HANDPRINT

not all tears and gnashing teeth

2010-09-30T19:13:00.000-07:00

well, it's been a frenetic few weeks of astronomy out here at rancho jonive (see next post), but the art does continue at its charcoal and gum arabic pace.

friday mornings i head up to forestville where i am lucky to participate in a figure drawing group run by sandy frank, a hugely talented local sculptress and pastel artist. the group has about ten or so semiregular participants, a good selection of models, and a very collegial atmosphere. sandy is a great host and i tweaked her about her yahoo! t shirt ... i usually decline to wear my smithsonian quality collection of yahoo branded apparel, but i wear my yahoo! belt buckle to group ... to fly the flag for times long gone by.

speaking of ... i've also, as no one is interested, deleted my facebook account (which turns out to be rather hard to do) because, well, it's facebook. if you're selling, hustling, seeking, smearing, or just lonely -- a great service. but one of the basic achievements of old age is that you deal with the lonely thing, and move on. and real friends actually ring your doorbell.

as it happened my computer was down for over a week; it took a few days for apple to diagnose the problem (the monitor needed a new power transformer) and then took almost a week to get the right part. and for that i missed sandy's group the first couple of times i planned to attend. but since then it's been a great way to conclude the week.

yes, there is a point ... i'm getting to it: the first day i was late getting to group and in the frantic couldn't find my drawing materials ... so i grabbed a set of felt pens that i'd bought in london to use for sketching in the national portrait gallery (see post back in april) and a newsprint block. and i've been basically using those until i use them up.

the newsprint has a fast, absorbent texture, eager to drink, and the pens have little brushlike tips that flex easily and are always moist. this makes for quicker gestures and some wonderful line variety by varying the pressure.

i've gradually evolved a method where i first block out the form using the "light gray" pen, then anchor the outline with the "black" pen, then go in and do modeling with the "gray" pen. of the set of six there are actually two sets of three, one variations on a cool, greenish gray and the other a range of sepia. i haven't gotten to the point of using the contrasts consciously.

wisteria was our model one week, a pleasant woman but with a peculiarly loose knit figure, as if there was an extra inch in the big joints. this later drawing of her reclining was one of my better ones, but she has the odd feel of nicely piled laundry, heavy and inert.

wendell was our model the week after, a sharply chiseled male with a shaved head. i found his poses distracting rather than revealing primarily because they were overly strenuous and elaborate. i prefer models who show the body through its leisure and comfort. anyway, i got some good head drawings with him.

and so the weeks go by.

emperor 1

2010-08-27T00:46:00.001-07:00

today i finished the first color pattern in my "emperor waves" project. this is a photograph of the full sheet coverage. the image below shows the type of pattern that had to be copied.

i promptly discovered that i had to rule the sheet in a 1" grid in order to make any progress. that's 2430 square inches, if you're counting.

i also found that these forms, which are really fractal in structure, had a strongly stupefying effect on my hand eye skills. i had to break the shapes down into the outline landmark points, then connect these by landmark points, and so on down to the complete form. progress was very slow and incredibly fatiguing: my pace averaged about 3 of the 6" square blocks a day.

at that pace, i wouldn't finish the painting until next spring. but this red was difficult because it was laid on bare paper. the remaining colors are woven into and through the red, which acts as the trellis, so i'm expecting the work will go more quickly.

the insight i gleaned from this is that structures we are habituated to see as textures or patterns are extremely difficult to render as discrete forms. there is no dynamic gestalt, no holistic integration, the way there is to a tree or a human figure, nothing geometrical in the way of cezanne's cubes and cylinders and cones. instead there was an exasperating, nattering landscape of little turrets, boxes, squiggles and blotches, repeated over and over in different orientations, proportions, sizes, configurations. over and over and over.

not for the faint of hand.

this is the working setup. to protect the painting, the laptop with reference image rests on a large sheet of foam core, and i worked with my arms resting on a large piece of cardboard. the paint dishes are placed on a rimmed dish, to guard against accidental spills or drips. i learned not to work in a sweater, which left cashmere lint on the paper.

so ... next up is the pattern of gold figures, which will populate the bottom of the painting and thin out toward the top of the sheet, the spatial complement to the red. after that i lace in some dull yellow, and stitch together the reds with ultramarine violet. that fills out about half of the painting, and the remaining colors are largely ornamental.

emperor waves 0

2010-08-01T12:46:00.000-07:00

i've cleared my schedule for work on a new project, a watercolor of water waves, developed from photos shot during my recent europe vacation. this will be on an emperor sized (41" x 60") sheet of 600gsm Arches watercolor paper, and is the largest project i have yet attempted.

i will be posting photos and comments on the work as it progresses.

here's a thumbnail of the reference image. i won't go into the specific photo manipulation methods used to create it, as everyone has their own photoshopping procedures. in gist, the "curves" function was used to displace the photo value sequence, and various color adjustments were applied to develop the overall image appearance i was after. the file was saved in .gif mode (using the option "exact colors") to reduce the colors to a smaller number (14). finally the CIE Lab colors (shown in the color picker) were used to identify the color locations in a perceptual color space, and the pigment selection was developed from that information.

to begin the paint selection, i plotted the Lab location of the image colors in my artist's color wheel or CIELAB color map, in order to understand the basic color relationships and identify plausible pigment selections and paint mixtures. the colors grouped into muted blues, violets, reds and greens, many in complementary relationship, and in a repeated cycle through the spectrum.

in his watercolor tutorial (which i highly recommend), david dewey recommends the use of "color bars" to examine the color relationships within an image. my first color design step is usually to paint out the list of pigment selections as color bars, to get a first impression of how they interact. this also gives me an opportunity to adjust the colors, by glazing over the paints with other paints, and these changes are notated in the margin as mixture recipes.

although color bars fine for the broad impression, colors are often correlated or related within an image -- for example, if oranges cast violet shadows, then orange and violet are always contiguous in an image. this is hard to simulate with color bars. for that purpose, i used a grid of 3/4" squares, where the number of squares filled by a color approximately stands for its proportional area in the planned painting, and colors that go together in the painting can be painted next to each other in the grid.

the image below shows that the appearance of a paint selection is quite different when presented as color bars or as a color grid. (happily, the trex planks of my studio deck provide the perfect medium gray background for balanced color evaluation.)

as with the color bars, the color grid can be adjusted by glazing over certain colors, which suggests revised paint mixtures or pigment choices, which in turn can be used to create a new color grid ... and so on for as long as the color adjustments seem necessary. the color grid also lets me identify any problems that occur in edging the paints -- specifically one paint wicking or dissolving into another -- which affects both pigment choices and the sequence in which paints are applied.

the image below shows the initial color grid and a later version, and as you can see, the changes in the pigments made to eliminate granulation (a distraction in a complex image), whitening or blotching, and the adjustments in the paint mixtures, stand out nicely.

my procedure is to assign color locations freely in the first color grid, but in subsequent grids to copy this color allocation exactly, so that all visual changes in the pattern can be attributed solely to the colors, and not to the placement of the colors.

the final color grid can be used as standard color samples to match the mixture of paints, so that they can be applied at one pass to dry to the desired color. i want to avoid the chore of adjusting the paint colors after they have been applied!

next comes the underdrawing. in previous posts i've described my four preferred methods of developing the underdrawing for a painting: a freehand drawing of the subject, a freehand drawing corrected freehand (by photoshopping the image of the freehand drawing over a photograph of the subject); a rough charcoal outline drawn over a projected photo; and a graphite tracing of a projected photo.

all these methods seemed impractical given the size and complexity of the image. and printing out reference images, of 14 separate colors in 70 squares, would amount to 980 pages! so i've saved the reference image on a laptop computer, gridded to match the paper, with each color of paint as a separate image layer. this way i can paint the image freehand, color by color, square by square, using the laptop image as the reference.

by "blinking" each layer on and off, i could analyze how they fit together and identify the colors that follow the structural constraints or essential outlines in the image. these will be painted first. they define the crucial mapping from image to paper, and can be used as reference points to paint in the other colors.

finally, i measured the time it took me to copy the pattern for one color within one 6" area of the painting, then multiplied this by 70 (the number of six inch squares in an emperor sheet) and again by 14 (the number of different colors). this gave me an estimated time of 32 days, 5 hours a day, to complete the painting.

i decided this was doable.

i've ruled off the six inch squares on the sheet, chosen my paints and mixtures, and start work today.

two boys

2010-07-28T14:38:00.001-07:00

three commission paintings recently completed of two lively boys.

jared - watercolor on Arches CP 300gsm, 10" x 14"

the active one. always smiling and running about. i've cropped out the bicycle he was riding.

caleb - watercolor on Arches CP 300gsm, 10" x 14"

the thoughtful one. this is a characteristic expression, so i was careful not to give it a melancholy turn.

two boys - watercolor on Arches CP 300gsm, 14" x 10"

the two in a very simple, colorful portrait. nothing fancy, but perhaps a good sense of their spirit.

also started a large (41" x 60") painting of water, based on photographs i took during my venice trip. it's a large project and fairly complex, so i'll be posting images of the work in stages, to explain how it's going.

sunny day. time for some studio time, then maybe a movie later with my sister, in town for a locum. jan is off in viriginia at a biologist's conference.

unpacking

2010-07-06T21:48:00.000-07:00

jan and i recently returned from a week in jackson, wyoming, where we had spectacular weather and lovely hiking. we went to the national museum of wildlife art, which is somewhat as dreary and hackneyed as it sounds, but they had an enchanting display of maurice sendak's drawings and paintings, and a superb collection of paintings by carl rungius, who i had not known. much to learn in rungius about color in light.

i spent the afternoon today unpacking the studio. i turntabled a selection of favorite guitarists -- metheny, mclaughlin, van eps, beck -- and sorted through my collection of books, boxing up a few dozen as discards, including a hefty and very reverent hagiography on picasso.

i unpacked paints and supplies, cleaned dishware, gathered up cobwebs, and watched birds scratching for seed in the fresh mowed meadow grass.

i sorted through photos, selecting a few as next projects.

tomorrow i begin work on a very large water painting (a painting of water, nothing else), and a new portrait of my wife and leah, our massage therapist.

i have been in a way digesting and ruminating.

travelog II: craft and history

2010-05-17T20:43:00.000-07:00

as my wife and i viewed uncounted paintings, sculptures, ceramics, carvings and precious objects in dozens of hallowed old piles -- in venice (accademia, ca' pesaro, ca' rezzonico, ca' d'oro, ca' mocenigo, pinault's palazzo grassi, santa maria della salute church, scuola grande di san rocco, scuola di san giorgio delgi schiavoni, doge's palace, santi giovanni e paolo church, san pantalon church, i frari church, santo mois church, san sebastiano church, querini stampalia foundation, jewish ghetto museum, naval museum, guggenheim museum, pinault's punta della dogana museum), verona (museo castelvecchio, palazzo forti, area archeologica del teatro romano), zurich (kunsthaus zürich), berlin (gemäldemuseum, kunstgewerbemuseum, neue nationalgalerie, german history museum, guggenheim gallery, pergamon museum, altes museum, the east side gallery), potsdam (sans souci palais, neues palais), amsterdam (rijksmuseum, van gogh museum, heritage amsterdam, rembrandt house) and london (national gallery, national portrait gallery, victoria & albert, hampton court house, tate modern, tate britain, british museum, kensington palace, windsor palace, foundling house museum, soane museum, royal art academy ["the real van gogh" exhibit and a fine exhibition of paul sandby watercolors], banquet hall, saatchi gallery) -- my sense of art broadened and ramified. the lockstep sequence of art history crumbled under the variety of regional schools, individual styles, personal talents and materials availability.

behind every item was a human life, a karmic path, a career. i discovered vigorous, superb, delicate, attentive talents completely unknown to me and omitted from the standard art indexes i consulted ... careers that spanned great style diversity or marched dutifully along a perfected path. art of high reputation that was awful, art of no reputation that was breathtaking. art in which the use of materials was alchemical and mystical, and art in which the use of materials was brutish and stupid.some of these items were flawlessly made and even after centuries were flawlessly preserved. others were not made to last, or had suffered neglect or damage that could not be repaired.

the effect of personal influence, via guilds, collections and museums, came into the foreground. copying and the study of individual artists by individual artists was rampant, from cranach copying bosch to rubens copying titian to lucien freud copying chardin. there was enormous variation in drawing skill, especially in portraits, and in coloring, especially in still lifes and landscapes: different artists emphasized different achievements. a whole rainbow of flesh harmonies, tokens of very different strategies for building and modeling paint color. "realist" styles that displayed an inventive mixture of realism, caricature, shadow drama, clinical light, decorative color or subdued palettes.

a hall of cast, sculpted, plated and handchased silver that extended along one entire side of the victoria and albert museum, and a museum of ceramics that brought together hundreds of items from the greeks to the modern britons in four large interconnected rooms -- each item a treasure in itself. a stone mason's clay pipe in a display case, dug out from a wall at hampton court that had collapsed in a fire and was rebuilt. a quilt composed entirely of alternating red and white, 3/4" hexagonal tiles of fabric, sown together in perfectly straight rows in all six directions, made as a convalescent diversion by a wounded soldier in a hospital in early 20th century england.

hundreds, thousands, millions of hours of labor, diligently completed for single clients in small communities, for large institutions, for famous collections ... all gradually handed down, consolidated and preserved as one more item in a display case or on a wall. hundreds of portraits of real people, real hearts and souls, now all dead. the sense weighed on me that time would eventually erase all things, and silence the praise of every excellence, and bring down the walls of every building.

i've mentioned the regrettable results of van gogh's negligent use of paint materials, but this is a theme that goes all the way back to leonardo's mummified "last supper" fresco in milan, which has been stripped of conservation additions and is now only bits of paint chips on a crumbling wall. frequent examples are the paintings by joshua reynolds completed after c.1790.

you might say, "wow, that's a crummy photograph. she's too yellow." but actually it's a pretty fair reproduction of the painting. reynolds was an extremely talented artist who was one of the first to get sucked into the materials experimentation that appears also in blake, in turner, and in many other english and french artists of the 19th century. (the germans, italians and spanish were more immune to the fads.) late in his career he adopted a carmine formulation that has disappeared entirely from dozens of his paintings. in london and berlin, you can spot a late reynolds portrait from across the room.

once i started looking for these mishaps, they turned out to be common. i found a large madonna and child by quentin massys (circa 1450), which at first glance was an extraordinarily cunning achievement in color realism -- the bread on a small table looked so real you could almost smell it. but beside the bread, some curiously pale and translucent cherries. again, the red (whatever it was) had faded over the centuries.

