I've Just Seen a Face

This is my second attempt to "do one thing, then move on," although to be honest, it sort of digressed from that purpose into "getting an entire face done colourfully" - which is a legitimate goal in itself. It's just good to try to do ONE thing when painting, instead of change your mind halfway through. That said, I'm not at all displeased with the result:

The best thing about this painting, in my opinion, is the colorfulness of it: I tend to use Earth colours and wind up with muddy, slightly monochrome paintings. In this one, I ratcheted up the chroma and got a slightly more colourful result than usual.

The worst thing about this painting, at least in terms of the actual painting process, was that I started out wayyyy too light in the darks, without realizing it, and had to totally go through the shadow section and reinforce the entire area. That sucked, since I was well on my way into the portrait before I realized that my shadows were too weak to support the lights. It also made the face look as though it were pivoting around the nose and kind of folding in onto itself. (It still has that effect, slightly.) I needed to bulk up the area slightly below and to the right of the nose. Oh yeah: some of the reflected light in that are was ridiculously too light (a leftover of my ridiculously too light shadows), which, come to think of it, the "pillar of the mouth" on the lower-right-side of the lips still seems a little too bright. (I just learned "pillar of the mouth" in the Eliot Goldfinger book; if you paint the figure and don't have that book, drop what you are doing and run like hell to Amazon.com and order it right now!) I'm planning on being buried with my copy when I die, so, sorry.

This painting, it turned out, was the last of the portraits I did before the Alla Prima Portrait Painting workshop at Studio Escalier. I had potentially the most stressful three weeks of my life just before leaving: a HUGE project at work was just ending (the original due date came and went, and we agreed on a deadline a week later, which seemed more to prolong the pain instead of actually assuage it), a huge freelance project loomed (I wanted to finish before leaving for France; I didn't, exactly), the "Arts & Crafts Room Nazi" in my condo unit more or less outlawed oil painting in the communal art room, and I was summoned before the condo Board to explain my reaction to that pronouncement (let's not get into that), I basically decided to move out of the condo unit in response.

So, far from getting dozens of paintings accomplished, as I'd somehow naively thought I could, I got more like half a dozen done.

Do One Thing, Then Move On

After painting several oil portrait sketches in 3 hours and always coming out with something around 70% finished, I decided on a different tack: I would attempt to paint ONE THING completely before moving on. I didn't do a block-in of the entire face: I blocked in the nose, painted the nose, then moved on.

This was the result:

I was quite happy with this painting, actually, since it represented the most "finished" thing I've done in a long time. Even though the entire portrait isn't finished, what I did work on is basically finished. OK...so I have a finished nose! Well, that's OK. I have enough unfinished everything paintings at home that it is nice to have something a little different. Also, it was interesting to start a painting from one small detail and expand from there, as opposed to blocking in the entire head (or even figure), then "fill in" the contour.

Actually, while I was painting this, I felt incredibly confident: it felt as though every stroke was the right one, and I could do no wrong. (Except, for some reason, the far cheek. I had a heck of a time pitching the angle correctly, although I think it ended up pretty good. Actually, I learned from that: the contour can be left as kind of a "detail" - you don't necessarily need to draw the contour 100% accurately at first. Sometimes, these things just resolve themselves out of everything else that you paint!)

My painting buddy, Isabelle, thought I was joking (or crazy) when I said I was going to "paint a nose".

Inspired by Ted Seth Jacobs

I've been reading several art books simultaneously: some on the C-Train commute to work, some at home, some when I ake a break from one of the others I'm reading.

Most recently, I've been reading Ted Seth Jacobs' first two books: Light for the Artist and Drawing with an open Mind. I consider both indispensable, since both of my primary teachers studied with Ted (as did Tony Ryder, Jacob Collins, and Michael Grimaldi - to name a few prominent artists out there). A lot of it is the same information that my instructors teach, albeit in a slightly different voice. (Tim says he can still hear Ted's voice in his head when he paints - mainly telling him how he's screwing up, from what I gather.)

Reading these books reinforces what I have learned from Tim & Michelle (which they learned in large part from Ted), and every once in a while, a key phrase sticks out: I either hear something for the first time (probably from being too thick when I was in class!), or else just hearing it in different words strikes the inside of my mind like a bell.

Case in point:

"We look at the surface of the picture to see whether the effect we want to suggest is taking place." (Light for the Artist, p. 129.)

Wow!

In other words, check your canvas to make sure that the effect you want to create is actually what it is you are busy doing on the canvas.

Sounds pretty obvious, right?

But I'll tell you, I bet I don't have a specific effect I'm going after as often as I should, and certainly don't (or I should say, "haven't", since I mean to change this immediately!) consciously ask myself if I am achieving the effect I was going after. For example, "am I creating this shadow dark enough yet allowing it to glow?," or "does the light on this face appear to glow compared to the shadow side?" I think I know that I want it to glow, but I'm not asking myself this question explicitly when painting. I think this is a subtle but important distinction.

My usual modus operandi would be to tackle the shadow, attempt to round out of it into the light, and ask myself if I am painting light enough (which I almost never am). But I don't think I'm asking "is this glowing, and if not, how do I make it glow?" Hm. I'm not sure I can articulate why I think it's important to ask myself this while actually making strokes as opposed to having it as a vaguely-formulated goal. Other than, I guess, the problem that vagueness entails.

