I’ve sketched this little boy during the Bromont Art Symposium… Was it 2003? 2004? I don’t remember any more. But I know I did a lot of sketching then, waiting for a “collector” of sorts to come and buy everything…anything… Usually, they didn’t bother but eventually, I still covered my expenses and left there with a small profit… Danu, the capitalist…
The little guy from Bromont
Anyway, recently I’ve seen some sketches by Watteau, this “artiste maudit” avant-la-lettre, dead at 37, like Rafael, like Modigliani and Van Gogh and many others who “kicked the bucket” at this fatidic age… I was amazed by the spontaneity, the vigor and, at the same time, the exquisite delicacy of his drawings. I could only imagine him, drawing. All the pleasure that sketching would have brought in his poor life, all the joy. Painter of the so called “fêtes galantes” of the end of the 17th and beginning of the 17th century in France, associated with “joie de vivre” and eroticism, he was quite a frugal man. Delicate, discretely erotic but not at all as Fragonard or Boucher. I would say I appreciate him even more for that… and he was a great draftsman, just as good as Bruegel and Rembrandt and Rubens. It is not rare to be able to tell more about an artist looking at his/her drawins. No “comission” for that… Just the artist, unadulterated, “pure”…
Here it is one of his drawings, and a lot more and better are at Louvres…
Sketches by Watteau
The pleasure to draw, to sketch is a fascinating subject, for me, for I have an orgasmic pleasure doing it. I think others have this too… So I come back with more…
Copyright © Dan Iordache, 2012
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