The charcoal rendering I had employed in the worked out drawings of the male figure and the female nude reminded me of Tamara de Lempicka – the strong contrasts, the shadings vs edges, the style. Therefore I was taking a closer look. at this artist after the first nude painting which I found somewhat “expressionless”.

My memories of Tamara de Lempicka’s works were faint, but looking at her works, I find the resemblance to these charcoal renderings striking. I think her 1932 Self Portrait (Tamara in the green Bugatti) comes close to the essence of what I remembered.

I found a website that presented her works in chronological order, and going through these, I was impressed by the bold figure drawings which were quite different from my own attempts so far.

It was interesting to see that de Lempicka had also been working in Cubist style.

Later in her life she experimented with a different painting technique, which I actually prefer over those works for which she’s become well known.

While continuing to paint I hadn’t been aware of it, but there was obviously quite some influence on the approach I took. This concerns particularly my treatment of shadows and lights and figure vs. ground. It’s not that I had de Lempickas paintings in mind while I was working on my series. I think the influence was rather due to similarity in approach so that the resulting images show resemblance. I think seeing her works has also encouraged me to go bold with the female form, in particular with Figure III, the orange figure with green background.

References

Images from http://www.delempicka.org