Neo Deco -01-06-23

A New Model

This graphite pencil drawing ‘Neo Deco – 01-06-23’ serves as a caesura after my long series of landscapes and cityscapes. The last one depicting the Nieuwe Kerk in The Hague I sold yesterday. That’s a nice conclusion and I think it’s time to do something new or is it? Hmm, perhaps not. A return to female forms hardly is but the model surely is. You don’t know her yet. I know her from Instagram where she asked me to portray her. Her slender looks impressed me and during my landscape frenzy I looked at her reference pictures she sent me. I picked this one because of the attractive folds in the towel she holds in front of her body.

A Straight Approach

Looking back at some recent nudes I made I saw it’s quite some time since I drew them angularly. I think a real angular one was Neo Deco – 26-01-23. For that pose by my regular model I used heavy back lighting, something that’s completely missing here though. In fact the light in the photo comes from the front. Lucky for me the shadows in the folds and limbs were equally interesting. My choice for straight cubist contour delineations was right I think. They represent the straightness of the creases and wrinkles perfectly. Because of her slender appearance her body also seems to complement this straight approach.

Neo Deco?

So there you have it, a new one in the Neo Deco series. A kind of? To call it cubism would only deliver me people chasing after me stating it’s not cubism at all. No Picasso multi-perspectivism whatsoever. Is it decorative of nature? Hence the ‘deco’-link one might say. I think this style of mine is a perfect combination of impressionism, realism, art deco and cubism. If it’s roundish I call it roundism. I think the Deco-aspect shows in the repetitive series of diagonals in the towel folds on her belly. They contrast the vertical position of her body. The extrapolations into the negative space also are typical deco, I think. I rest my case now for the time being.

SEO and the N-Word

Sometimes I feel a bit clumzy but then again all -isms also are in their own particular way. In fact I’d rather not call it anything. But hey, I’m a struggling artist and I have to craft nifty SEO-proof texts in order to be found. In the past I simply called them ‘nude’ plus a date so I could tell one from the other. However, it proved to be an unsuccesful strategy. Social media sentinels often blocked me because of the ‘N-word’. Sadly I must conclude this art statement with this bitter conclusion. Facebook and Instagram forced me to this practise of alternative namegiving. I don’t mind. ‘Neo Deco’ is more specific than ‘nude’ and I like the sound of it. Any alternatives?

Graphite pencil (Faber Castell Pitt Graphite Matt pencil 14B) drawing on Fabriano Ingres paper (21 x 29.7 x 0.1 cm)

Artist: Corné Akkers