Summer Lake Scenes

Oil on Canvas Boards 9.5 x 12 ins (24 x 30 cm); 5 x 7 in (13 x 18 cm)

Efforts to escape from strict representation of nature, without going abstract.

Reflections

Oil on Board 10.5 x 14 in (27 x 35 cm)

I've tried copying a portrait by the Spanish realist Raimundo de Madrazo y Garreta -- born in Rome 1841, died Versailles 1920.  He lived most of his life in Paris.  If Realism in literature -- French literature, at least (Zola, Maupassant, Flaubert) tends to depict the sordid, this is certainly not the case with de Madrazo.  He painted pretty women in pretty clothes almost exclusively.  His taste, if not his treatment of the subject, was Renoir-esque.  If the notion of kitsch floats near his airy and blithe canvases, if you hear the beatings of its wings,  try to match, or even approach, his facility, his technical near-perfection, and you may be left like me, one of his many admirers.