by Diane: a visit to Henri Rouseau's fanciful flight from Paris in Paris

My two adult granddaughters were graciously accommodating to an addition not on our list of the things we wished to see during our four days in Paris.  I wanted to see where Rousseau found what he needed to see to paint his jungle inspired painting.  One of my recent paintings is derived from Rousseau's  THE DREAM.
        Le Jardin des Serres d'Auteuils ( The garden of green houses ) is  a distance from the usual tourist attractions.

 On a Saturday the park attracts Parisians. We saw some families picnic on blankets and playing on the lawn, some were sitting on the benches reading. I was not surprised to see a few art students getting a semi-private art lessons.

 The art instructor provided a variety of materials. In the morning they used colored pencil. When we left at about 1:00 PM the instructor was demonstrating colored felt pens. He agreed to me taking a quick look but I didn't feel he was open to conversation as he was intense and highly engaged with his two student.  The instructor also had raw canvas and paints presumably for the afternoon.

 

 

 Inside one of the glass enclosed arboretums I saw two women with their children having a jungle themed lunch imagining that they were in the tropics.

The garden lends itself to surreal day dreaming now as it was for Rousseau who imagined into his painting a nude women on a couch in Paris pretending she is a mermaid in the jungle.

 

photo copied from the NewYork City MOMA web site

Different plants but same dreamy atmosphere was a delightfully relaxing change for all three of us.  

 

by Diane; Henri Rousseau's THE DREAM painting and my textured surface ecliped inspiration from my garden

The 12' square canvas board last week made me feel tight. I did not possess the skill to render a miniature of Rousseau-like foliage. So this week I worked on a larger  24" x 36" stretched canvas but thankfully the palette knife textured surface forbid the fine detail of Rousseau's jungle painting.



Before cataract surgery the painting appeared more gray than lavender.

The grays made it more cohesive. Now I considered it unfinished

so I turned it upside down and started painting another version of  "The Dream". 

 I am comfortable keeping to my impressionistic style of the landscape when using Rousseau's work as a reference. Not tediously painting every leaf led me to consider his story content.

 

Le reve exotiqu or Le Songe, 1910

From my perspective in 2019, almost 120 years after Rousseau's painting was completed, the rainbow skirt had me wondering what was the relationship between the African snake charmer and the nude. Unintentionally my nude kept wanting to be flirtaceous - eying the snake charmer. The nude's head was on top of a bright red splotch from the old abstract.  The bright splash of color gave the impression of flowers in her hair like Frieda Kahlo, a sexually free experimenter. I kept trying unsuccessfully to make the charmer masculine. Furthermore the orange tree with ripe fruit reminded me of Miriam's orange.  Maybe with all the wild animals and foliage my painting wants to be a lesbian Paradise paralleling Adam and Eve. Or maybe Yadwigha is an enticing  mermaid.  I started researching Rousseau's painting on line.

Henri Rousseau wrote a poem to  explain his painting. Another explanation he gave was that the nude was on a couch in Paris dreaming she is in an African jungle.  Below is the translation from  French in Wikipedia.

The  Dream
Yadwigha is a beautiful dream
Having fallen gently to sleep
Heard the sounds of a musette
Played by a well intended snake charmer.
As the moon reflected
On the rivers or flowers), the verdant trees,
The wild snakes lend an ear
To the joyous tunes of the instrument.

Yadwigha was Henri Rousseau's Polish mistress from his youth.

Symbolically the  curve of  Yadwigha's thigh and leg parallel

 the similar curve repeated in the snake. Symbolically meaning

that Yadwigha was the other snake in his picture
both soothed and made docile with joyful music.

 

My painting is a day dream.- not a night dream like Rousseau's.  

 In Rousseau's painting the snake charmer was African with dark skin in the shadows of night while the nude was in the light. In 2019, I don't want to put dark skinned people in the shadows compared to the lighter skinned people because in my times diminishing the value of a person by putting them in the shadows is a hateful practice. Furthermore my painting is symbolically about celebration and light. In Rousseau's times the rainbow skirt was symbolic of peace. Since 1978 in San Francisco, Gilbert Baker made the first LGBTQ rainbow flag.

 I fell into a fascinating twist suggestive of another kind of Adam and Eve story. This detour amused me in the development of a painting celebrating my love of the wildness of my flower garden.  My painting took another turn back to  the inspiration from our flower garden. I removed the nude.  The lions remained because there are mountain lion sightings in our neighborhood. The The deer were very nervous this week so the running lavender colored deer remained.

My ending painting block idea worked.  Taking three unrelated inspirations and bringing them together makes me excited to see what happens next week!