[detail, about 2 feet wide]

with a few clues like these, i began to see the "lateral craft" of individual painters -- not their "vertical craft" in the historical succession of styles, or career periods early and late, but in their use of materials and methods. some painters failed miserably across many paintings for many reasons (van gogh), some painters repeatedly failed in a single component (reynolds), and some painters in occasional details (massys). craquelure, varnishing, paint consistency, tonal balance (some paintings were inexplicably dark), edge control, pigment permanence; crude overpainting or painting in of objects and figures; the queer blueness of medieval distant mountains; the tint and depth of shadows; eyes that sat squarely in a man's skull or that seemed about to crawl out of their sockets. portraits by holbein that were crudely drawn and portraits that seemed traced in every detail from a photograph (yes, i believe hockney's thesis). i found dozens of ways in which painters could be distinguished from each other that had little to do with "art history" but a lot to do with personal innovation and skill, and the artist's economic resources within regional traditions of craft.

i recognized historical trends that i have not seen treated as a separate topic. the gradual coarsening of the brushstroke, accompanied by an incremental thickening of paint viscosity and density, was a kind of tectonic development across centuries. at first the transition from a flat picture surface to a fulsome impasto appears only occasionally, within the career evolution of painters like titian, tintoretto, rubens, hals and rembrandt; with hals the hasty brushstroke is more common in small works, with rembrandt it's more evident in his large works, such as his "jewish wedding". but it gradually becomes a pervasive feature of painting in the 19th century, and a hackneyed and limiting element of technique in the 20th century, coming to a disreputable terminus in the meretricious use of splatter and drip, and the concept that brushstrokes, by themselves and separate from representation and color, are a sufficient painted image.

oh cy twombly, how do you do what you do? [format: enormous]

many artists specialized in trademark challenges -- elegant fabrics, dewy flowers and reflective metals, stormy seascapes, twilight skies, animal portraits, estate portraits, political commentaries, dutch "guild" group portraits, full figure society portraits, children, domestic interiors, landscapes at night, cityscapes of specific cities, biblical stories, classical allegories, mythical scenes, social satire or sardonic commentary, the effect of candlelight in a dark room.

even after the late renaissance, when linear perspective was completely understood, it was not always used with good effect, but when it was, it often included a machinelike, manufactured quality. canaletto is astonishingly good at building a breathing, delicate and convincing illusion of aerial and optical perspective; but on close inspection one finds that he uses very simple, economical and efficient methods of delineation, coloring and simplification, applied systematically. by 1750, strategies of industrial manufacture intrude into the painting esthetic, not just as an optical image but as an assembled surface.

now the trend is the other way: in the venice punta della dogana and in the neues galerie in berlin, we saw several canvases by rudolph stingel that mimic on enormous scale what seem to be common, tiny amateur or tourist black and white photographs -- down to the scratches, fingerprints and creases. these were gradually built up of tiny blossoms of paint applied with a soft bristle brush, the reassertion of handicraft inducing an unexpected nostalgic, ominous and prophetic atmosphere.

[format: enormous]

at the other extreme, gerhard richter has recently turned to industrial paintings made by thickly and unevenly layering paint colors on a rigid surface and then scraping the paint down with a steel bar dragged back and forth, hundreds of times, over the painting. this parodies and automates the brushstroke, softening and partially compacting colors together, shearing down layers to the layers below, pulling color, "action" and representation from initially hidden variations in the density of successive paint layers.

[format: very large]

from canaletto to stingel, there is a long, complex and dynamic tension between handicraft and industrial esthetics, production methods and product applications. the workshop process too, just like the collaborative practices of printing and weaving, has been transformed behind the scenes -- from titian and rubens to dr. munro and ackermann to koons and murikami. many top drawer artists no longer produce their works entirely themselves: they delegate and administer the works as products of an organization.

the marvelous carved wood panels in the scuola san rocco, each representing a different theme, or iconic virtue or vice: who carved them? no one could tell me. yet there they are, full of life and humor, warm with centuries of careful polishing and refinishing by hands whose contribution was care and conservation rather than creation. astonishingly fluent and delicate carvings by grinling gibbons were sometimes placed high out of sight, tucked along the wainscoting of a pulpit, or sequestered in a private room.

the architectural interiors created an atmosphere that pulled some attributes into sharper view. the dim 18th century rooms in the querini stampalia, ca' rezzonico, ca' mocenigo or ca' d'oro, door jambs askew and creaky floors slightly tilted toward exterior walls, emphasized how difficult it must have been to make the diminutive sculptures and darkened paintings they had on display. the vast interior spaces of the punta della dogana, filled with artworks of huge scale or mind boggling repetition, felt desperately empty. the oppressive and dispiriting gloom of the "decadent" art on display in the berlin modern art gallery was amplified to an almost intolerable pitch by the arid and clinical museum building, designed by mies van der rohe. the same solid architectural craft that made the victoria & albert and british museums seemed to tame and scale down the wild perfection of the ceramic and silver galleries, and comfortably accommodate the huge exhibits of greek, egyptian and asian architecture. the rooms of the gemäldegalerie were color coded by art historical epoch -- a weird touch, since individual works (such as the van der weyden portrait in the previous post, some holbein portraits, a vermeer, and so on) seemed to float in a timeless space, fresh and immediate.

there is in humans an unrelenting urge to craft -- no matter that it's jeweling a silver chalice or or setting the stones in a church floor or pulling the last weed out of the garden or carving a flower out of cherry wood or making a madonna that seems to breathe or baking bread that scents a home -- craft is something we pursue almost without calculation of personal cost.

all those artists that we see from the outside, as a link in the chain of history ... they lived history from the inside just as we do, dimly aware of the past, unsure of everything far away, keeping close to routine, relying on family and friends, doing good work in spite of hardship, want and fatigue, and entirely ignorant of the future or the ultimate fate of their handiwork.

i had to discipline my cultural prejudice to "judge art" and instead see paintings from the individual and circumstantial point of view. these are not the products of movements or ideas, but of lives. i set myself to reconnect with the craft spirit, the joy of the hand, the cunning and patience instead of the reputation, and set aside the color codes and creaky floors of the critical and art historical rooms to which the artists have been ranked and consigned.

travelog I: paintings and photos

2010-05-16T11:04:00.000-07:00

now safely past the ire of iceland's volcano, and finally over the hideously lingering business class virus, i'm hankering to post some reflections on what i learned about art during my eleven weeks in venice, zurich, berlin, amsterdam and london.

i saw a tremendous lot of paintings, tapestries and sculptures, across a wide variety of institutional settings, with and without adequate curatorial attention and light engineering, in person and in catalog reproductions, at first impression and revisited, weary and fed, sketching or sauntering, sober and stoned. and the core of my experience is the profound, complex and disorienting perception of what it is to really look at art in situ, as opposed to merely recognizing and responding to an image.

i'll begin with the painting by charles guérin called out previously -- actually the digital image of the painting as it appears on the hermitage amsterdam web site.

now the first question you probably do not ask yourself is -- how big is this painting? my first insight was how far we're habituated by modern image reproduction media to disregard issues of scale in the encounter with an image.

i've posted on my web site a long examination of the relationship between a picture format and the pictorial impact the format asserts on the viewer -- both as an implied viewing distance in a public space and as a virtual claim about the relative physical scale between the objects in the image and the viewer -- which i call the display geometry. issues of display geometry were impressed on me repeatedly as i went through the dozens of museums along my itinerary.

to answer the question: the guérin painting is ... large. i can't find reliable documentation (and the museum catalog is infuriatingly unavailable from amazon.com) but my recall is that it is about 5 feet high by 4 feet wide. as the model's head would go out of the frame if she stood up where her left foot rests, this is clearly a "life size" or reproduction representation, which puts our encounter with the model on a human, literal and earthbound footing.

now dwell on that human and earthbound model. the perfectly understated sag in her upper arm, buttock and hip, the softness of her thigh against the edge of the chair, the intimations of coming middle age in her breasts and stomach ... i even see a little of lucian freud's trademark sitter boredom in her expression ... everything combines to convey a rembrandtlike quality of realism and vulnerability. (to better appreciate the pose, compare it first to my favorite rembrandt on the one hand, and then to something by the tediously vapid charles bouguereau or the snide gustave courbet on the other.) the large format projects that vulnerability as a living human presence, a life rather than a figure, but a life that is quite obscured by the digital image.

the hermitage "expert" commentary on this painting is quite amusing:

As a student of Gustave Moreau, Guérin learned to exploit the decorative effects of colour without obvious experimentation. He honed his skills by copying old masters in the Louvre. In his work he remained true to identifiable form and his palette was harmonious rather than bold, despite fauve influences. Shchukin was particularly enthusiastic about Guérin, who represented his models in attractive poses. This model poses serenely, apparently untroubled by the large, fashionable hat which forms a provocative contrast with her nude body.

Sergei Shchukin was a wealthy russian businessman turned art collector with an uncannily clear and unfaddish eye for art excellence -- many of his personal selections were in the amsterdam show -- so we have to ask what he found so precious in this work. my answer is ... its intoxicating color harmony and affirming light.

this is almost entirely lost in the digital image, because of what is called gamut mapping -- the compromises in lightness contrast, hue accuracy and chroma range created by forcing a fully dimensional pigment landscape into a trichromatic (RGB or CYM) color reproduction medium with a limited dynamic range.

the color keystone to the guérin painting is located, of all places, in the gilt frame behind the model's hat. this highly reflective surface signals to the viewer's eye both the intensity of the light falling on the painting and its color as well -- gilt goes steely under green light, or copperish under warm light. here the frame appears glinting with creamy warmth in the original (an effect lost in the digital image), and the eye, taking that as the anchor for white, spreads that effulgence throughout the canvas. under this warm light, her figure is expertly (subtly!) and realistically contrasted -- the legs sculpted with pale, soft touches of red and magenta in the original (they're just brownish in the image), her torso an iridescent analysis of green gold and warm tints in the original (drab yellow in the image). this contrast is handled so delicately that at first you don't notice it. and the color balance is assisted by the wall behind, which is not a scumbled gray but a mist of rose, teal, green and azure worthy of tiepolo; this intensifies into a shadow outline around the figure that is a dark blue green brightening almost to pure teal, which summarizes the chromatic bias of the "gray" wall, forces the green golds toward yellow, and draws more pink out of the magenta. it's a vision that shimmers.

we notice the green hat and orange seat cover. the studiously stupid "color theorist" might remark that this is the classic tension between red and green, introducing a fauvist dynamic conflict into the image ... van gogh would understand, oh yes! in fact its role is quite different, and the correct answer is clear in the presence of the painting. (again, the digital image fails us.)

the orange/red mixture is highly saturated (it appears very close to a pure cadmium scarlet red, which was newly available by 1910 when this painting was made). even more saturated is the ultramarine blue of the hat -- ultramarine being the most saturated single pigment of any hue available to a painter. and the green (probably viridian) has been mixed and lightened with yellow to boost its chroma as well. but the point of these colors -- these pigment selections -- is chroma. the eye cannot see intense chroma unless the light is both chromatically "broadband" and also sufficiently luminous to perk up the eye to its full chromatic response. (a reddish light would dull the green, a yellowish light would dull the blue, a greenish light would dull the red.) each color prevents the other from tipping the chromatic balance of the image, but all contribute to the sense of powerful, clear, creamy white light emerging from the canvas.

i had several encounters with the art holocaust of gamut mapping during my vagabonding. the most scrupulous was the rainy afternoon i bought an exhibition catalog at the ca' pesaro gallery (an exhibition that really rocked my art understanding ... more on that later), then spent hours going through its modern art exhibition work by work, comparing the painting to the printed image. over and over, not only was the printed image wildly, almost painfully inadequate, but specifically the effect or charm that i felt was the essence of the image was trampled on, distorted, or obliterated. grays were hugely wrong; warms were cools and crispenings were soggy. blacks went from depth to dirt. flesh tones were cheapened and thickened. chiaroscuro turned into quilting. (as if to cement the insight, the binding of the catalog fell apart, and the cover separated from the pages.)

a more familiar example is this famous vermeer painting, which i encountered in the amsterdam rijksmuseum:

especially in printed images, that girl's apron is a muted dark middle blue, often matching a prussian blue (or a phthalo blue GS, since printed images mean CYM mixtures). the shock was -- that apron is pure ultramarine! it has an almost electric brillance. it's nowhere purple (as it seems in the digital image), and it glows all the way into the deepest shadows, which in the image appear black. (it's so potent that i had reservations about the restoration that might have been inflicted on it.) but the point is, whether it's a restorer's blunder or the artist's intent, the image seriously distorts what the actual painting looks like. again, looking at the painting, the visual interpretation of the light is made more emphatic by the chromatic brilliance, a keynote that is amplified by the sparkling texture of the objects on the table and the brimming stream of pure white milk.

speaking of light, the third important insight i developed, across many museums using many different lighting strategies, is the light contrast put on the works. the standard gallery practice is to vignette the painting in a cone of light, as viewed inside a relatively dim room -- look at the gallery photos of the hermitage amsterdam exhibition at the bottom of this page, where the camera clearly brings out the lighting contrast. in that lighting arrangement, the eye adapts to the dim ambient light rather than the localized spot lights (which are partly dimmed for the eye by the dark and dull colors of a painting), so that a painting is pushed upwards in apparent brightness, and in the extreme can be made to appear almost to glow like a backlit transparency. this increases both the lightness and chroma contrasts, and in the guérin work, viewed overall, though the light contrast was more subdued, the effect was magical. the woman appears to be embodied in light.

my fourth and last learning takes me back to that critic's commentary quoted above. i can't read something like that without a weary feeling that many critics have been educated for too long (and perhaps write too many commentaries based on digital images). the subtext seems to be the hackneyed modernity myth: art is about "movements" and movements are inherently about -- well, you know, innovating, shocking, pushing limits, épatezing those bourgeoisie types and burning down the salon. poor plodding guérin, the "conventional" colorist, the provincial art professor who stuck to his prejudices! we'll let shchukin have a pass on this one ... with the lubricious innuendo that it must have been guérin's "attractive poses" and "provocative contrasts" that caught shchukin's eye.

