Supper of Emmaus paintings of the 16th century and me

Forty four years ago I wrote a term paper for a college history class and put it away. Recently while cleaning house I found and read the paper - surprised to find the paintings reveal the problems I have faced in developing my energy and artistic expression. Here are a few examples from my paper of analyzed paintings.
Looking at Pontormo's Supper I see he has resorted to symbolism and has esoteric reasons for the naked feet and the dog and cat in the left corner. Adding extra stuff weakens a painting because only a few in the know feel the emotion. In the previous post I showed some works by Rembrandt who expressed a comparatively more intimate spiritual journey. In Italy one reached the holy through the priest. But Rembrandt painted in an environment where people as individuals could reach the holy. He drew the supper over and over again showing his increasing religious awareness. To me it is important to do subjects over again that I painted years ago. It is important to me to paint what I care about.
Pontormo painted the painting below my analysis. Supper at Emmaus in 1525 for the Carthusian monastery at Galluzzo, ( ITALIAN MANNERISM, Guiliani , Figure 3.)http://www.blogger.com/www.wga.hu

Papolo Caliari know as Veronese around 1559 painted the Supper of Emmaus, now in the Louvre, Paris.There is so much happening with everyone's family and landscape as well as a probable dog fight in the makings. The Biblical story was simply an excuse for a grand scale work commissioned by the rich. http://www.louvre.fr/llv/oeuvres

Titian's Supper at Emmaus painted 1533 -34. reproduction from http://www.mfa.org/venice/exhibition.html Titian's linear energy is made static with the tablecloth wrinkles more important than Christ.

Caravaggio's Pilgrimage of Our Lord to Emmaus at the National Gallery, London renders the Emmaus' Supper with poor street people in rags. The moment of recognition of Christ is dramatized by lighting and compositional linear movement. This Caravaggio painting is one of my favorites but does not compare with Rembrandt's posted earlier. http://www.artbible.info/art/

The Supper of Emmaus frequently painted by Italian artists of the 16th century are wonderfully rich in connections to me. The paintings reveal what happens when artists depend on commissions. It also shows how the style of your art community can undermine or enhance the expressiveness of a theme. Analyzing the energy movement in these paintings when I was a student 44 years ago has entered my subconscious. These paintings are a part of my background for making expressive movement in my own paintings.

Dr. Leonard Kimbrell’s Class - Backgrounds to Modern Art / Studying The Theme of Supper at Emmaus is my Background

I remember 44 years ago at Portland State University my Art History Professor, Dr. Leonard Kimbrell , with a short groomed beard and mustache looking as though he just walked out of a Rembrandt portrait painting. He was less than 5 feet tall making up for his size by his style: He had a huge scholarly presence. He amassed an awesome slide collection and delivered an original art theory supported by a precisely worded analysis for each and every work of art. He was short but he whizzed from painting to painting.

I enjoyed taking notes from Kimbrell's lectures. I made lightening fast sketches picking up on my immediate reaction to the energy in classical paintings. I drew just enough to prick my memory. I rather enjoyed the freshness and immediacy of these quick renderings. I now see a connection to these notes and my paintings in which I strive for immediacy. I believe I pick up movement and energy from the masters whether I am working from a landscape in changing light or dancers shifting from one pose to another.




















I am always looking and finding paintings of Emmaus as I did this one by I. Manessier - Les Pelerins D'Emmaus, 1944 in the Le Musee De Poche, Paris. This more modern cubist painting is like the energy studies I did of old masters showing the movement and the connections of shapes and volumes. Here is an example of Tintoretta's Emmaus. More samples are below. For me the theme of Emmaus is a study inspiring in me the spirit of nature and dance. I do not have a desire to illustrate the Biblical Story.
















Picking up my term paper a couple weeks ago I looked through it and arrived at an epiphany. The 1964 term paper for Kimbrell’s Backgrounds to Modern Art is a tangible document of the beginnings of my direction in painting. The paper compiled numerous studies of The Supper At Emmaus during the Mannerist period. Then subsequent paintings revealed a direction for modern art. I have continued to keep my eyes open for paintings of the same theme and think about how they relate to my own art.

