People Listening (1984)

Sleepless Woman with Moon and Birds (1983)

It required some thinking before I could remember the name of this drawing. It wasn't until around 1987 that I began to write down the names that I gave to my drawings and paintings. Once again, I am finding that looking back at my work is a good exercise of my memory. 

This drawing has a connection to a poem I wrote in the early 1980's called "A Nation of Sleepless Women," which I posted yesterday. I was disappointed in the way the color of the image came through the first time I uploaded it because it had a cold blue look. The true image has much warmer blues. All of the colors are warmer, and even the black area is a warmer black. So, I went into iPhoto to see if I could remedy that. I clicked on "adjustments" and began playing with the brightness, contrast, saturation, temperature, tint, sharpness and exposure. I even discovered how to straighten the photo! What a revelation! The only thing I couldn't adjust to my satisfaction was the color up against the woman's face. The red near the woman's face in the first uploaded image is more like the original red. In the original image on paper, it is a red with more blue in it than orange. Of course, seeing a reproduction is not the same as seeing a drawing, but I got as close as I could to the spirit of the original drawing in the second uploaded image.

Just to see what it would look like, I made it into a black and white image.
 

Life Drawing of a Young Woman #2 (1982) / I and the Village, by Marc Chagall (1911)

Although I was not conscious that I was using green, blue and orange as Marc Chagall had used them in his painting, "I and the Village," it suddenly occurred to me, while writing these words, that his painting certainly influenced me as I did this drawing so many years ago. I hadn't hesitated to draw a green woman with blue hair. 

My mother had become interested in Marc Chagall during the time I was in high school and brought books of his drawings and paintings home from the public library and shared them with me. After I graduated from college at age 32 in 1982, my father took my mother and me to New York City and Washington, D.C., during which time he took a picture of my mother and I standing in front of "I and the Village," in the Museum of Modern Art. "I and the Village" is 75 1/4" x 59 1/4 inches, much taller than me or my mother or my father! 

As I type this, my laptop rests on the large art book, MARC CHAGALL, by Franz Meyer. Marc Chagall is a continuing influence. The week that Marc Chagall died in 1985 was the week when I was visiting my parents in Northern California. A man and his wife who were in their late 80s stopped by to visit my parents and when I showed them photographs of my drawings, the man said, to my great surprise, "Ah, a new Chagall!" That, along with R. Allen Jensen's appreciation of my drawings, was the encouragement that I needed. I liked my drawings but continued to be startled when other people besides family and friends liked them, too. 

"The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep." (Marc Chagall)