my reply starts with a painting by rogier van der weyden in the berlin gemäldegallerie, something usually given (with modern agnosticism) the title "portrait of a young woman".

this is an iphone photo of the painting -- the germans encourage photography, and the iphone does a surprisingly fine job of catching the color balance correctly. but color is not why i kept coming back to this intimate portrait, just 19 inches high. in that format the head is a bit over 6 inches high, or smaller than life size, which has the magnetic (and for most viewers, probably unnoticed) effect of drawing the viewer closer to the painting. and at close distance what springs into view is the incredibly fresh, tender and exquisite mouth, which is curved in an implicit emotion and latent speech, dimpled with character and moist with breath.

it's clear from the overall that, despite the care lavished on every part -- the precise fabric textures of linen and wool, the beautifully judged value contrasts between background, skin and starch, the delicately managed emphasis of light on the face rather than the hands, the gorgeously modeled flesh tones -- it's the mouth that was the focus of patient effort for the painter; even the eyes look hasty in comparison. and the fascination of that mouth lies in a sensuality that the pleats curving over the woman's breasts only complements. it's a gratitude that can redeem every evil that life can put in your path.

i'd accept the conclusion that this is the artist's wife, or certainly his beloved, rather than a random commission or studio product. something was done here that, despite the very different means, is exactly the same as the light and life i saw in the guérin nude, and in many wonderful paintings besides -- most of them hardly famous. it was this something, call it joy or love or reverence or gratitude, that i learned to look for and feel pleasure to find in art.

it seems to me that one of the miracles of art is that this reverent illusion can be created in so many ways, as images of so many different events and objects painted with so many different styles and techniques. in the same way, we can feel whole, fulfilled, and spiritually thankful in all kinds of encounters -- a kind word, a warm meal, a breaking storm, a silent night, a child's eyes, a flood of music, a well placed soccer goal.

the fact that this pleasure and this sensuality has nothing to do with art movements and "art theory" is perhaps why it is missed in contemporary overintellectualized art criticism. there is no breakthrough, no revolution, no stylization here! just an intimate honesty that must have cost the painter a labor at his limits.

modern art criticism, the blather about movements, innovations and greatness, the pathetic nursery tale of breakthroughs and bigness, obscures the real craftsmanship in art. it also implies a uniformity of response to art that is completely out of whack with the supposed individuality of our characters, our perceptual quirks, our idiosyncratic readings, educations and life experiences. one of the greatest pleasures in art is to visit a museum with someone you love or treasure, especially a maturing child or established friendship, and share with them your individual enthusiasms.

what we inherit as a result of the modernity myth is an art that is deeply demoralizing in its capacity to trivialize and posture, to automate our esthetic response to manufactured stimuli, and to level all excellence in a stylistic plurality. murikami's "cowboy", a larger than life, industrial acrylic sculpture of a naked manchild making a lasso of his copious and treacly ejaculation, is for me the epitome. of course i get the irony and polish and manga exuberance and twitting of the sexually straightlaced. but it is still the kind of thing that, when i came upon it in the customs house museum in venice, anchored my eye with incredulity and contempt. if the weyden portrait is a star, then this is a black hole.

the point for an artist like murikami is the dollar revenue imperative, invitations to the right parties and clubs, lionizing media attention and a workshop production machine. it's the same art economy that the mass media reproduction of paintings, as postcards and art books and digital images, encourages and amplifes. it's the art economy that socializes us to think of paintings as intellectual tokens in a historical narrative in which the touchstones of merit are marketability and critical notice, and then habituates us to accept the image as the original -- a format detached image, a gamut stripped, luminance crushed and critically filtered image, now become an "idea", a "concept", an "icon", a "landmark". (would you like an audioguide with that concept?)

there is something lost that only the painting can preserve and reveal to us. yes, guérin was a minor painter with an income he had to supplement with advertising art. yes, van der weyden was a master painter who did something out of the way, off the narrative, with his singular little portrait. but the same light shines through both works. it's the light of patient craft, hard won skill, unrelenting labor, and the exchange of career pretense and the acclaim of posterity for -- a work that does justice to life.

art preoccupations in europe

2010-04-07T17:14:00.000-07:00

my main interest has been in learning how to take photos and videos using only the iphone camera, which turns out to be very handy, wide angled but capable of macro, color accurate and very responsive to changes in light.

i tried to paint watercolors plein air twice in venice, but was driven back before i could finish a painting by the extreme cold air and wind. on one day i soon could not feel the brush in my hands. rain and a very busy schedule have kept me from painting in london.

museums in london are receptive to sketchers, so i've been drawing in the national and portrait galleries, and in the victoria & albert. i bought some charcoal pencils and a set of black felt tip pens, but the felt tip pens have yielded fun results, such as this drawing from a very large painting of an irish female politician in the portrait gallery.

i've sharpened my sense of color by looking at art by many different hands from many different historical and national styles. my appreciation of kandinsky, klee, degas and many of the old masters such as titian, chardin and gainsborough has gone up, and my interest in surrealism has waned. the berlin modern exhibition of "degenerate" painters was painful to look at. there was a stark difference in all periods between the painters whose colors seem trustworthy and painters whose works have lost their original balance and appear quite dark or oddly imbalanced. the paintings by joshua reynolds, with their ghostly white faces (all the carmine pigment has faded) are especially easy to recognize.

i've had a great time with my wife. we share for a while, split up, get back together to exchange enthusiasms and observations, and so on, with many nice respites in the museum cafes. (the restaurants in the tate modern and national portrait gallery are especially fine.)

i've gotten a peculiar sense of the enormity and intricacy of historical time, through the large number of buildings and artifacts and historical items we've seen over the past eight weeks, including the domestic items in the science museum in london. a sense of how many lives have poured forth onto the planet and how long they have worked to dig, pile, scrape, fire and cultivate all these things preserved from dust.

and these items have a cumulative flavor that is very different from mass produced items that pile up everywhere in our contemporary environment. a reverent, almost mystic aura surrounds them, like the relic bones, teeth, hair and larger corpse parts of saints that are stored in the churches of venice, st. mark's in particular. against this dreary backdrop the paintings with a living force and honesty shine out miraculously.

is van gogh the most overrated painter -- ever?

2010-04-07T16:25:00.000-07:00

i'm posting from europe, during a month long stay in london after a month long stay in venice separated by two weeks in amsterdam and berlin. i've seen a lot of art again during this trip, up close and leisurely, and many amazing paintings, including a figure nude by charles guérin that was a wonder of reverent, glowing color.

but having seen the van gogh museum in amsterdam and the latest show of paintings and letters at the royal academy, london ("the real van gogh"), i have to ask: is van gogh the most overrated painter -- ever?

set the critical propaganda aside, go through either of the exhibitions, and just look at what's on the wall. can anyone look at one of those works, pick any one you want, and seriously say that it contains an exemplary artistic effort?

the academy show had many of his drawings, and it is painfully obvious that they are done without "the joy of the hand". they consist almost entirely of an early period of clumsy figures and wispy, almost smeary graphite shading, followed by a period in which entire drawings are built up of emphatic dots and dashes that seem more intended to cover the page than create an image. the same dots and dashes serve for grass, bark, leaves and sky (easier and faster that way) ... indeed, he boasted to his brother of his slapdash technique ("done in ONE hour!"). after an early serious attempt to master figure drawing, van gogh seemed just to give up on the challenge; his later figures and portraits are crudely and ineptly drawn.

some of the paintings were so ghastly bad that they looked like an untalented high school student had painted them. his divisionist technique has none of the complexity or subtlety of signac or seurat, and his sense of visual color mixture and paint texture is far below what monet or gauguin put in play; his landscapes are spackled with paint the way wayne thiebauld paints desserts -- but this has a very different impact when used to represent clouds instead of pastries. his color poety is infantile compared to degas, and compared to manet or sargent he completely lacked any sense of darks and lights. (the amsterdam museum has a painting of potatoes that is almost entirely black. no, i don't mean it is dark. i mean the potatoes are black, the table is black, and the wall behind is black. the painting has been heavily photoshopped -- like a fashion magazine model -- in this image; the actual image is much darker and almost illegible.)

color poetry? brushwork mastery? artistic vision? -- really?

van gogh relied on a variety of artistic crutches, including a wired picture frame to help him see basic perspective, and a hobby horse conception of "color theory" which was far cruder than anything that talented painters would tolerate. little wonder that he retreated into a "japanese" perspective flatness, and his colors are generally garish and clangorous, regardless of the motif or light. to borrow a quip from picasso: on the vase above, the highlight is not light, it is merely paint.

and speaking of color ... van gogh's colors can't be trusted, or are known to have badly altered, because he used fugitive paints. both museums made explicit mention of this problem with his paintings; the amsterdam van gogh museum has a full wall display on the issue. it's even a badge of sophistication among art connoisseurs to know that the white background in the new york met's iris painting was originally pink, not white. a color that has long ago flown home to baby jesus.

the saving twist for posterity is that he wrote such a long epistolary narrative about his great efforts and wide experiments to make himself into an artist -- those letters! all those heartwarming, earnest, utterly humorless but highly quotable letters about the holy mission of art and his devout penitent efforts to make himself spiritually worthy!

the nub of van gogh was that he had the persistence, diligence and self presentation of the adult combined with the artistic outlook and talent of a child. That manchild chemistry, atavistic and yearning, makes him easy to market to the modern ethos ... and mass marketing was in full flow at both museums, which put on sale a great variety of van gogh merchandising, prints, postcards and publications.

will that be cash, or card?

indeed, van gogh's entire fame seems to rest on his marketability, both in the auction art market and in museum exhibition attendance. (sort of because it was something one expects to do on vacation in london, i stood in line for three hours to get into the academy show -- i, my wife and a visiting friend took turns at the queue.) somewhere between the lonely suicide who couldn't sell his paintings and the bloated myth romanticized by irving stone and fleshed out in film by kirk douglas, the art marketing juggernaut of the van gogh myth was born. and it's been rolling over gullible, conforming eyes ever since.

look at the stupefying length of this line! look at how huge is the van gogh museum in amsterdam! look at all those authoritative, lavish books! listen to the reverent blandishments of the audioguide! how could he not be great? no, greater than great -- immortal!

the royal academy show is the last van gogh exhibition i will ever see. i realized this when i admitted to myself that there are perhaps only two van gogh paintings i would look forward to seeing again, ever (neither was in the london show). but there are many paintings i hope to see again many times, or that i regret probably never seeing again ... such as that fabulous guérin figure nude, perky pink in a green hat, which will go back to the hermitage in leningrad.

naked ladies

2009-09-17T22:38:00.000-07:00

watercolor on velke losiny moldau CP 300gsm, 20"x30".

i bought these flowers at bill's market and set them in a vase for two days. i drew a foundation in watercolor pencil, then in charcoal or carbon pencil over that. finally the drawing was washed or filled in with watercolor paint. i didn't like the way the background turned out, so i trimmed the sheet at both ends, and i finished the pot quickly because i was bored with the work.

the point was the freehand drawing, a more complicated drawing than i've done in a long time without a grid or projected image. i am becoming more aware of how a drawing emerges out of first marks so that i can make those marks with the right focus.

i like the way the blossoms cover the stems, and the variety of curls and perspectives in the six pointed star at the end of each blossom cone. they are called "naked ladies" because the blossoms stalk out of the bare ground. the leaves emerge and die off in the summer.

starfield

2009-09-17T18:46:00.000-07:00

watercolor on velke losiny moldau CP paper, 300gsm, 30" x 22".

the star field between the pleiades and orion (across bottom) and between the milky way and the variable star mira (bottom to top). it includes several different distance scales: the star clusters of orion, hyades and pleiades, the milky way background, the red shifted galaxies in the distance.

first the star positions were identified in blue watercolor pencil using a grid to copy and project part of a star chart in the norton's star atlas. beads of latex resist were applied over the marks, and the whole sheet washed with indanthrone blue, prussian blue and phthalo blue. the resists were removed from the dried sheet and the star images edited with a brush.

the moldau paper is really a delight to work on, but the internal sizing does not hold up under areas protected by latex mask, so diluted color applied to them tends to creep or spread, which introduces variety into the star shapes.

binocular self

2009-09-15T13:48:00.001-07:00

Kremer pan watercolors, Wolff's carbon, Arches CP 300gsm, 16" x 12".

i have been feeling a desire lately to get back to vision rather than photography for a working basis. a lot of things going on ... looking at stars through an infrared scope, testing color combinations using photoshop generated media, finding the camera based paintings stale and timid, difficulty in focusing when i draw freehand, an interest in how objects are identified in vision, looking through japanese hantai comics and other graphic novels ... feeling boxed in by the image.

i had a grid traced on an acrylic sheet that i used to transfer a starscape into a large (30"x22") format, and thought to use it to draw my face in binocular view. the trick is to focus on the grid, but look at the image behind it; if the grid is propped against a mirror and the mirror is a few feet away, the binocular image appears fairly clearly.

it was very difficult for me to draw in this way, mostly because the binocular rivalry became stronger, and one image would dominate. there is actually great depth to this kind of image that becomes more apparent the longer you try to draw it; the difficulty is to draw both images with equal contribution.

the eye does various things to reconcile the images. the edge of the head (hair) and the eyes are pronounced, because the eyes overlap in the center (the right eye looks directly into the left eye, and vice versa). the mouth appears as a horizontal feature. the nose is split in separate images that are only half as strong as the eyes, and so on. where areas overlap, the image "behind" the other appears attenuated at the edge, as if the image in front were surrounded by a nimbus. features coalesce to make shapes, and the shapes change as one or the other image asserts itself. it was quite tiring.

the binocular issue was foregrounded by a large painting i am doing of "naked ladies", a type of lily that blossoms once each year around the first of september. the profuse lily cones created a dense pattern of overlaping and occluding volumes.

star paintings

2009-08-28T16:29:00.000-07:00

this is the span between the big dipper and cassiopea, centered on polaris. three stimulants on this. i happened by larry's on the first night of the perseid meteor shower, and let myself enjoy the asterisms in the north sky. i stumbled onto a freeware called "Where Is Messier 13?", which every amateur astronomer will recognize as a globular cluster in the constellation bootes, west in the sky from the bright star arcturus. i viewed the night sky using larry's infrared binoculars, which revealed texture in the milky way most beautifully.