Below is a copy of Tintoretta's painting from the website on a current exhibit at the Museum of Fine Art. http://www.mfa.org/venice/exhibition.html Additional analitical drawings below.

The many examples of 16th and 17th century Supper at Emmaus paintings have a very strong technical interest in surfaces like fabric and painting of things. These paintings were sometimes commissioned by rich patrons requesting perhaps some of their own possessions and family to be immortalized in the painting. Rembrandt on the other hand did his spiritual etchings and drawings not so much for sale. His spiritual paintings by contrast captured his personal experience of the theme with an economy of elements composed with expressive feelings.

Katharine Kuh wrote an article on the occasion of a Rembrandt exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago January 1970. Kuh wrote, " What makes Rembrandt incomparable is a combination of all these attributes ( in other great painters such as Breughel, Daumier, vanGogh: What sets him apart from others is): his humanity, his light that is more than a physical element as it shines through and isolates apocalyptic encounters, plus - and the plus is big - his drive to expose the living core of everything he touches, the core of man and the individual men, of the earth itself. This he did with modest means. In a tiny drawing, with a smudge or two, a sweeping line, a few calligraphic pen strokes, he generated a spacious landscape, moving, expanding before our eyes. ... In reaching for bare truths, he did not remove the supernatural from life, nor did he permit irrelevancy to obscure it." Saturday Review/ January 10, 1970 p. 47.

Kuh words here have been an important confirmation of me and my background education. I am always trying to leave out the unnecessary as in the gesteral dancers below.
"Ballet Lesson in Havera" 1994 watercolor, NFS

In my own art journey I want to reach the core avoiding painting things for the sake of their surface. I am grateful of Dr. Kimbrell's focus on art history and the other Portland State University faculty who in the 1960s valued the painterly, the intuitive, and the language of painting. The faculty included Frederick Heidel, Richard Muller, Richard Prasch, Robert Colescott, Elizabeth Galzier, Florence Saltzman, Ray Grimm, and Frederick Littman.

Mineral Painting Inspiration and Break Through

This is cut from a Chinese vase or snuff bottle. It was given to me by my grandfather who said paintings like these were his mentors in his own watercolor paintings. He also liked the way the Chinese held aging in high regard. This painting also inspires me to make Tango dancers on porcelain and to paint all ages of dancers most especially dancers of many years.

This tile penned with mineral paint last week in Antonia Acock's class is much more spontaneous than my earlier works because I drew out of my head. Previously I was copying from my drawings.

Today for two hours I painted on the plate trying the second step of the filtering technique. Minerals and mineral oil was applied and then some of the color was picked up with the brush leaving the under painted colors to glow from underneath. easier said than done. I did more dancers twirling in the gardenia bloom. Next Monday I promise to post a picture of the plate no matter if it doesn't turn out.

Woodlot Mother and Grandson at Bond Butte Pond

Tomorrow my new painting will be due for "This Everlasting Valley II" at River Gallery, Independence, Oregon, May 5 through July 5.

The day before it is due I started making a small change and ended up repainting most of the painting to pop out the figures while establishing a path for the eye to explore and come back to the figures.

The purpose of my painting is to paint an update on the painting, "Mother Thinning Woodlot" my other painting that will also be on exhibit.

Celebrating volunteers and donations for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wild Life my painting is of Woodlot Mother sharing the pond where her trees are now embracing a hatch of warm water fish at an I5 Freeway pond. The pond was dredged out to build up the highway over the wetland farms. The painting is nearing completion. Next the submerged tree will embrace the fish like the grandmother embracing her grandson.

