A Challenge

I started another posthumous portrait for the Lost Dreams project. The family provided photos to work from, but I'm at a standstill. One photo was what looked to be an 8th grade graduation picture, blurry, with a sun-in-the-eyes squint. Another is an odd angle, from below. In the last, the young man is wearing opaquely dark sunglasses and a baseball hat. I decided to use the third, because it was the closest thing to a traditional portrait pose, and the placement of the hand might give him a thoughtful look. But the sunglasses are proving to be a terrible problem. I've been trying for days to glean enough information from the three photos to give me a sense of what he looks like. I'm going to leave the hat on his head because I can't see what his head is really shaped like and that is so basic to getting a likeness. I can tell his eyes are deep set and a beautiful gray blue, but I'm having an awful time getting them to look like they're set in his head properly and that they're the same eyes in the picture taken from below. It got me thinking again about how much these portraits must mean to a family who may only have a couple of poor quality snapshots as mementos. I will keep working on this. If anyone has any ideas about how I could do this, please let me know.

A Beautiful Day

Was it Toad or Ratty who said, "Believe me, my young friend, there is NOTHING - absolutely nothing - half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats." ? The only thing better is to spend the morning painting at a friend's farm, then taking a break to paddle about in a small boat. On Saturday, the art group I belong to got together to paint outside. The location was spectacular, and the company even better. Here are Alice Dustin and Renee Daily enjoying a Wind in the Willows moment.

I've never been comfortable painting en plein aire, but I brought my new camera and had a great time taking photographs. I expect to get several paintings out of the day's pictures.

Completion

I finished Darnell's portrait today. I decided to keep the background light because I liked the way the warm colors in his face glow in contrast to the lighter cooler background. I made a few drawing corrections which helped with the likeness as well as accentuating his youth.

I used to work in pastels instead of oil paint. It was convenient when there were little kids around the house. I learned a lot about color using pastel. It's an addition and subtraction process, adding color, restating areas, layering cools on top of warms, finding the warm tones again. With pastel, you can't mix the perfect color. You have to make the colors you have work. Now, when I'm at the point in the painting process that I've reached with Darnell, I paint with oils the way I did with pastel. I'm adding thin veils of color, perhaps getting too warm, then  cooling it down with a bit of titanium mixed with the color I'm using. If it gets chalky, I'll go back into it with a glaze of a transparent color. I'm adding and subtracting until I get as many of the subtle nuances of the skin color as I can.

Darnell Continued

It's been a few days since I've been able to get in to the studio, so the under painting had dried nicely. The first thing I did was to tone the entire head, including the hair, with a thin layer of Rembrandt's Transparent Oxide Red mixed with Liquin.  The under painting is still very clearly visible through this layer. This gives me a warm base color that I can blend other colors into.  At this point in the painting I use mostly transparent colors, alizarin, raw umber, yellow ochre, vermilion, and cobalt blue. Gamblin makes a beautiful transparent orange that I used also. Keeping everything very soft, I start layering and blending colors in. It all starts to get rather dark so I start to work in a little naples yellow and a little titanium white, depending on whether I need a cool light or a warm light, to re-establish the lighter areas. I also mixed some cobalt blue with the transparent red oxide to deepen the darks in the hair, eyes, and eyebrows. At this point, I realized that the paint was setting up very quickly in the hot studio, so I quickly scrubbed on some cobalt blue mixed with raw umber to tone the shirt, and added some light tone to the background around the head. 

A Chelsea Afternoon

Saturday in New York. Ninety seven degrees farenheit. What a great day to be in Chelsea! My good friend Nancy Bea Miller celebrated the opening of her show, Still Moments, at the Sherry French Gallery with a reception at the gallery. The gallery is in a wonderful airy space overlooking the Hudson River. The view is so spectacular that every time I am there for an opening, there is a moment when the focus turns from the art on the wall to the panorama outside. Saturday's distraction was a fireboat in the river below, spraying its hoses in all directions. The crowd in the gallery was cheery and animated despite the heat, moving towards the window to see the fireboat, then back to the main part of the gallery to continue enjoying the paintings and the company. Many friends came up from Philadelphia for the event including Fred Danziger, Carla Tudor, Marianne Mitchell and Fay Stanford. Nancy Bea's paintings glowed against the wall in the subdued light of the gallery. Her still life paintings are known for their strong sense of stillness. The doughnuts looking like they've been caught in a bell jar, the sugar gleaming with a stickiness that can never be touched. Surprisingly, even her landscapes with figures, like "Berry Picking on Manana " above, have a feeling of time stopped forever at a particularly quiet moment.

Beginning Darnell

It occurred to me that watching me develop a portrait could be like watching the proverbial paint dry, but if you're reading this, you are probably a painter, too, or a friend. In either case you're more likely to have the patience.

I start with the pictures provided by the family. In this case, I have a camera phone shot, and one with a very small print of Darnell's face. I decided to use the that second picture,and I enlarged the portion of the photo that I needed to do a head and shoulders portrait.

I gave myself a few charcoal "landmarks" on the canvas, but then immediately started in developing a monochromatic underpainting. I use raw umber, titanium white, and turpenoid for this. I get the drawing problems worked out in this stage, as well as establishing my darks and lights. I can see that there are adjustments that I will make once I begin to layer on the color, but at this point, I have to allow the painting to dry for a couple of days.