i became intrigued with our celestial place and gathered photos of local galaxies, our galaxy structure, local star clusters and nebulae, the visual pattern of the milky way. i drew the northern star locations and magnitudes with a charcoal pencil, copying from the norton star atlas, making an asterisk shaped mark.

watercolor on Lanaquarelle HP 300gsm, 10" x 14".

this one was the first. i used this as the drawing guide for the painting below. the milky way is deep yellow, the sky green gold, every black star is tinted with cadmium scarlet, then colored in with cobalt teal blue. the stars look like blue cinders and the spatial sense of a star scape is more evident.

watercolor on Lanaquarelle CP 300gsm, 10" x 14".

this was drawn by copying the first. the sky is several kinds of transparent blue, stars reserved with liquid latex then tinted around the margins with yellow, magenta or green blue. i didn't enjoy the paper, which was too heavily sized and susceptible to cockling.

april & son

2009-08-25T20:05:00.001-07:00

watercolor on Arches CP 300gsm paper, 14" x 10".

second in the april series, heightened the color a little and enjoyed getting the fluffy texture on the sesame st. doll. unfortunately as with so many of my paintings, the photograph doesn't convey the figure modeling at all.

april & son

2009-08-05T20:00:00.001-07:00

watercolor on Arches CP, 300gsm, 14" x 10".

i had worked with april over a year ago, and contracted with her to do three paintings of her and her year old son as trade for her modeling for me.

one thing or another, other projects, travel, illness and an unpredictable tremble in my hand, perhaps a sign of age, alternately slowed or postponed work on these images. last month i substantially finished them, and this week put the final touches on all three.

in this image i opted for a muted palette confined to a limited range of warm hues, with an ultramarine blue wash for the background. the light structure is simple and the pose was both a good portrait study of april and an nice psychological contrast between past and future, adult and child, innocence and experience.

i kept the modeling rather flat, and stylized the hair, in a way that i wanted to suggest renaissance paintings. this was the painting the model chose to keep.

trinity

2009-06-10T19:21:00.000-07:00

watercolor & Arches CP 300gsm, 14" x 10".

i did this portrait because i liked the photograph and the pose, but especially because i liked trinity's luxurious, cascading hair.

the drawing is freehand, using a system of skewed guidelines i developed a couple of years ago. the guidelines assert a subtle distorting effect on the drawing, and the coloring is done roughly. the drawing resembles a portrait heroine from a graphic novel.

background is chromium oxide green and cadmium yellow deep, glazed with a layer of nickel dioxine yellow. flesh is raw sienna base, watermarked, with shading in burnt sienna, cadmium scarlet, and benzimida maroon. eyes are dioxine violet and green gold tinted with phthalo blue, phthalo green and cadmium scarlet. hair is transparent brown oxide and cobalt blue deep; the two give a granulating dark brown/gray black color that is tinted with phthalo blue and phthalo green.

trinity

2009-06-07T17:22:00.000-07:00

watercolor on Arches CP 600gsm, 16" x 12".

another figure study, this is a pose the model suggested from a photo she had seen of a movie star. i started this painting three times. the first painting failed because the background got out of control, the second because i spilled phthalo green on the face. this one turned out reasonably well but deserves to be larger size (probably half sheet). this is on an arches 600gsm block sheet, essentially a card stock with a rough finish.

the photo was altered in a few ways to make the image more appealing. for example, due to the optics of my position and foreshortening her left foot appeared too small: it's been enlarged about 8% so that it matches the (closer to camera) right foot.

background is several washes of phthalo blue plus iron blue, with a single top layer of cobalt blue deep. this dark granulation over the lighter gradations in tone gives the background a shimmery, radiant quality.

flesh tones are benzimida maroon for the darks, cadmium scarlet or burnt sienna for the volume modeling, isoindolinone yellow and raw sienna for the base (lightest) flesh tone, shadows tinted with indanthrone blue, cobalt teal blue or phthalo green. hair is sepia streaked with cadmium red and dioxazine violet.

what has happened to arches?

2009-05-27T15:48:00.001-07:00

yes, what has happened to arches papers? i thought my occasional bad experiences with their 600gsm sheets (specifically the double elephant or 29" x 41" sheets) were just luck of the half irish. what kind of bad experiences? how about a tuft of what appeared to be lint mixed with human hair stuck in the middle of the sheet, buried in the pulp, that had to be carefully trimmed down to the surface? or, in another sheet, a patch of denser pulp that repelled paint even when the patch was scraped slightly and scrubbed with a brush as paint was applied.

then a painter i admire wrote me about problems *she* was having with arches sheets, problems she took to the manufacturer and to which Arches responded in a generous manner. but one off gestures to repair the relationship with the artist do not get at the underlying problems with the paper.

case in point: the 29" x 41" figure nude of sienna, which i had to abandon because of inexplicable blotching across her ... well, across the part of the image that i could not disguise with texture, pattern, dark values or strong color contrasts.

i know how to store and handle papers; i wash my hands before handling papers, and i do not bruise or abrade papers accidentally or on purpose. these blotches get darker grossly darker when the paper is wet, implying the flaw is in the pulp.

the companion painting disclosed a different flaw -- a small cluster or spray of white dots, each about 1mm in diameter, covering an irregular, elongated area about 6 cm/sq. these dots, whatever they are, repel paint and cannot be worn down or lifted by judicious scraping with an xacto knife. they appear in a mid valued area where i can probably disguise them with texture.

i am a habitual user of Arches watercolor blocks, both the 300gsm and 600gsm sheets, and in general the 300gsm (140 lb.) blocks have a rock solid consistency. i recently purchased some 20 year old 300gsm blocks from an artist who wanted to offload her inventory, and the quality of the 300gsm sheets 20 years ago and today is indistinguishable.

in contrast, the 600gsm block sheets seem a little erratic to me; the surface in particular seems less finished and more unpredictable. so i have a conjecture: all the 600gsm weight papers are made in a separate line or at a separate manufactory, under separate or subsidiary management from the higher volume plants. if so, someone from Arches corporate (well, Arjo Wiggins or whoever owns them now) should drive out to that plant and do a quality and process review. something unhappy is happening to arches papers.

bearded irises

2009-05-23T15:44:00.000-07:00

watercolor on Arches CP 300gsm, 14" x 10.

jan's garden has come into full bloom so i spent a few days photographing and selecting some flowers for painting.

i justified cutting these irises because a heat snap would have cooked them dry. they are an almost black violet with gleams of red. i used ultramarine violet darkened and warmed with cadmium scarlet, and quinacridone magenta for the highlights.

this is just a recreational painting: freehand drawing, quick blocking in of color, little attention to detail or composition. the vase has a water glass shape but is actually a foot tall. the blossoms were about 13cm wide.

the stalks ended in a single blossom. after i posed and drew the flowers and started the painting, the stalks went through the death process and the central blossom opened, then the other buds opened after the two large flowers shriveled up. the plant exposed as much of its pollen as possible before the flowers were gone. it was sad to watch, but also inspiring.

trinity (color study)

2009-05-15T17:58:00.000-07:00

watercolor on Arches CP 300gsm, 14" x 10".

this color study was prepared to evaluate a color scheme that i intend for a series of mirror poses with trinity. i also wanted to explore ways to model her hair on cold pressed paper, and play around with the composition.

the hair turned out to be more work than i intended but the method i used -- lifting paint from a foundation layer of synthetic black (perylene maroon, phthalo green, a little phthalo blue), then painting into the highlights with the component colors, then shaping the darks with a second application of black -- gave the hair a softness i hadn't expected.

i foregrounded the figure by painting the flesh tones in burnt sienna, cadmium scarlet, benzimida maroon and cobalt teal, over a foundation wash of raw sienna, then contrasting it with the ultramarine violet wall color and the greenish brown frame of the mirror. the figure within the mirror is painted with cadmium red and chromium oxide green, shaded with phthalo blue. as a final step i laid a light wash of phthalo blue over the reflection, to push it back, but i'm not satisfied with the result.

i shaped trinity's portrait toward a contemplative, almost wistful expression. trinity told me stories of her teenage years in gymnastics and the many recent positive changes in her adult life, she seemed to be looking both inward and outward. i have also begun to see consciousness as fundamentally an image projected by physicality into identity, the vanitas theme of the middle ages and renaissance.

self

2009-05-01T13:03:00.000-07:00

watercolor on Arches CP 300gsm, 14" x 10".

it has been a while since i've done a decent self, and the pic i've been using on facebook and elsewhere, all in green with glaring purple eyes, makes me look like a stalker. so i did this one in a couple of days, between trinity paintings, to get my image up to date.

i used the tripod and shutter delay to pose in front of a studio wall. i chose the yellow wall because it is sunny and cheerful, and after all summer is icumen in and laud sang obama.

i am physiologically smile impaired. my normal smile is more like a smirk, and anything that shows teeth makes me look like i'm clenching for a dental exam. some people are gifted with a smile that sits in their face like a nightingale in the golden tree. anyway, i took about 20 photos to get one that looked human.

background is cadmium yellow deep; sweater is perylene maroon and phthalo green. flesh tones are benzimida maroon (a great portrait shadow color), pyrrole orange, cadmium scarlet and burnt sienna, all over a base tone of titanium zinc antimony stannate (winsor & newton "turner's yellow"). this turned out to be too lemony for a good flesh highlight, so i knocked it down with a very light glaze of manganese violet, which was also used (with phthalo green) to mute and darken the shadow modeling. used a gray of ultramarine blue and burnt sienna to rough in the hair, and a dulled mixture of olive green for texture.

trinity

2009-04-29T20:36:00.000-07:00

watercolor on Arches HP 300gsm, 14" x 10".

more than half my session with trinity was spent on portrait photographs with a variety of tops for color contrast. trinity mentioned she felt tense in front of a camera, but this image is from the second half of the session when she had relaxed into the work.

this hot pressed paper is well sized, making it easy to lift paints, but also producing a whitish, pearlescent effect in colors laid on as several juicy layers. trinity's hair is jet black, but for color interest i first blocked the hair in with sepia, then built up the blacks with overlapping sections of perylene maroon, phthalo green, pyrrole orange, phthalo blue, dioxazine violet and nickel dioxine yellow. once these had completely dried, i cut into the glazes with a moist, 1/8" acrylic flat brush, scribing the plaits and highlights and revealing different color mixtures in the process.

the skin tone is diluted chromium titanate yellow, with darks in cadmium orange, cadmium red and benzimidazolone brown, all muted with tints of phthalo green. the background is two layers of quinacridone violet. she has striking, hazel yellow eyes set in a black iris border; i painted these with green gold, then glazed with perylene maroon to get the right hue.

trinity enjoyed the portrait images enough to post a dozen to her facebook page. i'm glad she likes them.

TECH NOTE: i've recently discovered that i have to choose the option "discard the embedded profile (don't color manage)" in photoshop before posting images to the web. for some reason, files that retain the camera image space lose color balance when compressed on blogspot.

trinity

2009-04-24T17:44:00.000-07:00

watercolor on Arches CP 300gsm, 14" x 10".

a figure study from the trinity session. this is one of the first poses, and while it is not one of trinity's favorites, i liked it enough to work up as a color study.

i am drawn to this pose because it is frank and confident. the woman has her own space, which is a brilliant deep blue (rough layers of cobalt blue deep, phthalo blue and ultramarine violet), and she does not characterize the viewer through her stance. she has a well formed, capable figure, feminine without weakness and healthy without sensuality. the panties domesticate the image and add whimsy as well. i spent a lot of care on the facial portrait, though it is only the size of a dollar coin. the hair was fun to paint, and i made it dark brown rather than her black to show the plaits more clearly.

trinity has a pale, creamy complexion that i used a new mixture to reproduce. the flesh tone is chrome titanium oxide dulled with ultramarine, tinted with pyrrole orange, phthalo green, indanthrone blue and quinacridone magenta. the photograph does not reproduce the modeling well, which is very lightly done.

trinity's hands

2009-04-24T17:28:00.001-07:00

watercolor on Arches CP 300gsm, 10" x 14".

these are the hands of a young local woman of polish english descent, who works in web site design and is exploring a variety of alternative and tribal healing practices. she complimented my paintings and consented to model for me; we had a very enjoyable and productive session. she was confident for a first time model and gave me many good images.

usually i ask the model to present her hands in front, which means the thumbs will be turned outward when the palms face up. i asked trinity to drape her hands behind her back, over a chair, to get this image. i like it because it mimics the right and left hand of two individuals touching.

trinity was a gymnast in her early teens, and i learned from her about gymnast mental preparation. the background here is mostly cobalt teal blue, which resembles her "power color". i tinted it slightly with yellow to sharpen the contrast with the skin tones.

the flesh base tone is chrome titanium oxide, muted slightly with ultramarine, then tinted with pyrrole orange, burnt sienna, quinacridone magenta and phthalo green. the sleeves are cobalt teal mixed with cadmium scarlet, painted in overlapping strips to produce the ribbing in the fabric. shadows over skin tones are always challenging, and i like the way these turned out. (colors are more accurate in the full sized image; click on the image above.)

kat

2009-03-29T09:31:00.000-07:00

charcoal on Strathmore drawing, 14" x 10".

i worked a few weeks ago with a new model, an austrian woman who is here as a student in physical therapy. she is working as a stable hand with a local horse breeder and aspires to become a professional jockey in america, and wanted to model because "i have never tried it before."

kat proudly describes herself as descended from four gypsy grandparents. like many of the young models who work for me she is independent minded, candid and self assured. it is getting harder for me to keep up with them.

watercolor on Arches CP 300 gsm, 12" x 9".

this is the life portrait done in charcoal pencil and painted in a flat, tesselated, almost graphical novel style. it's not corrected from a photograph because it turned out very well. (i like the days when i have my hand!) it suggests her secure attitude but unfortunately isn't turned enough to display her remarkable profile. i will post a smaller profile portrait soon.

background is indanthrone blue, which the photo makes too light valued and blue rather than violet blue. hair is sepia with perylene maroon. flesh is raw sienna wash tinted with burnt sienna.

self

2009-03-28T21:08:00.000-07:00

watercolor on Arches CP 300gsm 14" x 10".