Diane Widler Wenzel’s Journey in Paint

All my paintings put together chronologically are a pictorial journal of my life. For 44 years some of my journey is Willamette Valley farming, forestry and fisheries starting from when I helped my husband to be, Donald Wenzel, plant trees near Vernonia, Oregon. I painted us trout fishing from a row boat among the flooded snags at Quarts Lake. At the Cooper Mountain Wenzel Farm I painted him on the antique family tractor putting up hay bales. Then we married in 1965 and moved away. Twenty years later we moved back to Oregon. We settled in a North Albany neighborhood with farm pasture and forest in our back yard.

Our neighbor, Dian Gerstner, is a true stewardess of the earth as she cares and tends her overgrown Christmas tree lot, harvesting firewood, and removing dead trees. She is the Mother of the Woodlot, the subject of my painting of 1999.

I painted a series telling the story of how we sold our pasture lot in 2007. The fir trees were cut down to make way for a house.

One of the paintings was a dream that did not materialize with our trees. My dream was that the root balls were placed in a pond where the tangled roots provided shelter for small newly hatched fish. This painting may have helped to inspire my husband to volunteer his logging skills.

April 2008 many of Mother Woodlot’s pine trees had dead tops and the lower branches of the trees were thick masses of dead dry fuel – a real danger for a possible hot wild fire. The cleaning up of the fire hazard was a must to ensure the safety of the encroaching urban development. Mother Woodlot donated some of her smaller trees and brushy branches to enhance the fish habitat on Bond Butte Pond near Halsey - a large freeway lake where gravel was dredged out to raise the I5 Freeway above the wet lands. My husband volunteered his logging skills working more than full time for over a month. He chain sawed out dense limbs. He pulled out less healthy trees with the tractor and put them in big piles for hauling. He arranged for Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife to hire a logging trucker for the purpose of knocking down larger trees and transporting three loads to streams.

What an unexpected joy awaited me when I first visited Bond Butte Pond and saw how the pond is being transformed from a scar on the landscape to a park of great beauty enhancing the farm land of the Willamette Valley as well as providing recreational warm water fishing and abundant wildlife. Thus I have come a long way to paint “Grandmother and Grandson in the Fishery Created from her Trees – Bond Butte Pond.”

Diane Widler Wenzel Bio
Recording my Journey in Paint

Education :

1966 Bachelor of Science Degree with high honors in drawing and painting,
Portland State College, Portland, Oregon.

Solo Exhibitions
2009 May, Recent Journey, Sam’s Station, Corvallis
November ’08 – January, Of the Oregon Coast, Sylvia Beach Hotel, Newport,
2008 “Hidden Dragons,” Sam’s Station, Corvallis
“Dragons Boogie Woogie,” Enid Joy Mount Gallery, Keizer Art Association
2005 “ A Vase of a Hundred Flowers” Pegasus Art Gallery, Corvallis
2003 “Trip to Tibet” Albany City Hall
2001 “Personal Symbols,” Footwise Window, Corvallis
2000 “Alaska Watercolors,” Boccherini’s Coffee Shop, Albany
“Robinson House Series,” Footwise Window, Corvallis
1999 “Watercolors,” Albany City Hall
“Waves in Abstract,” Sylvia Beach Hotel, Newport, Oregon
1998 “Water Impressions,” Illustrated Garden Gallery, Corvallis
“Watercolors and Acrylics,” New Morning Bakery, Corvallis
1993 Good Samaritan Hospital, Corvallis
Arts and Letters Gallery, Albany
1986 Two Rivers Market, Albany
1978 The Nut Loft, Aloha
My Studio, Clover Bldg., Bellingham
1969 Interactive Painting with Installation, Magnolia Gallery, Bellingham
Parlor Gallery, Portland, Oregon
1968 Hamman's Gallery, Bellingham, Washington
1967 Courtyard Gallery, Illahe Hills Country Club, Salem
Lake Oswego and Beaverton Public Libraries
La Points Department Store, Salem
1966 The Loft Theater Gallery, Tucson, Arizona