Another one - this time in Drawing with an Open Mind (p. 29):

"The representational artist allows himself to be constantly surprised by what is seen."

Again - wow!

What an amazing way to live! Imagine being (hopefully pleasantly) surprised all the time by the myriad changing things you were seeing. (Cuz that's basically what Ted is implying: everything is different from everything else, and everything changes from one instant to the next.) Wouldn't that allow us to live with that elusive innocence of children? Imagine walking around, as if you were in a foreign city for the first time and everything is new: Wow, look at that! Check that out! Holy shit, look at that!! It reminds me of the fervent lust for living in On the Road. Which, maybe it's time to read that again. As well as Nature & Madness. (I digress.)

Imagine, too, though, the impact it could have on one's work, to be surprised and overjoyed at the strangeness of the forms one is looking at. It seems to me that it could infuse a certain dynamic energy in one's art, as well as a more organic likeness. (Which, to my thinking, Ted Jacobs carries a bit too far. To be blunt: I barely like anything the guy has done, but I am VERY appreciative of the knowledge he has!)

Anyway, I am going to try to infuse more surprise and variety into my painting and see what I come up with!

Weekly Portrait Paintings

Since the 2-day portrait workshop I took with Martinho Correira, I've been feeling extremely confident in portraiture. I should probably say in drawing, since that's where I've been progressing most, but I've also done better in the application of paint, too.

Here is the full-color painting I did of Norma:




















This piece culminates The Norma Project, although not quite how I had intended. Nevertheless, I'm fairly pleased with the result, especially given that it was painted in only one 4-hour session (not 3, as I had originally intended).

And here is my portrait of Darcy, which I painted during our weekly Sunday figure session at Isabelle's studio:




















I had planned to do a full-colour portrait, following my portrait of Norma, but with only an hour left to add colour after doing the monochrome block-in, I decided to keep it as a grisaille (so to speak).

Two-Day Atelier-Method Portrait Workshop

A couple of days ago, my drawing buddy Isabelle emailed me to say that "that guy who lives in Italy is giving a two-day portrait workshop - do you want to go?" Since I am a.) preparing for my three-week portrait workshop at Studio Escalier in France and b.) totally crazy to paint these days (especially portrait & figure), I jumped at the chance to see what he had on offer.

The first time I heard about "the guy who lives in Italy" - Martinho Correia - was when I was railing against the lack of instruction at the Alberta College of Art & Design. Somebody told me there was a realist painter who was coming to Calgary to put on a 2-week workshop. I didn't go, but I checked out his posters and kinda wished I could go. (I did, however, eventually visit the Academy of Realist Art in Toronto, which is the sister atelier, albeit the "stolen sister" in Martinho's words, of the Angel Academy in Florence, where Martinho studied and now teaches.) I have to admit that they produce some very beautiful work, "photographic-quality" in terms of drawing accuracy.

My drawing:




















My underpainting:




















My painting:

Doing the Tishes

In preparation for the alla prima workshop I will be attending, I am starting a series of poster studies and master copies. A bit of perfect timing - the plaster copies of David's eye, nose, mouth, and ear arrived a couple days ago, and I picked those up (and some wonderful small Princeton rounds) and will be drawing and painting those as practice, too.

Here's the underpainting of the first copy:
















Luckily, I have another shot at fixing all the places I screwed up: the overly-wide right cheek, the globella area, the lips, the nose, the direction of beard in the right-hand bottom corner.

Nevertheless, I think it's a fair shake for an hour's work. Especially since I kept screwing up the nose, which I thought was going to be "so easy." I was quite pleased with how the composition worked out, too: I had originally planned just to paint the nose and a bit of flesh surrounding it. But the more I crammed in, the more I liked it, until I had a closely-cropped Portrait going on.

The Young Man as a Portrait Artist

Good news: I was accepted into Studio Escalier's 2011 alla prima portrait workshop!

In advance of that, I've been busy burning hours working on elements of portraiture: drawing ears, eyes, noses, and mouths, and learning the related anatomy. I know what the sclera is. I can identify the scaphoid fossa. I've learned about the infrapalpebral furrow. The helix, tragus, and their antagonists (the anti-helix and anti-tragus) are like dear, close friends by now. I'm just not sure what in heck the caruncula is. (And the girl at Starbuck's, who coincidentally was studying the anatomy of the eye, didn't know either, and left pretty quickly after I asked.)

(Well, OK...it's a chunk of meat in the 'lacrimal lake'....but what's it do?)

I've been copying some anatomical parts from Tony Ryder's wonderful book on figure drawing - perhaps the best figure drawing book I know of. Also have at hand Stephen Rogers Peck's Atlas of Human Anatomy for the Artist, which has decent anatomical information but rather weirdy, plasticky-looking paintings (I guess) of the anatomical parts (not to mention extremely old-fashioned photos). Also have some photos, a number of Titian's paintings that my work was kind enough to dontae colour copies of. I plan to draw from these as much as possible (I have Peck at work to draw over lunch hours), and then to work my way up to doing copies of the Titians. I want to start doing some portrait poster studies, and then move on to doing finished paintings of, say, a nose, an ear, a caruncularly-complete eye.