last christmas jan and i attended a bracebridge dinner at the ahwahnee hotel in yosemite valley. a festive and memorable affair, and we enjoyed the old hotel and the very colorful and gabby staff. someone should do a book about those people! we had perfect timing, too ... drove in with chains the night a snow storm passed through, and got out just as a new storm was coming in. (photos are posted on my facebook page.)

anyway, this painting was done from a photo of me all dressed up with no place to go except dinner, in my new olive italian suit, mostly m.graham olive green, perylene green with some phthalo green or phthalo blue accents on a sepia foundation. chair is cadmium scarlet and all kinds of scrap paint thrown in. the face is mostly burnt sienna with cadmium red and phthalo blue modeling, but it is washed out in the photo by the dark values.

leah's hands

2009-03-28T20:55:00.001-07:00

watercolor on Arches CP 600gsm, 14" x 10".

leah is a lovely young massage therapist who has been working with me and my wife, and on recommendation to good friends. she is one of a kind, a sweet, inquisitive and generous spirit with an amazing skill in her craft and remarkable personal integrity.

i took a few photos of her hands after one of our 2+ hour sessions, and liked this photo of one hand supporting the other enough to work it up into a painting.

the background is three layers of quinacridone violet, muted and darkened with a layer of phthalo blue and two of benzimida maroon. it's in that mystical zone between a spiritual purple and an earthy brown. i used the glazes to nudge the color around, but mainly to tamp down a whitish speckling that occurred because the arches paper pushed up a fine texture of cellulose fibers as it was wetted. (i have had a lot of problems with arches papers lately. more on that in another post.)

the hands were painted entirely in the most intense, lightfast and transparent paints i know of -- nickel dioxine yellow, pyrrole orange, quinacridone red, phthalo blue, phthalo green and quinacridone orange (i think there is even some dioxazine violet in there) -- all heavily diluted into crystalline tints. the image was built up with layer after layer of these watery hues ... mostly the red, oranges and green, with yellow, blue and purple for accent and modeling. in noon sunlight the painting shimmers.

carole

2009-02-18T15:37:00.001-08:00

watercolor & charcoal on Arches CP 300gsm, 16" x 12".

i worked with carole last saturday and had a memorable experience with her. this is the portrait sketch i did at the end of the session.

carole has a type of feminine strength that i find really compelling. intelligent, confident, serene, physically robust and instinctively gracious. my drawing completely left me, and i was unable to do her hands. the portrait sketch was done in pencil, then aggressively modified with charcoal from the pose photograph.

i have had two packages of 40" x 60" arches 600gsm sitting in my garage and not had inspiration to work with them. carole likes to dance and at the end of the session she threw some astonishing "dancing" nudes that are finished down to the fingertips. so i am thinking of painting a few of them up, really big.

i was struck by carole's features, and she explained that her geneology goes back to the native indians of belize and european colonizers. i relished the idea of two tribes separating in prehistory, walking in opposite directions to the ends of the earth, iberia and central america, then mingling again in her bloodline. her eyes, which are black, are painted phthalo green overlaid on cadmium red deep, making them appear both black and iridescent.

her combination of indian and european features is very striking, and her face is both attractive and complex. i emphasized complex in the portrait. i overmodeled contours to give the portrait a robust, primitive feeling. i kept the color palette small to contrast hair and figure. the flesh tones are mixed of quinacridone magenta or cadmium scarlet with green gold.

three heart circle

2008-12-08T15:54:00.001-08:00

Acrylic on gessoed canvas, 14" x 18".

this started as an anatomical heart in a yellow flamelike circle, with the surrounding black mixed by overlapping yellow, red orange, magenta, blue violet, blue and green paints.

the two diagrammatic hearts were added as i drew it, but i may take them out and redo the painting.

i worked mostly with paste acrylics, so i let brush textures come out in every part. it would be fun to repeat this by pouring the colors, but the canvas was preframed and somewhat slack, so liquids would have puddled on it.

i liked the effect of the "chromatic black" and i am thinking of playing around with it using a more geometrical or process control of the mixtures. still i like the cartoonish effect of this painting.

self

2008-12-05T16:08:00.000-08:00

Watercolor & charcoal on Arches CP 300gsm, 14" x 10".

this is the first time i've tried an object tracing as the basis for a drawing.

i laid the glasses on the paper and traced the outside contour with carbon pencil, then added the interior contour. then the whole face was drawn using the glasses as proportional references.

background is cobalt turquoise and cadmium yellow; shirt is ultramarine blue; flesh is manganese violet and raw sienna, darkened with burnt sienna, hair is ultramarine and burnt sienna. glass frames are burnt umber and cadmium red.

lula

2008-11-28T13:12:00.000-08:00

Watercolor on Saunders Waterford 350gsm 40" x 26".

this pose is from our session last spring. i asked for a simple standing pose.

the background started blue but turned into yellow green, struck through with magenta streaks marked with backruns. that was striped with a transparent yellow, producing a kind of vibration around the figure.

the figure is entirely in red, yellow and green, mostly siennas and browns, quinacridone gold and chromium oxide green. blue is the cutout (background) color and yellow is the color of the palest skin.

the extended rectangle behind the figure indicates how much her legs were stretched in photoshop to produce canonical figure proportions. this renders the figure idealization as a spatial dislocation.

i may do this one again with different pigments.

april's hands

2008-11-27T12:07:00.001-08:00

Watercolor on Arches CP 300gsm, 10" x 14".

i've started work on the series of april images, which she posed with her son.

april did several hand poses, and this is the first i have painted.

one of the poses has her hands overlapped, fingers interlaced and radiating. i tried to draw the image several times and failed, and i tried painting it on a very large format and failed. the image has a kind of intensity that is hard for me to realize.

siena

2008-11-25T16:13:00.000-08:00

watercolor on Arches CP 300gsm, 14" x 10".

another siena pose from the sessions earlier this year; she is crouching on the studio bed and looking into winter sunlight.

the main color problem was rendering her pale skin in shadow.

everything here is several layers, the painting has a "worked" quality and pigment granularity somewhat like nolde.

the aim was not to render her back with anatomical accuracy but to give it a kind of dark shimmer or translucency.

melon

2008-10-16T18:08:00.000-07:00

watercolor on Arches R 300 gsm, 9" x 12".

this was one of those paintings that happen because an interesting object lands near a blank piece of paper. i got into the color mimicry of the fruit and skin, and making the background a dull color exactly between gray, brown and purple. it has a more velvety visual texture than the photo demonstrates.

paola

2008-10-14T18:04:00.000-07:00

watercolor on Arches CP 300 gsm, 14" x 10".

this is the last of the four paola paintings. the pose was taken in late afternoon light, the model lounging in the studio's leather and bent wood rocker.

i worked on this one in small stages and slowly, letting the piece sit for a while in between. it was the most interesting to work on, mostly because of the detail in the rug, limbs, and the interwoven leather strips.

i realized after completing the series that each painting is keyed by one of the four painter's primary colors -- green, red, blue, and yellow (this one).

weekly figure group

2008-09-30T16:35:00.000-07:00

charcoal on Strathmore drawing, 14" x 10".

another figure drawing group, another model ... i've worked with this model before but forgot to ask her name. she was a great subject -- lots of variety, good musculature and proportion across her form, and energetic interesting poses. she did not do a single lying down pose, which most models use as their free nap. amazing!

the group has been in a slump lately. don, one of the stalwarts, has been sick a lot, and the group organizer has frequently used a particular model, jo, who is both unpleasant to look at and a loud personality. she has worked at the group six times in the past three months. i ran into two artists on my way into the group who were complaining about her; one had just walked out when he found out who the model was.

i called don at home to check in on him, and he asked who was the model at the group that night. "jo," i said. "gee," he replied, "three times in four weeks." and then he laughed.

paola

2008-09-25T18:22:00.000-07:00

watercolor on Lanaquarelle HP 300 gsm, 14" x 10".

third in the paola series. this was shot in very dim light so the modeling contrast is subdued.

in contrast to the previous paintings, this is done in a rough, skritchy manner, with iridescent color contrasts and unresolved brushmarks, somewhat in the style of bonnard.

this painting was the model's choice as compensation for modeling. many thanks, paola!

paola

2008-09-24T17:40:00.000-07:00

watercolor on Arches CP 300 gsm, 14" x 10".

second in the paola series. we were working outside and she stretched out on one of my sun loungers, making for a great image.

i bumped up the chroma in most of the colors and mixed her "hot" skin tones primarily of quinacridone gold and quinacridone magenta, muted with a little phthalocyanine green YS and perylene maroon or burnt sienna.

her face, which was in complete shadow and rather dark in the reference photo, required a lot of fine tuning to harmonize with the lighted parts of the figure and appear darkened but chromatically balanced -- not too yellow, red or blue. (a green bias ended up looking yellow.)

the previous painting was done in a very "liquid" style in which all the areas (with the exception of the hair) were rendered with juicy washes tilted and blotted to create very smooth diffusion modeling. in this painting i relied more on the brush to model the figure, but still tried to keep the edge transitions soft.

paola

2008-09-18T18:57:00.000-07:00

watercolor on arches R, 300gsm. 10" x 14".

despite the distractions of stock markets and home improvement projects, have been slowly finishing a handful of pieces on paola, a model i worked with last march.

this is a simple image, less revealing than most of my nudes (i think the term is "implicit nude") and designed around simple shapes. i like it because it highlights most of her flattering features, especially her large eyes, slender arms and elegant hands.

blue or purple is distributed throughout the background but not in the figure, which is entirely earth pigments plus pyrrole orange, perylene maroon and phthalo green YS.

weekly figure drawing group

2008-09-04T18:19:00.003-07:00

charcoal on strathmore drawing, 12" x 9".

i have missed several sessions in august ... our dog died; i spent a couple of weeks completely refinishing and repairing my wife's redwood greenhouse; and we have been making preparations for a fundraiser we will be hosting this weekend for the endangered species coalition.

anna marie was the model tonight. i have not especially enjoyed working with her in the past but last night was a very congenial session. she was much more relaxed and focused than has been usual, and she had put on some very flattering weight -- by eating, she said, "butter and eggs". scott, a local english professor, was drawing by me and we had some interesting exchanges on campus politics and classical rhetoric.

although her figure is lovely and great interest to draw, i focused mostly on her face, making several drawings and a couple of paintings. these two drawings are both 10 minute poses.

for some reason my glasses were not giving me the clarity i needed and i had only a fuzzy perception of her real features.

coast cypresses

2008-09-03T18:07:00.000-07:00

watercolor on arches CP, 600 gsm, 42" x 29".

i began this painting in 2002 and finished it this week. for five years i have kept the porcelain dishes of dried out paints used in the painting, and carefully transferred the painting from one hanging and one storage to another. today i framed the painting and hung it in our great room and i have finally cleaned out those dishes. my thanks to nick simmons for insisting i get back to it.

i'm an admirer of the late 18th century style of tinted watercolor, for example as perfected in the works of francis towne and john cotman. i kept to the drawing as closely as feasible, and in several places accented or cleaned up the drawing with charcoal pencil. there is very little modeling of form, and complex textures are mostly confined to the grassy bank.

my original interest was in the interlacing branches, a remarkable image of tree community, even though i eliminated about half the branches that appear in the original photo document. i also eliminated all the shadows. i did not want a crisp light concept and the bewildering tesselation of shadows and branches that a strong light rendering would create; instead i wanted the trees to stand as distinct but intertwined figures. i played a violet scale across the tree trunks to define the spatial contrasts between foreground and background trees, and darkened the sky to suggest early morning.

i have never persisted with an unfinished painting for this long. the only reason i did so was because of the enormous work i had already put into it -- the underdrawing alone took two or three hours. it's not my favorite painting, but it is very gratifying to see it finally finished.

self

2008-08-20T19:15:00.001-07:00

charcoal on ingres drawing, 22" x 16".

i started this over a week ago and then ignored it because it turned flat and insipid. this week i went over it with a heavier charcoal, twice on two days, mostly just scribbling or making shadow contours. i like that it looks like a cross between a lifetime of scars and the tattoos of my tribe.

i dislike the whole routine of shading forms in the classical style. i don't mind it if i can play with color but when restricted to charcoal or pencil i just want to draw.

charlotte

2008-08-20T19:07:00.001-07:00

watercolor on arches CP 14" x 10".

picking up a painting of charlotte started last february and left with the background finished and the sweater, face and hair blocked in. the hair was the task that tired me out. i got a lot of pleasure from filling in her face using only warm hues and greens, and sculpting her hair from various red, yellow and green pigments; there are even a few red-yellow-green spectra in there. blue is only in the background and in eyes, bound in purple. i enjoy disciplining blue.

charlotte and i were just settling into the last posing position, with her seated on the couch, when i asked her "so you don't believe in that baby jesus stuff, do you?" and she gave this raucous, surprised eclat.

margaret's hands

2008-08-19T18:39:00.000-07:00

Charcoal on Strathmore drawing, 10" x 14".

the hand drawing at the start of our session. i was drawn into a lot of detail. the original was an outline drawing; later i went over the drawing emphasizing some lines and shadows.

margaret

2008-08-17T17:21:00.000-07:00

Charcoal on Strathmore drawing, 30" x 22".

margaret came over today to inaugurate my return to the studio ... i did her hands twice, two figure drawings, and about 10 minutes of photography. it was good to see her again.

this drawing was work but it came off pretty well in the proportions and gesture.

social whirl

2008-07-29T09:10:00.000-07:00

some worried emails from friends prompt me to this update.

it's been a busy summer season out here in west county. had friends from wyoming staying for several days, then a trip up to visit my family in eureka; our first environmental refugees, a friend from the internet days and his family out here to escape the smoke from north california fires; my wife's best buddy from texas; visits from my sister; my wife's family reunion of 50+ people ...

all the while my studio serving as a guest/party house. as it was built to do, here and there, but we've been busy enough to really disrupt my work rhythm.

keeping up with the figure drawing, playing quite a lot of xbox, and working on the web site in the meantime. but next week my wife is off to a couple of conferences and i'll have plenty of time on my hands.

april

2008-06-02T22:29:00.001-07:00

watercolor on Arches HP 300 gsm, 14" x 10".

a portrait study of april, primarily to explore the projection of her nose in relation to the rest of her face, and the overall shape of her hair.

i used a very simple color and light scheme in imitation of 15th century continental portraits.

no blue in the painting.

