I painted this painting in oil close to ten years ago for a show at Brevard College (my first alma mater). Tim Murray had arranged for me to have a large show there and I was pleased to work up 19 paintings and 60-some drawings and watercolors. This painting, and I admit to an appropriationist streak, was a take on Raphaelle Peale's After the Bath (at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City) - nude behind curtain. I added a cello and altered the color, and the drape was initially a landscape painting, and I enlarged the space of the room. Peale's work is a trompe l'oeil bit of handkerchief covering the nude (not many nudes survive from the early years of the republic: Vanderlyn and Washington Allston being rare exceptions).This painting kicked around for a decade - shown a couple of times, hung up or stored away. Recently I was painting in my studio, our backyard garage, and seeing it lurking behind a ladder, feeling the despair of its existence, put it on the easel and added a big slathering of paint over the landscape and two verticals of green, a vertical of red and another of blue. I preserved the cello.
Several nights that week, as I was venturing off to sleep, I thought about this painting. Mostly I saw the white paint in the middle, which I hoped would be more active and watery than it is. When I was in the midst of painting it (in acrylic this time, a no no, but after 10 years the oil paint has cured surely) I added the bars of color to simplify things, to help the painting breathe. All in all, I think it's better. I searched for a jpg of the original state but couldn't find it. Ten years is the longest intervening time I've experienced with a painting - although I have a watercolor that is an experiment in chance that I've been "working on" for 6 years now.
I wish this painting well.
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