Luscious Lips.

Yesterday I blogged about the near-miss poisoning of my children with the nutritious sea kale that turned out to be poisonous sea poppy.

Today I’m dishing up lips. Lists of lips. My top 3 lips in art. Other body parts will probably follow, so you may want to bookmark me now!

What prompted this swerve from the vegetable? I was going to do great things with carrots today. They started out purple, my daughter told me last night. Well, the blogosphere is a marvellous and accomodating place - actually it would be if I could access my favourites in a zippier timeframe than Technorati or Firefox or the gods responsible seem to give at the moment. My 10 minutes of blog-catch-up time went like this today: 3 minutes reading Scribbit on Motherhood in Alaska. A one minute wait to be told “huh?” by Technorati, telling me a blog I’d read yesterday and favourited doesn’t actually exist. And the other 7 minutes waiting for pages to load.

Ok first vegetables, then indigestion, so working backwards we’ll we get there eventually - lips.

In first place, and these stopped me in my tracks and prompted me to research this initial “best of” survey, is Portrait of a Lady by Rogier van der Weyden, the leading lip artist in the mid-C15th Netherlands as far as I’m concerned. Pursed, plump, perfect.

Albrecht Durer was a fabulous artist, and will definitely feature in other body parts in art blogs; hair, moustaches, and great hats, for starters. Today, I nominate his lips from the famous series of self-portraits completed in his late 20’s.

To finish today’s list, Russian Expressionist painter, Marianne von Werefkin. She’s described in my guide to Great Women Masters of Art, variously as ‘muse’ and as ‘a sort of priestess’. I, for one, want to know more. She painted on cardboard and didn’t date many of her works. This wonderful red-lipped Self-Portrait is from around 1908-1910.

Add your contenders in comments.

The first list of Christmas. Self-Portraits

In the run up to Christmas I’ve been working on more portraits than usual.
Portraits are always intriguing to work on as well as demanding; who’s the subject listening to or flirting with such a cock of the head? What’s provoked that smile playing at the edge of the lips, or the outright laugh in the eyes?
With portraits and raw personality much on my mind, and as it’s the season for lists and best of compilations, I think I’ll join in too:
So here is the first of my Christmas lists - Self-portraits Through Time.

1. Yes, yes, got to put Rembrandt in the top spot.

2. Durer next. Such vanity too. Love the hair.

3. No surprises so far, but perhaps Sofonisba Anguissola is not such a familiar name.
Her dates are c.1532 – 1625. and I’m looking at three portraits she painted of herself, first as a teenager, then as an assured and highly skilled 30-something. She lived well into her 90's and most moving is a portrait she painted of herself when in her 70’s. Assured, dignified, unflinching.
Sofonisba has been described as the greatest female Italian painter of the Renaissance, with her work compared to that of Titian with one of her portraits – that of the Infanta Catalina Micaela – long mistakenly attributed to El Greco.