lula

2008-06-01T22:41:00.000-07:00

wolff's carbon on Strathmore drawing 180 gsm, 12" x 17.5".

a portrait of lula with extended legs. i used a diagonal eighths grid to copy the figure freehand from a photo.

the main problems were the foot and the foreshortening of the flexed leg and the face.

i built the figure outline gradually and only hinted at the figure environment.

lula

2008-05-29T18:41:00.000-07:00

watercolor & carbon pencil on Arches R 300gsm, 14" x 10".

a portrait image of lula. she had sprawled her arms more but i asked her to tuck her hands toward her body. the hair is a golden yellow base (quinacridone gold) tinted with phthalo green, perylene black, cadmium scarlet, sepia. it barely hangs together but was fun to try.

the warm colors are not tinted with blue, which gives more brightness to the blue accents (eyes, wall) and the single green accent, the foliage through the blinds. the blouse pattern was painted without an underdrawing, to make it delicate.

i have felt an unexpected positive interest toward this young woman, a "wish you well" feeling about her life.

kimberly

2008-05-29T17:47:00.000-07:00

wolff's carbon pencil on strathmore drawing, 14" x 10".

have been getting more into the problem of human figure proportions, the ideal schemes throughout history; writing a web page on figure painting; working with bridgeman's "constructive anatomy" to understand the anatomical fitting together.

kimberly always had a talent for amazing poses, and a feral head of magenta hair. i extended her legs as an experiment in proportions. it doesn't change the sexual dynamics of the pose, but makes them more exotic in caricature.

lula

2008-05-29T17:39:00.000-07:00

watercolor on Arches HP 300gsm, 14" x 10".

i wanted to use up a hot pressed block i don't like, started a painting of lula to try painting with more backruns and watermarks.

the paper turned out to be backrun resistant, and i got involved in the color problems of the image and frustrated that it wasn't turning out as i expected it would. so i kept working it.

the skin tones are reds and greens over a base yellow (raw sienna), faint tint of indanthrone blue for the shadow, in the actual painting the figure has a warm, honey tone. the couch slathered up and is iron oxide, perylene black and indanthrone blue. the pigment buildup contributes to the texture.

this is the kind of pose that comes straight out of the model; i forget if i asked her to adjust it in any way. her look is cool and bemused, the hands and whole figure are graceful, and the legs add a nice touch of modesty.

canon

2008-05-22T13:36:00.000-07:00

watercolor on arches CP 600gsm, 41" x 21".
a slow couple of weeks; cleaning up files and docs from this spring's figure drawing campaign, landscaping around the studio, entertaining guests, and interviewing financial advisors. sorted through some pictures of april with her year old son and worked on a method of analyzing figures and portraits into harmonic intervals defined by a grid. so far the results have been promising.

spent several mornings editing and writing pages for handprint.com, in particular a page on color harmonies and another on figure painting. this led me back to the topic of a figure canon and the various proportional schemes that have been worked out since ancient times.

in this image of siena i subtly adjusted her figure proportions to correspond to a specific canon, not the classical one. i used a coarse charcoal to outline the figure and kept the light modeling very basic. i especially like how the flesh tones turned out; siena has a very pale but not sickly complexion, close to a warm granite.

figure drawing group

2008-05-08T23:09:00.000-07:00

male model this week; i didn't learn his name, the group had already started when i arrived at 7pm. was undisciplined in my drawing, not really trying for accuracy; then did some charcoal and watercolor on fabriano artistico rough, 12" x 18" blocks. i have maybe a dozen of these blocks and will use them up this way. (the middle drawing went to a private collection.)

siena

2008-05-06T23:36:00.000-07:00

siena was back today after a long break. the day before i did another red dress watercolor to get in the mood for her. there is always something in the air with siena. got some good portrait and figure shots with her, including a series in the darkened bedroom with a vertical shaft of sunlight across her face and torso. did her hands and profile from life. "you drew me like i feel angry." "i sometimes feel you are angry."

lula

2008-05-05T23:41:00.000-07:00

a new model this week, a painter recently arrived to sonoma county from portland. a gracious, relaxed young woman who wanted to model to experience the process from the other side. quirky, expressive demeanor, slim physique, elegant hands. got a lively series of portrait images and some serene and graceful figure poses with her. many good paintings in there. a thoughtful person and a pleasure to spend time with.

invitation

2008-04-19T23:55:00.000-07:00

two watercolors of coho salmon, the parr and spawning stages, done for fundraising invites for the endangered species coalition.

easy hand

2008-04-10T20:11:00.000-07:00

watercolor and carbon pencil on Fabriano Artistico R 300gsm, 18" x 12".

we had the master & guest bedrooms, two offices, the master bathroom and the hallway painted and this induced a spurt of bottom up spring cleaning -- books, clothes, computers, dvds, financial documents, tools, furniture, storage boxes, the works.

a few weeks' relaxation, a thorough cleaning of the studio, a sort & reshelving of all my studio art books, and days just staring out the window. how blissful.

when i picked up again at the weekly figure group, i was surprised to find that drawings came more easily and took a more relaxed style.

these pieces, of aaron, were done from 15 or 20 minute poses, including both the drawing and painting. i worked as quickly as i could but didn't focus on accuracy or finish. i enjoyed myself.

i've gotten a couple of commissions and also sold a large (40" x 30") figure nude at a very good price. so it's been a good month.

241 days, and not counting

2008-03-14T17:08:00.000-07:00

a talented painter and friend of mine wondered, when he launched his own blog several weeks ago, why a painter would ever want to maintain a "painting a day" output.

but he also expressed admiration that i kept up the pace for so long, especially as i made up the days missed to sickness, travel or other responsibilities.

well, after 241 days of continuous postings, today is the day that i stand down and change the subtitle of this blog. but as i do, i want to answer my friend's question for those painters who might consider a similar commitment.

THE GOOD POINTS. why attempt "a painting a day"? because it fundamentally sharpens and strengthens your painting abilities. among the benefits:

• deadline discipline - i do not paint for bread and board, and i don't take commissions i am not interested in, so i otherwise would not feel the external discipline to start new work and keep it moving.

• mood doesn't matter - you get over the idea that you should only paint on the cheerful frisky days; there is work to be done, and you show up to do it.

• becoming a closer - one of the first luxuries you relinquish is the idea that a painting can linger on forever; you learn to keep a painting on track and guide it toward its ending; the work doesn't dawdle or drift.

• streamlining work - work habits get polished down to the most efficient and most productive; fussing, perfectionism and daydreaming get pushed aside; clutter gets sorted out and put away; painting technique sharpens.

• painting in series - you start to appreciate the value of working on several similar paintings at the same time, utilizing the same palette, paint mixtures and working procedures; rather than work on three different paintings that you finish each in a day, you work for three days on three similar paintings; you look for a cluster of sibling paintings (images) that you can develop at the same time.

• backlog clearance - in the crunch, a half finished painting is much more attractive than a blank sheet of paper; to keep up the pace, you eventually dig out every half completed work and either discard it or finish it.

• productivity - obviously, productivity goes way up. you have, after 100 days, 100 paintings (if not more!) to show for it.

• play and improvisation - i found the pace of the work forced me out of the routine in ways that encouraged experimentation with new techniques; and the need to keep motivation going led me to choose paintings that were fun or exciting to do, rather than familiar. cruising is not as much fun as flying.

• stamina - perhaps the most important benefit is that all the mental and physical painting muscles get a good workout, every day, or (as with any exercise) on makeup days, so your stamina greatly improves. last fall i carefully traced from photographs a series of six matching, 14" x 10" paintings, the stefanie figure paintings, but quit after completing only the first one: the effort required to do all six was just too much for me. well, after six months of "a painting a day," i dug out those five outlined papers, spread them out on my work table (right), knocked out finished paintings in four days, and didn't break a sweat. it was like sprinting up stairs that used to leave me winded.

THE BAD POINTS. not everything about the "painting a day" process is positive, however. among the drawbacks:

• quality ceiling - paintings often ask you to slow down or take a break, and there is a tendency to push against the work, sometimes too hard for the sake of quality; the best paintings may require more time than you have to spend.

• format shrinkage - if you really are doing a painting a day, without recycling paintings you posted months ago, then you have to work smaller; i ended up gravitating to the 10" x 14" format, but many "painting a day" artists (for example, the talented molly brose) work in smaller formats than that.

• filler works - inevitably, the work stream gets cluttered with inconsequential or knockdown "filler works" that find their way onto the blog because, well, something has to go up today!

• make up strain - unfortunately, i did not adopt the humane policy of excusing myself for vacations and holidays, and since starting this blog my rolling stone of a wife has carried me off on about 6 weeks worth of holiday or recreational travel ... and that meant 6 weeks where i had to produce at least *two* paintings a day just to catch up ... which inevitably made the work a burden.

• reactance - add all that up, and reactance -- the contrarian human tendency to do what is forbidden, and to avoid doing what is required -- sets in, the painting becomes just a chronic labor, the fun goes out of it, and fear and loathing set in. of all the drawbacks, that is the most disheartening and unacceptable.

THE UGLY POINT. on balance, this has been a fabulous ride, and i would gladly repeat it all again knowing what i know now. but the final reason to break off my daily postings has been the palpable and aggravating deterioration in the blogger service -- for example:

Safari can’t open the page “http://www.blogger.com/whatever.g” because the server unexpectedly dropped the connection, which sometimes occurs when the server is busy. You might be able to open the page later.

maybe blogger can't be bothered to handle threads spawned through a dialup connect; maybe blogger has decided safari and firefox aren't worth dealing with; maybe blogger management wants to handle rising user demand by raising the time-to-execute "price" (cost) of its service. whatever: i've had enough of hoping today is my lucky day.

p.s. nick ... the cypress painting is back in the queue.

self

2008-03-13T15:03:00.000-07:00

Charcoal pencil & watercolor on Whatman CP 600 gsm, 22" x 15".

with the wife gone and some other things in the background, including a bottle of lucid absinthe, i got myself into an unravel and passed a hard night and morning.

i slept until noon and then in the evening dragged myself down to the studio for an audit.

i copied the features from my life mask, in a scribbly uneven hand, then flooded the image with wet color. the whatman paper holds the paint on the surface -- the finish has a subtle frizzy texture that won't let the water down into the pulp -- so that paint blots up easily. the charcoal blurred and flowed along with the paint, subduing the drawing.

i left the painting and went to bed; the next morning i added more paint to the background, and shifted some colors around with magenta or purple, but basically left it as it was.

weekly figure group

2008-03-12T16:27:00.000-07:00

Carbon pencil on Strathmore drawing 180gsm, 12' x 16".

the model this week was jeffrey, familiar to me from previous sessions and a hardworking poser. these are some drawings from the 3 or 5 minute poses early in the session.

unfortunately i left shortly after this because i felt sick in body and in spirit. i drove home and went to bed.

kortney

2008-03-11T14:59:00.000-07:00

Carbon pencil on Strathmore recycled drawing, 16" x 13".

kortney was back today; we did portrait poses and ended a little early so that she could get on to a late afternoon shoot with another artist.

i finished the session with a portrait drawing, about 20 minutes, in the same pose that she took in her previous visit (feb. 12). "putting truth and untruth together, a shot may be made at what this hybrid actually was like to look at" (finnegans wake).

tulip

2008-03-10T19:56:00.000-07:00

Watercolor and carbon pencil on Arches CP 300 gsm, 14" x 10".

i had a hankering to do a botanical, a break from the portrait and figure work and the recent pile up of new models. i wanted to do a "whole plant" drawing in the style of renaissance floral prints, the kind that shows the roots and one or two insects on the leaves. before she left for mexico, my wife offered me one of her tulips, which she did not want where it lived and was not going to transplant. so out it came.

i decided to do a dark background rather than white, but i forget what all it is mixed from. viridian and cadmium red, i think, but there is also some manganese violet in there too. gives the ground a rich granular texture, like emery paper. the brush strokes show, but don't intrude.

the petals are done with mixtures of cadmium red and scarlet, with perylene maroon -- what a versatile pigment! -- water blotched to give them a feathery texture.

writing exercise

2008-03-09T20:38:00.000-07:00

Charcoal and watercolor pencil on Utrecht bristol 180 gsm, 12" x 16", on black background.

while browsing a book on maurits escher, mostly for recreation, i came across this quote:

A person who is lucidly aware of miracles that surround him, who has learned to bear up under loneliness, has made quite a bit of progress on the road to wisdom.

i copied this in the format of my first handwriting exercises in elementary school. i double ruled five lines of bristol and wrote with compressed charcoal, and was surprised to see my handwriting revert to the childlike form. the "erasures" are smudged out mistakes. i shadowboxed the card with black paper and posted it on the wall, where it looks just like the slogans, famous sayings, pithy wisdom that used to stand over my earnest classroom head.

what a long road we take in life, and how far away now my beginnings seem to be.

april

2008-03-08T20:37:00.000-08:00

Watercolor & carbon pencil on Whatman CP 600 gsm, 16" x 12".

april pleased and inspired me so much that i used our last half hour or so to knock out this freehand portrait drawing, with the hair completed from a photo and the whole filled in with watercolor the next day.

her hair forms tendrils part way down, then dissolves into a kind of threaded mist, very delicate and profuse. i opted for suggesting the rhythms through wavy bands and alternating areas of light and dark within each lock, a pleasing effect to me but not really faithful to the model. so, i am toying with the idea of preparing a portrait head before her next visit, so i can freehand draw in the hair, every last strand.

most of her portrait photos capture her delightful smile; here she took a sober expression for the twenty minute sit. there is a classical or austere quality to her features that i really like.

april

2008-03-07T14:54:00.000-08:00

Carbon pencil on Strathmore drawing 180gsm, 14" x 10".

next up is april, a local woman and proud mother, who had a positive experience modeling for a friend and wanted to do more.

for some reason i had a lot of difficulty drawing her hands, which appears in the drawing as the stray preliminary outlines. these kept shifting around on me. perhaps her presence distracted me.

i always ask models to arrive with their hair up, if they wear it both up and down, so they don't have to arrange it in the studio. april comes out of germanic stock and has an impressive nose with many facets. the portrait is not quite good but captures the serenity and positive center of her spirit.

weekly figure group

2008-03-05T11:08:00.000-08:00

Carbon pencil on Strathmore drawing 180gsm, 14" x10".

