Though every word he spake

Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house

From the one man left awake:

Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,

And the sound of iron on stone,

And how the silence surged softly backward,

When the plunging hoofs were gone.

Natasha Khan/Bat for Lashes, 'Horse and I'

Got woken in the night,
by a mystic golden light.
My head soaked in river water.
I had been dressed in a coat of armor. They called
a horse out of the woodland.
"Take her there, through the desert shores."
They sang to me, "This is yours to wear.
You're the chosen one, there's no turning back now."

The smell of redwood giants.
The banquet for the shadows.
Horse and I, we're dancers in the dark.
Came upon the headdress.
It was gilded, dark and golden.
The children sang.
I was so afraid I took it to my head and prayed.
They sang to me, "This is yours to wear. You're the chosen one, there's no turning back."
They sang to me, "This is yours to wear. You're the chosen one, there's no turning back."

Mark Doty, 'A Display of Mackerel'

They lie in parallel rows,

on ice, head to tail,

each a foot of luminosity

barred with black bands,

which divide the scales’

radiant sections

like seams of lead

in a Tiffany window.

Iridescent, watery

prismatics: think abalone,

the wildly rainbowed

mirror of a soapbubble sphere,

think sun on gasoline.

Splendor, and splendor,

and not a one in any way

distinguished from the other

—nothing about them

of individuality. Instead

they’re all exact expressions

of the one soul,

each a perfect fulfilment

of heaven’s template,

mackerel essence. As if,

after a lifetime arriving

at this enameling, the jeweler’s

made uncountable examples,

each as intricate

in its oily fabulation

as the one before

Suppose we could iridesce,

like these, and lose ourselves

entirely in the universe

of shimmer—would you want

to be yourself only,

unduplicatable, doomed

to be lost? They’d prefer,

plainly, to be flashing participants,

multitudinous. Even now

they seem to be bolting

forward, heedless of stasis.

They don’t care they’re dead

and nearly frozen,

just as, presumably,

they didn’t care that they were living:

all, all for all,

the rainbowed school

and its acres of brilliant classrooms,

in which no verb is singular,

or every one is. How happy they seem,

even on ice, to be together, selfless,

which is the price of gleaming.

Kate Clanchy, 'Poem for a Man with No Sense of Smell'

This is simply to inform you:

that the thickest line in the kink of my hand
smells like the feel of an old school desk,
the deep carved names worn sleek with sweat;

that beneath the spray of my expensive scent
my armpits sound a bass note strong
as the boom of a palm on a kettle drum;

that the wet flush of my fear is sharp
as the taste of an iron pipe, midwinter,
on a child's hot tongue; and that sometimes,

in a breeze, the delicate hairs on the nape
of my neck, just where you might bend
your head, might hesitate and brush your lips,

hold a scent frail and precise as a fleet
of tiny origami ships, just setting out to sea.

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Monday, 7 May 2012

Postcards - an exhibition