Joanne Taeuffer Art

Lately I’ve been reliving some of our trips to Europe in my paintings. These three recent works are scenes from Collonges la Rouge in France, Bad Kreuznach in Germany and a bisto in an unnamed village also in France. Enjoy!

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I spent the weekend in a workshop called “Experimental Mark-Making In Figure Drawing.” Two days, six hours a day. Pretty exhausting. Teacher Mark Eanes was great. I regained my sense of joy in figure drawing.

Here is some of my work:

Using a searching, “groping” line to create a figure gesture that looks like a wire sculpture.

Combining conte crayon as a “tone” with charcoal pencil line.

Quick, small studies designed to explore the negative space more than the figure itself.

Paint used for drawing.

Some final charcoal drawings, using a variety of lines, marks and tones.

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This weekend we were at our Healdsburg house pruning the over-grown persimmon tree. My old friends Dennis and Melinda showed up with well-worn ladders and pruning shears from Dennis’ family farm. Luckily he also brought his long experience with those shears and helped get the job done.

It made me think about the weeks of pruning that were the main work of deep winter on the prune farm. My Dad really enjoyed this part of the job. Winter days darkened in late afternoon, giving him an excuse to quit early and settle down in the living room. I’d find him there, reading, when the bus arrived home from school about 4 p.m.

I hope the painting Winter’s Work captures the cold, stark light of winter in the orchard.

The first 20 years of my life were marked by the annual prune harvest, a tradition that has disappeared from my hometown today. In fact, many of the old-fashioned by-hand harvest methods have disappeared even from the places that still cultivate prunes. (Yes, they are really plums, but they are a specific breed called a prune.)

Some of my recent paintings document those harvest days. At The Dipper shows my father and our two “day men,” Moses and Sylvester, at the dipper. Before the prunes went into the dehydrator, they were dipped in hot lye water. I always thought it was just a way to wash them. But recently a friend told me this lye bath changes the prunes’ skin so they will dry properly, shriveling with the meat instead bloating up during drying.

It was a hot, messy process. And it seemed completely romantic to me. I begged to help with the dipping but I was never tall and strong enough to lift the trays of prunes to the top of the stack. My mother and I handled the trays later, after the prunes were dry. It wasn’t as romantic: no steam coming off the lye water and none of that pruney-wet-lye water smell.