Dragon's Eye. Duncan Regehr
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу Dragon's Eye - Duncan Regehr страница 3
Название: Dragon's Eye
Автор: Duncan Regehr
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Зарубежные стихи
isbn: 9781462918027
isbn:
That evening the royal aide came to look upon the finished work and proclaimed it a masterpiece. The artist was paid a commission and told that the Emperor and his court would view the painting in the morning.
The artist waited until everyone in the palace had gone to bed before applying two glowing white dots to the deep centers of the dragon’s eyes. After collecting his materials, he covered the mural with a veil. Then he disappeared into the night and the far-off forest.
Early the next day, the mural was unveiled before the Emperor and his court. All were enchanted by its exquisite beauty and lifelike features. As words of praise were voiced, the dragon’s eyes flickered. His body slowly turned and he rose into the air, circling above the court before flying out of a window, leaving only his intricate outline on the white palace wall, and the red chop of the artist.
I
SECRETS OF AN
AUTODIDACT
Early Work
and Portraits
The Magician OIL 24”x 18”
PETER REGEHR The Red Carpet OIL ON MASONITE 29” x 24”
AS YOUNGSTER, idea of growing up to be an artist did not occur to me. Art was a steady, ongoing process from the beginning. I never looked upon it as a career or a job. It was a way of life.
As an adult, not much has changed except that I am more aware of art-making as a constant state of becoming—a way of life where the growing up never ends.
Since early childhood I have been making work. My father’s painting studio was in the house. Pencils, paper, ink and paint were always available. As far as I was concerned, art was as important to life as eating or breathing.
My attitude was not shared by other children, as I soon learned in elementary school in Victoria, Canada.
My teacher asked Rhonda Williams, the prettiest girl in the Primary Division to model for art class. She was wearing a dark sweater, tartan skirt, white ankle socks, and oxfords. Fairly standard attire for the early 1960s, but not very interesting I thought.
I mentally removed Rhonda’s clothing and proceeded to draw the little girl in the nude. I saw nothing wrong with this. My father was painting a nude at home. I wanted Rhonda to appear as a goddess of nature, like T. Hart Benton’s Persephone, a copy of which I had seen in my father’s book on American painting.
My ink drawings progressed and Rhonda grew breasts, hips, and long flowing hair. Suddenly the teacher loomed over my shoulder. She was horrified. Rhonda was mortified. I was tongue-tied. The drawings were confiscated, and I was caned across the backside in front of the class.
Pride swallowed humiliation. I knew my drawings were special. Even though my draftsmanship was never considered to be any good (I was told often enough that it looked like scribbling), it somehow seemed “right” to me. They were part of me. The episode gave me an early sense that my art work was growing up to be my life. Later, I discovered that acting and writing would also be a part of this life.
Rhonda INK ON PAPER
Crane“PRETTY” WORK
Crane “SPECIAL” WORK
Perhaps one negative result of the incident was that it drove me to work in secret. To this day, my process remains very private. I certainly stopped drawing nudes for many years.
I developed two types of material. “Pretty” work for school, which kept everyone else happy, and “special” work for myself, which dealt with my true feelings and ideas. I hid everything in the space where I slept behind the basement stairs.
I showed a little of my work to another teacher, Miss Pottinger, a gifted art instructor, who encouraged me to develop my colors. She would speak of color as though it were something rich and secret to eat, like dark chocolates, and referred to my paint box as “a treasure trove of jewels.”
She tried unsuccessfully to cure my habit of working with both hands. I had been trained to write the (supposed) right way, but I saw no reason why I had to apply the rule to art. I saw no reason for applying it to writing either, but I was told that I would always smear my own scribbles. I frequently and automatically changed hands whilst painting and was equally good at smearing with both.She called this ambidextrous switching “fidgeting.”
Miss Pottinger felt that my assignments were messy and lopsided (a kind understatement) and that fidgeting was due to poor concentration. She was correct, but only halfway. My creations were terribly confused, but only because I had not trained my hands to act harmoniously upon one subject, like those of a pianist. One hand thinks and feels differently from the other, hence it was not lack of concentration, but split concentration that caused my problems.
This syndrome threads its way through most of my life. I am of two minds about nearly everything (sexuality being an exception); having a compulsion to seek contrast, analogy, and balance in everything I experience.
Today, all of my painted efforts are the result of fidgeting, but my line drawings are formed singularly by one hand or the other (smears and all).
Crane “PRETTY” WORK
Miss P. WATERCOLOR 20” x 16”
Picasso OIL 30”x24”
Self Portrait (LINE DRAWING SERIES) PEN AND INK 18”x24” 1989
Skating, ten years old
Throughout the 1960s, my parents were taken with the idea that I might grow up to be a successful figure skater. Although I had other plans for myself, I pursued this artistic sport mostly to please them. They could ill afford the lessons. While I enjoyed freestyle skating, I resented the long hours of patch (precise lines, repeatedly etched one on top of the other and contained within a small rectangle of ice) which required my mind and body to focus on variations of the figure eight. During these sessions my imagination spiraled far away from those frozen patterns.
Skating was a backhanded gift. It СКАЧАТЬ