Group Exhibitions

2007 acrylic paintings, “Four Women Seven Years Later”
Benton County Historical Museum, Philomath, Or
Feathers, Fins and Fire,” a group of three painters
La Selles Stewart Center, Oregon State University Corvallis, Oregon
2006 This Bountiful Place, Portland ,Oregon
1999 13 watercolors and acrylics,
“Four Women Artists Celebrating the Seasons of Life,”
Benton County Historical Museum

Filtering Brush Strokes demonstrated by Antonia Acock

Antonia Acock is an accomplished well known mineral painter working with oil and mineral pigments on glazed china. She opens her studio teaches students on Monday afternoons. She does not like to call her art China painting because today the craft has been discovered by painters as a creative art. On Monday I was happy to start a plate with the feathered filtering method. Some colors need to be applied in order because the gold pigment pinks will block under painted colors. In this exercise we were to do flowers. I have picked a hard one says Tony because I am painting another gardenia painting with tango dancers from a difficult perspective.

Filtering is a brush technique that I have avoided because the beauty of the brush stroke and mark is my style. In Filtering transparency is important allowing the light and gloss to partially glow through the pigments. Antonia is very tolerant of my digression from tradition. I left three strong edges on my plate for the faces of the dancers and one gardenia petal. Next Monday I will photograph the plate after the firing and also my finishing touch before the second firing.

China tile Tango

Today I am going to try again to paint outside my comfort zone so small. I am more comfortable painting canvases 6 feet by 4 feet.

Brickett and hairdryer forge a digging stick

Yesterday my husband enjoyed making a forge to hammer out a pipe to a sharp end. This is a tool for an elderly native American friend who likes to use a digging stick instead of a shovel in his garden. The pipe makes the tool lighter weight than a crowbar. I think this digging stick is exceptional.
While Don was hard at work I tried some finishing touches on my Tango exhibit paintings. I am still wondering what my new direction will be in my art journey. Reading the history of Argentina Tango, the music began to have political content during an oppressive regime. Then the Tango was banned. I think folk art including dance is real art. People do really meaningful work when there is a felt need. In the 21st century we are entering a new age and I wonder if art will be made to be given away as gifts or will be more marketable filling real needs. Should I be asking what I can do to help people with my art? In the past I did some paintings of creative people and tried to honor them in paint.

A walk in McDonald's Forest

My husband and I went for a delightful walk today on our favorite loop up to the lake and back down in McDonald's Forest near Corvallis, Oregon. Anyone game to paint out here with me? I really do not care to paint from photographs when all I need is someone else interested in sticking around long enough while we paint.
I have just about completed my series of Tango for now and I want to respond to this beautiful weather even though we had frost this morning.

Tango also means Play

The dancer lifted his partner as he twirled around. Faster and faster, around they go and then right after this painting she will suddenly bend back as he comes to a quick stop. This painting was on a perfectly fine abstract, but I thought the splats would be appropriate to the near end of a dance.

Some more full sheet watercolor papers and mixed media painting made the day pass very quickly. I didn't go out and paint in the beautiful sunshine today but the mood the sunshine was instrumental for these paintings.

Steps in Creating an Arches National Park painting

In my sketch book a few years ago I used up some cobalt violet drying up on my palette. It was placed around the edges of a painting my mother started in her last days when she was suffering from dementia. Then when I was in Arches last week I started drawing and painting over the random colors. I liked the juniper trees and bushes that were starting to spring back to life. In the studio I added some white lines and more branches. I have expressed the struggle of life and rock. This 9" x 12" sketch may evolve into a full scale painting.

La Boca Tango

"La Boca Tango" is my memory of the colors of La Boca district, the birth place of the tango. Mixed media watercolor, gouache and pastel on paper 29 1/2" x 22". This is my center piece painting for my May exhibit at Sam's Station in Corvallis.