another model no show ... this time because the model got lost trying to find sebastopol. ongoing cell phone dialog trying to bring the guy down. "no no, turn RIGHT!"

meanwhile don leivas sat for drawing, this is my 15 minute portrait. he seemed to like it.

the model finally arrived, trim built guy, got some good drawings off him. here is his first lying pose ... i think he was tuckered out from all that driving around in the dark.

anyway, i had to leave early because my wife was departing next morning for a week vacation in mexico. our last night together for a while.

tabitha

2008-03-03T11:13:00.000-08:00

Carbon pencil on Strathmore drawing 180gsm, 14" x 10".

next up is tabitha, a young sonoma immigrant from seattle, here to take the herbal medicine course in forestville. very sweet lady, cheerful and lively.

her hands were set on well defined wrist bones, fun to draw. the portrait is a good likeness i thought. we spent two hours doing portrait and figure photography. she is a natural model ... "i love to get naked."

stefanie

2008-02-28T15:04:00.001-08:00

Watercolor on Arches HP 300 gsm, 14" x 10".

to conclude the stefanie series, here is a backlog portrait that i began last year.

i have to say that from the beginning i did not much like this painting ... the colors seemed wrong, the rendering was clumsy, and the grace of the pose was lost.

but i refused to give up on it and finally got it to a state where i am not ashamed of it, though i still don't look at it with pleasure.

the background is a mixture of quinacridone violet and quinacridone red, which yields a beautiful fuchsia, not as strident as it appears in the image.

my displeasure is still with the eyes, which are not quite what i wanted. but the painting seems to get better the more often i look at it.

weekly figure group

2008-02-27T15:05:00.000-08:00

Carbon pencil on Strathmore drawing 180 gsm, 14" x 10".

a weary week, and off to the wednesday night figure group.

the model was anna marie, who was much more focused than usual. she did a number of good standing poses, but my focus throughout was on her face; i did six or eight portrait heads before i left early.

i liked this pose for the challenge of the tilted and foreshortened head.

we are having all the bedrooms and offices in our house repainted, and the fumes have driven me down to the studio to sleep.

stefanie stretching (6)

2008-02-26T15:02:00.000-08:00

Watercolor on Arches R 300 gsm, 14" x 10".

when i first dug out these paintings i discarded this one because of small blemishes; in fact i was looking for an excuse not to do it. but i repented and finished it because the pose is one of the nicest in the series.

the rough paper makes it difficult to get clean edges. in all the paintings i roughed in the background to define the figure, then modeled the figure volume. to finish i glazed the background with a juicy tint of ultramarine blue. this is a "cutting layer" because it sharpens and cleans up the edge and pushes the figure forward.

stefanie stretching (5)

2008-02-25T15:06:00.000-08:00

Watercolor on Lanaquarelle HP 300 gsm, 14" x 10".

the background foliage and the deck planks in paintings 3 to 6 were all painted at the same time, in assembly line fashion. even so the foliage patterns turned out differently in each.

the tree is m.graham hooker's green, which gives a luxuriant thick texture; the shadow is perylene black (green), a great landscape shadow pigment; the remainder is chromium oxide green mixed with burnt sienna and a dulling bit of ultramarine blue.

stefanie stretching (4)

2008-02-24T15:01:00.000-08:00

Watercolor on Winsor & Newton CP 300 gsm, 14" x 10".

this painting uses the same flesh tone series, but softened in the deep shadows by tints of ultramarine blue.

the modeling on the back was a fun challenge; the point was to keep the musculature from appearing too defined.

i was intrigued to discover how the separate images diverged, both in color and in brush texture, as i worked. at one or two junctures i had to focus on harmonizing the series, yet visible differences remain.

one reason i do not make technical progress is that i am continually experimenting with relatively small changes in technique. i enjoy the process, but the enjoyment may not be worth the extra effort it requires.

stefanie stretching (3)

2008-02-23T15:07:00.000-08:00

Watercolor on Lanaquarelle HP 300 gsm, 14" x 10".

the flesh tones in these paintings are modeled with a single series of pigments — quinacridone magenta, perylene red, gold ochre, burnt sienna, and benzimida maroon — muted by glazes of phthalo green yellow shade.

i regret that the color balance and even the visual texture of these paintings does not come through in the images. there is still something i do not understand about correctly photographing my works.

stefanie stretching (2)

2008-02-22T14:58:00.000-08:00

Watercolor on Winsor & Newton CP 300 gsm, 14" x 10".

i began the series serveral months ago and left this painting half finished.

it's my least favorite pose, but it complements the other views as a series.

the base flesh tone is winsor & newton gold ochre, modified with burnt sienna, perylene red, benzimida maroon, and phthalo green (yellow shade).

the original photos show a cable railing system along the edge of the deck, which is seven or eight feet above the ground beyond. by removing that element i simplified or schematicized the design, and rendered the background ambiguous. it may be trees and grass as it appears, or it may be a wall mural of trees and grass in an urban enclosure.

stefanie stretching (1)

2008-02-21T15:36:00.000-08:00

Watercolor on Arches CP 300 gsm, 14" x 10".

working through more backlog, i dug out six paintings i had started of stefanie doing dance stretches on the studio sun deck. these are from a photo series shot last august; the paintings were all started in outline then, but only this one was brought close to completion.

my interest was to work the form with a brighter spectrum of flesh colors, including cobalt violet. i left her features unfinished to give the figure anonymity. once all six paintings are finished, i can go through and harmonize them as a set.

stefanie claims to come from a family of south german peasants. what strikes me about stefanie's form is the way it radiates health and solidity. sexual tension is kept to a minimum.

weekly figure group

2008-02-20T11:05:00.000-08:00

Carbon pencil on Strathmore drawing 180 gsm, 10" x 14".

our model tonight was stan, who was to pose with his partner, who was not working because of a back injury.

i had drawn stan two weeks before and was not very inspired to draw him again. this is a page from early in the session, including an anatomical analysis of one of the two life poses.

stan is also a musician and brought his recording of bob dylan and simon & garfinkel covers. i had forgotten my sound canceling headphones and world music ipod. around the second or third repeat of "blowin' in the wind" i packed it in for the evening.

figure self

2008-02-19T09:25:00.000-08:00

Watercolor on Arches CP 300 gsm, 14" x 10".

the (nude) figure self portrait is basically a 20th century genre. to my knowledge it runs in painting from egon schiele through lucian freud, with major examples (john coplans) in photography. i haven't done one before.

this is a freehand drawing done in the studio dressing mirror. i laid out a grid of tape on the mirror and used this to transfer the image to the squared paper. the mirror grid had to be adjusted, by observation and construction, to account for the increased foreshortening in height from head to feet, and for the 10% reduction in width produced by mirror curvature.

the drawing was very difficult to do, and contains many corrections. the arms had to be drawn from memory. the colors turned out well, and i plan to do a larger version using the same methods.

the head is peculiarly large, in proportions similar to a nine year old ... which is about my emotional age, anyway.

self

2008-02-18T12:49:00.000-08:00

Carbon pencil & watercolor on Arches CP 300 gsm, 14" x 10".

i have been feeling in my occasional vale lately ... loneliness, physical aches, questioning faith, time slowing down, mortality.

a freehand self portrait is a way to "get a grip on myself" and also rebuild painting momentum. nothing better than a self portrait to put me in an "i don't give a damn" attitude about how a painting turns out. also i enjoy breaking down my face into proportions and details; i forget about whatever is bothering me.

the background is quinacridone gold, which is most closely matched in current paints by nickel azomethine. (quinacridone gold pigment, PO49, is no longer manufactured.) the shirt is indanthrone blue, flesh is manganese violet shadows under burnt sienna; eyes are mongrel blue green red with violet irises. touches of gray and phthalo yellow green and quinacridone magenta.

kortney

2008-02-17T15:25:00.000-08:00

Watercolor on Arches CP 300 gsm, 14" x 10".

this is the life drawing i did of kortney at the end of our session, carbon pencil on watercolor block.

the background is cobalt teal scalloped with green gold (copper azomethine). the flesh is burnt sienna tinted with quinacridone magenta, lips perylene maroon. the eyes are green and brown with violet irises. hair is ivory black.

i kept the coloring simple and schematic as the drawing was loose. there is a kind of androgynous classical strength about her head that i wanted to represent in an austere way.

paola's hands

2008-02-16T15:33:00.000-08:00

Watercolor on Arches CP 300 gsm, 10" x 14".

another try at paola's long fingers in carbon pencil from a squared photo. still have not got them.

background is cerulean blue RS mixed with pyrrole orange. the flesh colors are pure tints of the secondary palette paints, plus green gold, applied as distinct sheets of color. this gave a pellucid, iridescent range of flesh tones that i really like.

Z

2008-02-15T15:17:00.000-08:00

Charcoal pencil on Strathmore drawing 180 gsm, 14" x 10".

this is another life portrait of Z taken in a 20 minute pose.

it is hardest to make a convincing portrait when the far eye is visible at the bridge of the nose. the preferred profile position is to hide all the cheek and most or all of the eye behind the nose, and the preferred quarter view position is to bring the cheek into clear view and move the eye far enough away from the nose to show the inner canthus.

the problem is that the eyes are set back from the cheek and brow, and the front of the face curves around them. the bony rim of the eye socket is also behind the front of the eye and may not be visible. misjudgments make the eye appear to pop out or the face to appear flattened.

three oranges

2008-02-14T14:50:00.001-08:00

Watercolor on Arches R 300 gsm, 7" x 9".

i went shopping and small crates of what looked like tangerines where stacked by the cash registers where i could impulsively snatch one.

the crate label had the name CUTIES and the stickers on the fruit said, "i ♥ cuties". "love of three oranges" is a fantasy opera favorite of mine by prokofiev.

background is iron blue, left to backrun, and dioxazine violet as an unbroken tint; oranges are cadmium scarlet with nickel azo yellow and quinacridone gold. i may shadow sculpt the oranges with tints of phthalo green.

weekly figure group

2008-02-13T14:09:00.000-08:00

Carbon pencil on Utrecht bristol 240 gsm, 14" x 10".

once again the model was a no show, so the artists took turns in 10 minute poses. this is aaron, another regular at the group.

finally the replacement model, michal, arrived. she is a very strenous poser and even did a five minute standing pose with her head touching her knees! i don't know how she does it.

later she took a more relaxed sitting pose for 15 minutes, which was enough time to do a watercolor of it.

Watercolor on Arches CP 300 gsm, 12" x 9".

i first made a light, quick outline in pencil, then bulked out the figure in burnt sienna and gold ochre, using the brush to lift out highlights. the arms were done first so that the body could be painted up to them. then the hair (raw umber) and finally light touches of sepia hue to shape the shadows a little.

i finished painting the background (ultramarine blue) and mat (ultramarine and perylene maroon) while michal took her break.

kortney

2008-02-12T14:06:00.000-08:00

Charcoal pencil on Strathmore drawing 180 gsm, 10" x 14".

next up is kortney, a twentysomething american indian from santa rosa. she responded to my ad with some portfolio head shots, and had only done photo and video modeling before, but was willing to try an art modeling gig because i i live nearby.

Charcoal pencil on Strathmore drawing 180 gsm, 10" x 14".

i've posted two drawings of her hands because they came out differently. the second drawing is more active because she let the pose drift, so there are many pentimenti woven through the finished fingers.

Charcoal pencil on Strathmore drawing 180 gsm, 10" x 14".

the head drawing catches some of her physical strength and presence.

kortney struck me as a sensitive spirit who was completely unguarded about her feelings and personal history. like many of the women who model for me, she is working through life changes and next steps. she was also just fun to work with, easygoing and imaginative, and i got some great photos with her.

cassandra (acrylic)

2008-02-11T14:01:00.000-08:00

Golden "heavy body" acrylics on gessoed linen canvas, 12" x 18".

here is the acrylic version. the main difference is in the depth of color on the couch. i satisfied myself that i could match it in the watercolor painting (below) with additional layers of paint, but decided not to put in the effort.

now to summarize the differences between watercolor and acrylic that most impressed me during the paired paintings. (disclosure: i developed as a painter by optimizing my setup and process around watercolors, and this shapes my working preferences.)

• paint dryout - watercolors in pans or palette wells are wetted or left to dry: they conveniently manage themselves either way. i asked several acrylic painters for advice and they all said acrylics have to be diluted or mixed with acrylic medium or water to retard drying time. i found they harden in about 20 minutes, have to be put on the painting or cleaned off tools and brushes before they harden, and this time limited task of managing paint before it dries was a painting distraction.

• paint waste - for all the watercolor paints i habitually rely on, i empty tube paints into small porcelain condiment dishes, where the paint dries out to make large pan watercolors (basically the same format as you can buy, at much higher cost, from blockx or winsor & newton). these pans can be wetted and dried an unlimited number of times; the only wasted paint is in the brush rinse water. acrylic seems more wasteful. in my practice a lot of acrylic paint got blotted onto paper towels, or formed a mixture residue on the disposable palette that had hardened before i could use it. mixing colors or blending paint with acrylic medium forced paint up onto the brush ferrule, where it had to be scraped or wiped off. more thick paint goes into the rinse water each time the brushes are cleaned.

• paint consistency - i found the thick acrylic paint consistency to be unpleasant. no matter which dilution i tried, the acrylic could not be applied without brushmarks. i could not create smooth color areas ("washes") without applying the paint in a thick, hiding layer. diluted paint applied as a "wash" tended to creep back and dry into a smaller, clearly bordered puddle of evenly distributed color.

• chroma & value - watercolors seem to start out dull and light valued, though they can be built up to acrylic appearance by repeated glazes. acrylics start out saturated and strongly contrasted, and have to be methodically dulled down by glazing with black, white or complementary hues. i came to the conclusion, surprisingly enough, that it was easier to make a watercolor look like an acrylic than to make an acrylic look like a watercolor. acrylics produced more vibrant effects of color and contrast, while watercolors produced more delicate effects of atmosphere and light.

• wet in wet - i was unable to produce wet in wet variety in acrylics, unlike the fantastically varied diffusion and backrun effects you can get in watercolor. dropping paint into a watery puddle, or puddle into a diluted paint mixture, produced a dried color that was smooth and had well defined edges. backruns and diffusion just didn't happen in acrylics. all contrasts were in the brushstroke textures.

