An Old Photo

Part of the ‘birth of new cubism’ series. The first one I made in those series was in April 2014. That one still was not very styled cubistically but looking back I can see I tried though. It even might have been based on a reference picture of Bettie Page. For this one I used an old photograph I suspect might be from the 1950s. It has been used by many other artists in the past but this time it was my turn.

Diagonal Parallelism

Obviously the posture lended itself for cubist styling almost perfectly. The reason is the triangular pose of course. I liked the parallelism in diagonal contour delineations in the calf and arms, creating rhythym. In order to vary I decided to counterbalance aforementioned delineations by a series of diagonals outside the body below.

Sketchy Feel

There was one downside to the picture though. The female form almost seemed stuck inside darker adjacent areas. Such phenomena always are tricky because they easily tend to appear to ‘hoover’ so to speak. I ressolved this by opening up some body parts such as the lower arm. This way there hardly is no contour delineation and the body can breath into the negative space. The drawing therefor has a sketchy feel to it. I decided to keep it that way.

Sold

Until the beginning of the 2010s I still made realist and impressionist works. Therefor the series were a kick-off for me in my search for abstraction. That is why I look back on the series most dearly. Even though I sold some of them, they hardly are noticed by collectors nowadays. That is why I was pleasantly surprized by the purchase in June 2022 by friend of mine. Thanks Marieke!

Click here to read about the sale of this art work to a Dutch collector through Artfinder.

Graphite pencil drawing (Pentel 0.5 mm, 3B) on Winsor & Newton paper (14.8 x 21 x 0.1 cm – A5 format)

Artist: Corné Akkers