Portrait practise
Intention matters
I’ve started practising for my upcoming workshops online at the Winslow Art Center. This week it’s been portraits for “The Living Portrait From Photos”. Next week I’ll get to work on some family pics for “The Painted History: A Fresh Look at the Family Album”. I like to be fully immersed in the subject that I’m teaching so it will be goodbye to floral still life for a while:)
These portraits are both from photos but progressed in entirely different directions once I started them. My intention, or concept, was different for each and that meant that I made distinct choices along the way.
Sunlight, glare, movement, summer: all describe what I was trying to show with the portrait of the woman - faithful portrait didn’t even cross my mind. The woman is a vehicle for an atmosphere and mood but her identity is unimportant. (My apologies to the Croquis Cafe art model - who was, by the way, evenly lit, nude and in a beige interior setting).
Summer is synonymous with colour in my mind so I splashed out with rich olives, greens, pinks and reds. I used a complementary colour scheme to get maximum colour energy and changed the model’s neutral expression into a playful smirk. She’s unrecognizable from the woman on Vimeo whose head tilt caught my eye.
The child’s portrait, by contrast, was all about the specificity of the model. Taken from a photo of my son when he was young, I was intent on capturing accurate proportion and his porcelain-pale colouration. I toned down my palette, mixing complementary colours together to get subtle neutrals that don’t overwhelm the subject. Lively colour and brushwork around the face stop it from being a static, fussy portrait.
I scraped and repainted this piece a couple of times along the way, taking comfort from the famous accounts of John Singer Sargent’s ruthless and repeated scraping of commissioned portraits. Instead of making small tweaks - which is always a temptation - he’d scrape and make a new, bold start, knowing that was the only way to end up with a head that looked effortless and casual. Apparently, it sometimes took dozens of scrapes and repaints to end up with effortless, so I count myself lucky.
If you’d like to join me in the engrossing and rewarding work of portrait painting, there are still spaces left in my online workshop.
I hope to see you on Zoom!
Happy painting!