Workin' my stuff

It took me a while to build up my courage to start on the new canvas.  For one thing, I asked Chris to make it 40"x60" then decided to reduce the size to 30"x45" but regrettably forgot to mention that to Chris (!), so when I came home from teaching Tuesday, he had already made it the larger size.  Intimidating!  It has ended up being perfect - I'm loving the larger size - but it made it a little harder for me to get going.

Plus I couldn't figure out how to incorporate all the new stuff I learned from Thomas - Jenny Saville?  Freud?  Rembrandt?  Whose lead should I follow?

I took out my books by each of them plus another 10 or so books with other nudes in them and looked to see which sort of image I wanted to end up with.  The interesting thing was that none of the pictures looked like I wanted mine to look.  The colors were off, or they were too extreme, or not extreme enough, or they distorted the figure - whatever.  Though I didn't quite have a vision of how I wanted mine to end up, I couldn't find it in the books either.

I decided that was a good thing and it meant I was doing something unique, so I began!

I mixed up a bunch of colors I saw in her flesh - purple, pink, green, burnt sienna.  I decided to use a light green for cool and alizarin crimson mixed with vermillion for hot colors with enough dioxinine violet in there to deepen the shadows.  For those of you for whom that last sentence was Greek, what I mean is this:  when I look at a photograph or a person I want to paint, I think about values - where the lights and shadows are.  Then I take that one step further and consider where the woman's flesh looks warm and cool.  Creating those contrasts helps bring the form forward or send it back, thus creating a stronger illusion of three dimensionality.  If an artist accentuates the cool colors, the figure will be less appealing in most cases - more corpse-like perhaps.  If she focuses on the hot colors, the body looks more sweltering and full of life.  I think Freud focuses on cool greys, and Saville has hotter colors in her works.

In the picture of my palette(s), you can obviously see the darks and lights, but perhaps the hots and cools are evident also.  There are some cool greens on the left, and the oranges and reds and browns are on the right.

I put a lot of turpenoid on my brush then picked up a gob of paint - the turpenoid thinned out the paint a lot so it would drip and run and go on smoothly.  I worked in the shadow areas mostly because I wanted to get some interesting color into those so the piece would feel strong.

My next step surprised me - I had thought I might let the darks dry like that then come back in with the lights later, but instead I picked up some of the light green with my brush and started putting it in.  The brush was large - 3" - twice the size I usually use - so I didn't have a lot of control - a good thing, in my case!  I picked up some of the dark colors accidentally.  That ended up spreading the shadows and modifying them in lovely ways. 

After that, I took a smaller brush and did some work on her face.  I did a lot of it with larger brushes, but knew I wanted a better level of detail there, so I let myself use smaller ones.  After that I put in the curtains in the background and worked some areas up more.  I especially focused on the hand but was excited by how that went.  I'd put down the shadows and finger delineations carefully even though they looked like sausages hanging off her arm.  When I went back in with the right colors and a slightly smaller brush, I was surprised  how easily I could move the paint around and get an accurate-looking rendering quite quickly.  I'm finding it helps a lot to have so much paint on the canvas.  I'm used to working with it much thinner.

Today I want to refine her facial features and some shadows which seem a bit off.  Her left leg seems odd too, so I'll check on that.  Otherwise I'm feeling like she's pretty much done.  All that huge canvas in about 6 hours.  Ones that size usually take weeks.  I think it's the difference in confidence and looseness and trusting that I can say what I want to say in broader strokes. 

Dear Chris - now he's going to have to spend the weekend making me more canvases! 

My Freudian phase

For the fourth image I was working on last week, I tried to incorporate Lucien Freud's style.  What I like about Freud's work is the utter humanity in it.  His paint surfaces are thick and groddy with lots of grey in them.  I never use grey.  I avoid grey!  Freud's studio is a horrible mess with rags and globbed paint and dirt all over the place.  I try to keep mine neat and clean and tidy so I can find everything, and I have to clearn up and organize before starting a new picture each time.  Freud's studio looks like he's never done that.  I feel sorry for his models who lie on piles of rags or a ragged bed or sofa.  I don't judge it so much as I'm aware I would be very uncomfortable being there!  But I LOVE his paintings.  There is a raw strength in them that comes from both the presence of the painted surface and from the presence of the models in his work.  He works from life and spends 100's of hours on each piece.  He models the surface almost like a sculptor with clay.

When I decided to study his work and to try to emulate aspects of his style, I realized several things - my paint had to be lots thicker; I had to use grey; I couldn't use many colors; I had to put on more layers than I'm used to, in much thicker paint.

I mixed up a pallette of colors and literally put dirt and chalk into them to thicken them and dry them out.  I also mixed up an achromatic grey using black and white.  I had never painted with black before.  I still didn't use it directly, but it certainly is in all the colors I used.  The first part I started to paint was the leg.  I had some lovely layers on it and was feeling good about it when Thomas came up, globbed on about an inch of paint on a flat brush and applied it crudely to the canvas - "No!  Now that's more like it!"  Ugh!  He ruined my pretty picture!  AND, admittedly, (pout), made my picture more powerful because I had to bring it all up to that level.  Now the leg looks like you see it on the right - it looks like I put clay on the canvas and made the darn thing 3-D.  I don't find it appealing and don't want to paint this way in general, but it's an outstanding exercise for learning what the possibilities are.  I would otherwise NEVER glob so much paint on!  Ugly!!

I finished the rest of the model's lower body similarly with lots of paint.  It felt freeing to glob the paint on and to let it be so ugly.  I didn't worry about messing up because I knew I could cover it in another layer with more paint.  That gave me a sweet freedom to experiment with colors and shading I might not have done otherwise.

That took me through the end of the morning.  In the afternoon, I began on her upper body.  Thomas wasn't around so much, so I drifted back somewhat to my more normal way of painting.  The paint is smoother, but I still worked with the colors more like I perceive him to.  I used grey and found that to be quite powerful.  I upped the amps on the colors to a certain extent the way Jenny Saville did, so sort of began to combine what I'd learned from both artists.

I think this upper part is more the way I'll try to paint in my next piece: considerably thicker paint, stronger color, bolder choices, more trust of the paint.  I'm realizing I have the skills now to render what I want to.  Now that I can do that, I can begin to experiment more and use my skills to explore other things.  The skills are there.  I can count on them and can begin to see just what it's possible to do with paint.

Musings from the Studio

I haven't gotten into the studio since the workshop ended, but my head has been there almost full time.  I've been thinking a lot about what I'm going to do next.  I feel so freed from my normal constraints after travelling into Saville- and Freud-land.  (See previous post if you have no clue what I'm alluding to!)  I can see many more ways to apply paint, many of which fit with my yearning to explore my inner landscape more fully.  I have a feeling that my work will shift from here on out - permanently?  temporarily?  no idea.  But it feels great to have all these thoughts and ideas and visions in my head and now to have some idea of how to realize them in the physical world.  Fun is coming!!