Bonnard Inspired Portraits and Painting the People You Love

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Prolific Pierre Bonnard

In addition to Bonnard’s bathing nude portraits, and window/still life interiors, he painted lovely genre scenes of his people.

If you’ve visited this art blog before, you know I’m partial to these subjects in my own work, so it’s no wonder that I appreciate Bonnard’s approach to what might be seen as mundane or trite scenery. (Here is a video slideshow of over 700 Bonnard paintings.)

Finding a subject that resonates with you is part of every artist’s seeking adventure. It has less to do with the dictations of the buying public, even though that can be a part of an artist’s pursuit.

It’s more important, I think, to find 1) subjects and 2) compositions and 3) a palette that springboard your urge to paint and create.

What subjects continually grab your attention? What type of reference material are you repeatedly drawn to?

The previous posts in this Pierre Bonnard series can be found here, here, here and here.

Bring Your Artist’s Eye

The Bonnard film above was made decades ago, so the low-resolution footage and tinny audio quality aren’t ideal for a video about an artist, but it’s worth watching. The documentary is full of details about Pierre Bonnard’s drawings and paintings, the environs he lived in during certain periods, the people in his life, and the scenery that inspired him.

The best parts are the current day and 1930s footage of the houses he and Marte lived in. You’ll see early film clips of Pierre, his studio, the gardens, and the rooms and windows he painted so many times.

His home was incredibly modest, and so very plain compared to the way he rendered fragments of the rooms on his large canvases.

That alone is a great suggestion about inspiration; paint your own environment, but don’t document what you see, when you have the option to bring your artist’s eye to the process.

Pierre Bonnard Online Resources

If you’re interested in seeing more work by Bonnard, there is a database of over 800 works uploaded to the Athenaeum website here. It’s a great source for billowing your inspiration and noticing – via the thumbnails of the images – how a colorful, well-composed, larger artwork reads from afar.

All those hasty-but-deliberate blobs of color resolve as a solid field, and magically transform into a sky, or a table, or a stand of trees, etc. Great encouragement to quit noodling each and every leaf, and just paint with color and values. #stepawayandsquint

(Note: If you’re looking at Bonnard’s paintings in this post close up, or on a tablet, be sure to view them at some distance too, so you can see how the values and colors blend and relay light and shadow from a distance. Most art is viewed from across a room – at a distance – and the habit of repeatedly standing back to squint while building a painting prepares the work for those views.)

Painting with Gouache

If you don’t work in oils, but you’re interested in playing with opaque colors to try your hand at some Bonnard-esque scenes, this might be helpful…

James Gurney has a wonderful playlist of gouache painting demos of landscapes, buildings, sunsets, animals and people (see this speedy sketch of ladies sitting in a diner while he’s having lunch – and note the purple used!) Here is the playlist.

I’ve been thinking about doing a few gouache paintings, but it’s been a very long time. Do you paint in gouache, and if so, do you have any tips or links to artists who inspire you? Please leave us a link in the comments. Thanks!

Paint What You Love

After watching the Bonnard documentary, scrolling through so many new-to-me Bonnard paintings on the Athenaeum site, and pondering the subjects he painted over and over again, I have even more appreciation for the man.

He was successful as soon as he started to exhibit his work, and he could have gone the way of many artists, painting formal portrait commissions, and appeasing patrons with a surplus of rendering other people’s lives.

He may have felt pressure to do that in his long career, but he stayed true, and prolific, to the intimate subjects from his day-to-day life.

The loving way Bonnard propagated scenes from his home and garden transmit a serene dedication to painting the people and rooms that mattered the most to him. The simplicity of that approach to subjects is very appealing, don’t you think?

Thanks for stopping by today, and I’ll see you in the next post –

Belinda

P.S. I’m listening to The Library Book by Susan Orlean, and if you love books, libraries, and history, I bet you’ll enjoy it as much as I am. 🙂 If you’ve never tried an audiobook, here’s a link to get one for free.

Art Quote

Edmund C. Tarbell used light and atmosphere not to tell a story but to paint elegant subjects with technical precision, stating once that ‘art should try to render the beauty of the thing unseen.’ The sitter for Girl Reading, Charlotte West, was one of Tarbell’s favorite models and one of the few who was not a family member. Although unfinished at the time, the artist included Girl Reading in the March 1909 Twelfth Annual Exhibition – Ten American Painters at New York’s Montross Gallery. One reviewer noted that the painting showed tremendous growth in Tarbell’s work: ‘in color this latest canvas is more beautiful than any of its predecessors… the tones are very quiet, but they seem richer and deeper.’ The MFA purchased the painting directly from Tarbell shortly thereafter.

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