Thoughts on petroglyphs as seen by a crafter of images

We were in awe of the petroglyphs on a trail just off the main one to Delicate Arch in Arches National Park near Moab. The horse riders and sheep are clearly recognizable. We questioned why the sheep horns didn't curl all the way around or was this an extinct animal we were looking at. The horses indicated a recent petroglyph ruling out the likelihood of extinction. I would venture to make several observations based on my experience crafting images on different surfaces with a variety of tool. First, the petroglyphs are images made in accordance with the properties of the cutting tool and the resistance of the rock surface. In order to depict circular curved horns it would require continually readjusting the angle of the cutting tool. Second, making the horns completely circular violates principals of making the most recognizable image with the simplest of means. Third, the addition of the circular design pulls attention to itself like a bulls eye and the importance of the animal body is diminished. Looking at petroglyphs on the side of the Potach Road

From Goblin Valley we headed back towards Salt Lake City

Cloud concealed Mt Neboe was the challenge of the day as a painting done moving 70 miles an hour down the highway. Please click on image to see detail of texture.

Hale beat against our window and made the road treacherous in the high passes last Thursday. In relative comfort I painted as we relentlessly drove on in the Subaru. The lower drawing is Prang watercolor pencil on my super deluxe Bee Paper Aquabee 9 inch by 6 inch Supper Deluxe sketch book. The top two painting are done on a sketch book purchased in Lhasa, Tibet. The paper is opalescent with a grid of small circles. In English the cover says"Gouache Sketch Book.

It is tricky being both neat and loose while painting in a moving car. I only used a tablespoon or less water at a time and managed to use all the water before refilling my little container on the Cotman compact set of 13 of the 14 watercolor half tins. I replace the lead white with titanium white from a tube. I hold the Cotman set in my left hand. My sketchbook is in my lap and I paint and draw with my right hand. It works well on long trips but occasionally a spastic brush swipes the car console.

Family vacation in Moab

Monday I hiked to Delicate Arch in Canyon Lands. It was a perfect day to paint on location.

We were staying at Red Cliff Condos on the south end of Moab. On Tuesday I stayed behind with my grandson who was immobilized by a knee injury. We played chess and watched TV. I had some time to paint especially when he was sleeping. From where we were staying I could see horses, the red cliff and distant snow covered mountains. The painting that is shown here in a frame is a gift for my granddaughter who liked it.

I was fascinated by the fast moving clouds at sunset.

Dust storm at Moab on Wednesday.

We returned on Thursday towards Salt Lake by going to Goblin Valley. This is one of the paintings I did in the car. Tomorrow I will post more of the drawings and car paintings on that day of unseasonal snow and hale storms.

"Mother Clearing Woodlot" and two of "Woodlot Mother Sharing With Grandson"

"Mother Clearing Woodlot" plus a new painting of mine will be on exhibit in "The Everlasting Valley Exhibit" in May.

I don't know which of the new ones I will enter. I am putting them away for a week. I will be devoting the week to my family. My next post will be Saturday, April 18th. It is good to be able to again post pictures from my camera on a a newly repaired computer.

Bond Butte Pond Bio-enriched

Here is a look at my progress. For those who have not been reading my blog, this is a painting to celebrate volunteers and contributes to Oregon Department State Fish and Wildlife. Mother of the Woodlot is helping her grandson release a fish into the pond that received her wood lot small trees for fish habitat at one of the lakes along Interstate Highway 5. The lake was formed when the gravel was dredged out to build up the freeway above the wetlands.

this painting isn't for sale yet because it will be my entry into an invitational exhibit, "this Everlasting Valley II Exhibition in may this year.

In a few days when Hewlett Packard returns a repaired hard drive and we are set up, I'll post a better and completed painting. there is still work to be done on this one. This is my second painting of the subject in which I want to relate the sheltering barn with these volunteers and with the tree she donated seen submerged on the right.

Scam ripping off artists

A few days ago I recieved this e-mail form with an attempt to copy two of my titles. One title was copied incorrectly. I just answered that I only do transactions through Pay Pal and never heard back.


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