• tinting strength - the relative tinting strength of pigments is different in watercolors and acrylics. this did not seem to be only a property of the pigment load in the paints, but also the way the pigment combined with the vehicle as the resin dried. in my palette i greatly underestimated the tinting strength of acrylic nickel azo yellow and phthalo green; quinacridone magenta was weaker in acrylic than in watercolor.

• drying shifts - in general drying shifts in value (the color appears lighter after it has dried) were larger and often harder to anticipate in watercolor than in acrylic. however i found that novel *hue shifts* in paint mixtures occurred in acrylic paints, as if the tinting strength of the pigments changed as the paint dried. for example, a mixture of yellow, magenta and white appeared a perfect flesh pink on the palette and when brushed out, but dried into a definite yellow.

• support - the support texture shows through much clearer in acrylic, although the texture is a generic weave; the paper textures in watercolor have a much greater variety and more impact on paint appearance. the absorbency of papers contributes a lot of variation to watercolor painting, but the lack of absorbency in gesso is constant; gesso also contributes to the brighter color in acrylic. paper creates a softer, more atmospheric color in watercolor or in acrylic on paper.

• underdrawing - the underdrawings in watercolor pencil lifted equally easily from both the gessoed canvas and the sized paper, but the underdrawing in carbon pencil held much better on the gesso. in watercolor it lifted to muddy the color somewhat, and i had to redo the drawing before the painting was finished.

• glazing - i have a lot to learn about building alternating layers of paint and transparent medium, in acrylic, but overall i think that similar glazing adjustments were possible in both media. acrylic also offers a wider range of surface finishes -- gloss, matte, dull, textured, etc. -- compared to traditional watercolor. (i have not tried coating a finished watercolor with acrylic medium.)

• pigment texture - pigment textures, including flocculation and granulation, are effaced by the acrylic medium. every color has the pigment texture of house paint.

• brush blotting - if i need to dry a watercolor brush as i paint, i simply wipe it across the leg of my denim pants, or snap out the excess water onto the floor. both stains clean up easily. i can't do either with acrylic; i need a rag or paper towel. and once a paper towel has two or three wipes of acrylic on it i must throw it away to prevent unwanted paint transfer when i use the towel to blot paint from the painting. my trash can quickly filled with paper towels.

i am enthusiastic about continuing with acrylics -- at least, until i use up the paints i've bought -- but i realize i have to rethink my technique from the medium up. you can't just dip a watercolor brush into acrylic paint, and expect to fly from the beginning.

cassandra (watercolor)

2008-02-10T14:05:00.000-08:00

Watercolor on Velke Losiny "Moldau", 12" x 18".

as i was flogging around with the acrylics i decided it would be useful to do two identical paintings, in acrylic and watercolor, to clarify the differences between the two media.

the image is of cassandra horsing around on the studio brown leather couch. the image was squared, and both supports squared with blue watercolor pencil. then the image was transferred freehand to both supports using carbon pencil.

to make the comparison exact i used the same palette -- the six paint secondary palette, described on january 19 -- because the same pigments were available in both watercolor and acrylic.

i made photographs of the paintings as they progressed, but only show the finished paintings here. each painting took about 5 hours.

comparisons are made in the next post.

cassandra's hands

2008-02-09T14:03:00.000-08:00

Carbon pencil on Strathmore drawing 180 gsm, 10" x 14".

cassandra was back today for her second modeling session, i did more drawings of her hands, including this one, and then two hours of photography, including some great images of her sitting on the studio sun ledge, about 10 feet above the floor, in among the sunlight coming through the dormer windows.

life mask (part 2)

2008-02-08T18:34:00.000-08:00

i made a mould of my face with plaster of paris on january 25.

on january 31 i poured the mask. first i smeared the inside of the mould with petroleum jelly, wrapped the mould in aluminum foil to prevent plaster from flowing out the ends, and filled it with fresh plaster of paris. i left it for a week to cure.

yesterday i finished the mask, shown at left. i got a massage in the morning from a young woman who modeled for me last year. then went to the studio and with hammer, screwdrivers, handsaw, dental picks and a file slowly cut, chipped, pried and filed down the plaster mould to reveal the casting inside. this process took all afternoon; i had to work slowly so as not to crack the mask or gouge it with a tool.

there was a peculiar fascination in chipping my recognizable features out of the block of chalk, and palpating the features without feeling touch on my face, as if it were another face.

i filled gouges and scraped down imperfections. the petroleum jelly left the surface somewhat greasy. to blot up the oil, i smeared the mask with yarka "sanguine" chalk and wiped the excess off.

i made a shallow tray with the binding of four art books laid on my work table, spaced to form a golden rectangle, then lined the void with aluminum foil. i set the mask on small strips of wood, then filled the space with plaster up to the edges of the mask, which were chipped. (i should have first filled the void and then dropped the mask into the matrix.) the face seems to emerge from a caul, and has the scowl of a newborn. (the mouldmaking was a trying experience.)

my wife took an immediate dislike to the mask and asked me to keep it down in the studio.

paola

2008-02-07T12:49:00.000-08:00

Carbon pencil on Strathmore drawing, 10" x 14".

next up is paola, a young woman from a town south of me. she comes out of columbian parents, petite and with intense dark eyes and strong bones.

her hands are delicate, with beautifully extended digits. i don't think i did them justice in the drawing. i want to try again with different drawing styles, to see what works best with her hands.

working with so many different models over a short period has helped me see the differences between the women i've worked with. paola has a kind of forthright reserve, if that makes sense; i hope i can put it on good display in her portraits.

one thing these models seem to share is that they are at inflection points in their lives. the future looks more important than the past, they are active in making things happen, they are ready to try new things. it's a great energy to explore with them.

weekly figure group

2008-02-06T12:42:00.000-08:00

Carbon pencil on Strathmore drawing 180 gsm, 10" x 14".

the model this week was new to all of us, whom i'll call Z because i can't spell her mayan name. (as she explained it, she's not mayan: she was born in mexico and her parents were hippies.)

i got a lot of good drawings from Z. she was generally steady and struck some novel poses. she had a warm skin tone, sharp features and a very rewarding figure, athletic and large but not cut (muscled) or bony.

normally i don't enjoy the lying down portion of the modeling session, but the pose shown above had a dynamic twist in the lower back, tautness across the breasts, a lyrical drape of both arms, and fantastic foreshortening. this is not a model that has just flopped down to take a paid nap: she is "working the pose".

i did a couple of portrait drawings; this one is the first. don leivas, who is probably the best artist attending the group regularly, liked it ... so here's to you, don.

margaret

2008-02-05T12:37:00.000-08:00

Fabriano Artistico CP 300 gsm, 12" x 9".

this is another backlog painting, companion to the painting posted last week. same pigments and color scheme; the hair is slightly different.

the main contrasts are between the saturated backgrounds and the muted life colors, and between the dark eyes and earrings and the pale skin.

pyrrole orange, diluted far enough, shifts toward a mystical blue tint that is very different from the tints of cadmium scarlet, which shift toward yellow. it's a beautiful flesh tone, but unfortunately it is almost completely washed out in the photo. try light washes of pyrrole orange and you'll see what i mean.

charlotte

2008-02-04T22:09:00.000-08:00

Acrylic on canvas board, 16" x 12".

this is my fourth acrylic, again with the secondary (hexachrome) palette (described on 19 january).

this painting almost did itself, starting with the mouth, nostrils and eyes, then the facial modeling, then the background and clothing, and finally the hair. it's not quite finished but i am going to let it sit for a few days and sink in.

the drawing was transferred by ruling the support in sixths, height and width, then building the outline freehand in charcoal. i find that the division in sixths is the best overall framework for medium sized (up to full sheet) formats; it also supports a variety of diagonal lines, from one grid corner to another, that are handy for locating detail features.

however the graphite grid was difficult to erase and i had to scrape off several visible lines when the portrait was half finished. i've since switched to watercolor pencil for the grid; the charcoal underdrawing adds a bit of black along the edges that helps define color areas.

the only premixed colors here are the basic hair color and the sweater green. everything else is done in separate layers of pure paint. this gives the painting a very strong color vibrancy, especially in the face, which has an almost iridescent weaving of magenta, green, yellow, scarlet and blue tints, muted here and there by white or black. the eyes are far too bright. i wanted the face to have the decorative coloring of a viennese pastry or ripe tropical fruit.

the quality i admire in women of this age is the excitement they express as they embark on their adult life, with adventure in their eyes and confidence in their talents and beliefs.

charlotte

2008-02-03T17:24:00.000-08:00

Arches CP 300 gsm, 14" x 10". 1.5 hours.

this is a freehand portrait of charlotte, done without a pencil underdrawing or grid. i started with the eyes and went from there.

the skin is gold ochre, burnt sienna and venetian red. the hair is sepia tinted with cadmium red, nickel dioxine yellow and pyrrole orange. the eyes are cerulean muted with cad red; phthalo blue tint for background.

i enjoyed painting this, and especially tried to capture the far away, introspective depth in charlotte's eyes.

cassandra's hands

2008-02-02T22:52:00.000-08:00

Arches CP 300 gsm, 10" x 14".

this is a freehand drawing of cassandra's hands, from a photo, tinted in watercolor.

these "hands" paintings began with a series i did of siena's and my hands, beginning in november.

cassandra

2008-02-01T15:49:00.000-08:00

Acrylic on gessoed canvas panel, 16" x 12". 2 hours.

this is my second acrylic painting. it is built from the same photograph as the previous drawing, but with the panel gridded in sixths to facilitate the drawing transfer, done freehand.

i was surprised how quickly the acrylics worked, especially in her hair, which would be much harder to do in watercolor. also the color modulations are easier to see on the palette, since the drying shifts (changes in color as the paint dries) are much smaller in acrylics than in watercolors. even so, i am still feeling my way in the paint mixtures, since the tinting strengths of the pigments are not the same as in watercolor. (i ruined a good painting of charlotte, my second acrylic, because i underestimated the tinting strength of the nickel azo yellow.) it's like trying to bowl with an unusually heavy ball.

this painting shows a little better the definition and correct proportion of cassandra's features.

ciana

2008-01-31T16:18:00.000-08:00

Carbon pencil on Strathmore drawing, 10" x 14". 20 minutes.

next up is ciana, a texan very far from home. as always, i like to start with hands and i like to introduce a model with her hands ... so here she is.

i always leave the preliminary lines in a freehand drawing, rather than erase them (i only erase hand stamps or smudges). but rather than scrawl out a rough envelope or cloud of lines, i started by drawing the hands carefully, so that the final cut is on top of the preliminary lines over much of the drawing. i forgot to photograph this pose, but like it very much.

we did a life portrait and then got into photography, which we kept short due to the ongoing inclement weather (dark light). as ciana said, "in texas i'm used to it raining all day, but i'm not used to it raining and raining and raining ..." hey, us west county folks are not used to it either.

Fabriano Artistico CP 300 gsm, 12" x 9". 15 minutes.

at the end of our photo work i asked ciana to pose for another life portrait, facing me because she said she likes to watch.

i did this one without a preliminary pencil drawing; a nice feature of the fabriano paper is that paints which are still wet lift or blot easily, so i was able to sculpt the modeling on the fly, and then add details (nostrils, mouth contour, etc.) as it dried. hair and background were last.

ciana has spent the past four years cultivating a raging set of dreds, which will be a terrific challenge to paint ... even for a hair freak like me.

weekly figure group

2008-01-30T22:46:00.000-08:00

Carbon pencil on Strathmore drawing, 14" x 10".

the model this week was male, name unknown to me. i got some fairly good drawings off him; the group was also very small this week ... maybe the rains kept people at home.

this portrait view was made during a 20 minute pose. i could have spent more time sculpting the hair masses, but i wasn't motivated to do it.

Carbon pencil on Strathmore drawing, 16" x 12".

this is about the best figure drawing of the night, and it's not frontal so i can show it in a public blog. i know how america feels about these things. "go ahead, show me the girl eating yellow maggots, show me the girl flashing white titties, just don't show me a penis! anything but the penis!"

the background hatching didn't turn out as well as i expected it would. it's one of those things ... even after you discover it isn't really what you had in mind ... you started it, so you have to finish it.

cassandra, two views

2008-01-29T15:41:00.000-08:00

Carbon pencil on Strathmore drawing, 14" x10".

this is the second life sketch of cassandra, drawn after i'd done the survey photos of her face. (this is a series of photos in full sunlight, taken at the same distance but from different angles -- from full face to profile -- to show nose, mouth and bones in depth.)

below i've attached a freehand drawing (no transfer grid, no projective tracing) i did from one of the survey photographs that roughly matches the life pose at left. it's interesting to compare the two; they are very different.

Carbon pencil on Strathmore drawing, 14" x10".

i spent more time with the photograph, particularly to analyze the hair, which is the major problem with the life drawing. oddly, the facial proportions in the life drawing are more accurate -- the photo drawing makes her nose too long, though it's an interesting effect.

cassandra has very crisply defined features ... a brilliant smile, large blue eyes, a finely chiseled nose, translucent skin. she also has a dramatic, outgoing personality, which she shines through her face like sunlight through a prism.

cassandra

2008-01-28T15:34:00.000-08:00

Carbon pencil on Strathmore drawing, 10" x 14".

next up is cassandra, a 22 year old from a town north of me, who is just coming back from a modeling hiatus.

this is my first drawing of her hands, which are among the most elegant and charming hands i have ever seen. i told her i could spend a month on her hands alone.

she'd written in reply to my ad, and we'd chatted on the phone and then met at the graton reception. i was talking to one of the gallery partners when she swam up in front of me, with a look of recognition that actually startled me. then she came over two days later to fill in for a model who had a scheduling conflict.

we spent two hours together in difficult light, and i got a general sense of her energy and range. i see her again in two weeks.

charlotte

2008-01-27T23:39:00.000-08:00

Arches CP 300 gsm 14" x 10".

this is another pose of charlotte on the couch.

after the outline drawings, i start some color studies. these can go quickly or slowly, depending on the kind of problem i want to work with. it was a chill winter day and i primarily keyed off the cool blue greens out the window.

there is a genuine radiance and clarity in charlotte's demeanor, but also the turmoil and inwardness of her age. i am not yet sure how to wrap color around all that.

i had her on the couch and was bouncing the posing topic around a little; she would alternately laugh, smile, puzzle, ponder, daydream, or as here, roll up her pants cuff and make a scrutiny of me.