Pastiche is the second (and largest) of the Helen Triptych.  The figure here is 17 year old Helen Alexander, my great aunt.  She is reaching down from a platform below a steamer dock at the family's summer house at Georgian Bay, Ontario in 1914.  I imagined that her mother - the family's most prolific photographer - had staged this photo to evoke a kind of Pre-Raphaelite sense of poise and beauty.  The photo from which I worked was so antique looking that it was hard to imagine that when it was taken it might have been a recreation of yet an earlier sensibility: a "pastiche." The 17 year old we see here went on to become a very talented and classically trained artist whose work was shown in various galleries in New York and other cities in the 1920's and 30's. As I was growing up I would see her work in all the houses of my extended family.  But to me she was just my great aunt "Henny."  Henny worked in pastel, pencil, charcoal, and oils. She could do it all; but her watercolors were my favorite.  I chose to recreate this scene (my own "pastiche") in gray markers to try to evoke some of this water color feel. 

 

This was my first return to working in large format since 1991.  I spent a considerable amount of time here on the draft - some 58 hours.  Since I began to work in markers I had noticed that the intracacies of the drafts had been increasing.  Much attention was paid to sorting out the blacks from the near blacks, a task made all the harder by the extreme variations in darkness in the original 1914 print.  Despite its sentimentality and pretensiousness, I was very happy with it when I had finished.

DRAFT