December, 2010 | Jessica Jewett

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>Bonne Année!

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Bonsior, mes très chers amis!

Here we are in the last dwindling hours of 2010. Most people are either getting ready to go out tonight or spending time quietly with family and friends. Many of my friends are staying in tonight in order to watch the ubergroup that is now NKOTBSB on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve somewhere around 11:30 on the East coast. I think my family is mostly staying in tonight even though we were invited to our neighbors’ soirée. My uncle has been fighting double pneumonia for days now and his partner works so much that they basically collapse around eight every night. I would kind of like to go to the soirée next door but I don’t know anybody else except our neighbors and I get antsy in situations where I don’t feel like I fit in with people. So, here I sit, cuddling my dog and typing away on my laptop as I do most nights. It’s comfortable. It’s routine. I saw my best friend today and we worked on a scrapbook together, which was, honestly, better than any big glittery soirée with a bunch of booze and loud people. I don’t drink anyway! I’m betting she doesn’t even make it until midnight, that old lady. Wink, wink!

Paris, the motherland, is already in 2011. This picture isn’t from tonight but I like it anyway. It’s strange to think that half the world is already in a whole new year while the other half still exists in the previous year.

I didn’t accomplish all of the goals I set for myself in 2009 going into 2010, but on the other hand, I accomplished a lot that I didn’t think possible for myself. I had wanted to publish another book but I decided rushing myself wasn’t going to work. I don’t want to publish a poorly written book just to check off a New Year’s resolution. I have several books in the works though. My novel about the French Revolution is in its second draft and probably the closest to being finished. The sequel to From the Darkness Risen is progressing fairly well too. At some point, I plan to release an expanded special edition of Unveiled: Fanny Chamberlain Reincarnated because there is more than enough material and interest to re-release such a book. I have a few new books that I never anticipated beginning either but when the muse moves me, I tend to follow its lead. Certainly there will be a book published in 2011 but as I said, I’m more concerned with publishing good material than fulfilling resolutions.

There are several personal things I hope to accomplish in 2011 as well. These things have to do with better management of my energy and time. I have fatigue issues that were new in 2010 and I find myself unable to go at the constant pace that I prefer. Something is forcing me to slow down. Oil painting is another thing I hope to fill 2011 with and I have a lot of ideas in my head. Painting is actually a calming activity that helps me focus. I thought it would fry my nerves but it’s actually quite the opposite. It’s comforting.

Of course 2011 is going to bring more traveling and gathering with my friends, beginning next month. A bunch of my friends are getting together for a double birthday dinner for my friend Gretchen and me. Then in May, I’m going on a cruise with Sissy, Dena, Maryka, and basically everybody else. After that, in June, I’m going to New York with Abbie, Di, Katy and others. I would like to go to Gettysburg again too but I’m not sure if that will work out since I’m facing the prospect of major surgery this year. I will practically need a construction worker to rebuild the sorry excuses for feet I got in this life. I’m hoping I can take care of this problem after my traveling so I can recover into next winter when I’m not doing anything of interest.

What about you? How was your 2010? What are your hopes for 2011?

>Berthe Morisot

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As I said in my last blog, I have been studying painting of late to help me along in my new endeavor of mastering the medium of oils. In particular, I have been studying female painters because I draw inspiration from them, being a female too. I have been copying an Impressionist painting but I find that my natural style seems to pull toward realism and, at times, Rococo. The very idea of abstract art makes me homicidal. I can’t tolerate it.

On the left, you’ll see a portrait of Berthe Morisot done by her brother-in-law, Édouard Manet. She was a girl in a boys club, being part of the circle of French Impressionists including Édouard Manet, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley. Who wouldn’t want to be a fly on the wall for those dinner party conversations?!

She was born in 1841 to a bourgeois family that held fast to a tradition that they were related to the great Rococo painter of the ancien régime, Fragonard. At the young age of 23, her work was exhibited in the Salon de Paris, and her work was selected for six future salons. However, in 1874, she chose to exhibit her work with the other “rejected” Impressionists in their own salon exhibition. Remember, at that time, Impressionism was considered rebellious and lacked structure, technique and talent. The French just weren’t sure of how to interpret the work because no one had ever seen it before. Morisot painted like the other Impressionists, mostly domestic scenes of daily life, class restrictions, women, landscapes and so forth. She avoided dirty urban scenes and full nudes due to her haute bourgeois lifestyle, which would have been entirely inappropriate. Like Le Brun in the generation before, she married within the art community and had a daughter named Julie, who was the subject of many of her paintings. She died at the age of 54 of pneumonia.

This is a photograph of Berthe Morisot by Felix Nadar.

Here are some works by Berthe Morisot for study. Note the freedom of expression in Impressionism that was not present in the Rococo movement of the previous generations.

>Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun

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I have been studying painting of late to help me along in my new endeavor of mastering the medium of oils. In particular, I have been studying female painters because I draw inspiration from them, being a female too. I have been copying an Impressionist painting but I find that my natural style seems to pull toward realism and, at times, Rococo. The very idea of abstract art makes me homicidal. I can’t tolerate it.

The lovely lady in this portrait is Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun. She was probably the most famous European female painter of the eighteenth century. So famous, in fact, that she became Marie Antoinette’s portraitist, friend and confidante. Madame Le Brun was a Rococo painter but had some influences with the neoclassical movement. Rococo art was ornate, colorful, playful and had movement in the compositions, whereas previous popular styles were very structured, historical and symmetrical. She lived at the end of the Rococo movement, which drifted into the neoclassical movement at the nineteenth century. Neoclassical painting drew heavy inspiration from Ancient Greece and Rome. The compositions were very idealistic as opposed to depicting reality and they were made up of epic subjects such as ancient mythology, legends and so forth. While Le Brun was more of a Rococo artist, one can easily see neoclassicism in her later works.

Madame Le Brun was born to an artist father and a hairdresser mother; her father having given her the earliest artistic training and encouraged her talent. She had a studio and was painting portraits professionally in her early teens but the studio was seized when it was discovered that she was practicing without a license. In 1775, she married a fellow artist, Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun, and they had a baby, Jeanne Julie Louise, in 1780. She was made a member of the Académie de Saint Luc in 1783. Le Brun painted several portraits for the royal family and by 1789, she replaced Alexander Kucharsky as official court painter to Marie Antoinette. During her time with the royal family, Le Brun painted more than 30 portraits of the queen and her children. When the royal family was arrested in the French Revolution, Le Brun fled France with her daughter and lived in Italy, Austria and Russia, where she continued her work as a celebrated portraitist to the aristocracy and royalty. She lived from 1755 until 1842 and left behind more than 600 portraits and 200 landscapes.

Here are several examples of Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s work.