Painting: The Hidden Music

When I paint a commission, it's not just a photograph that I require. I need to know more. Often I do not know the individual that I am painting - sometimes, like one I am working on at the moment, the painting is a gift and surprise so that the whole creation is being worked on secretively. 

“From stroke to stroke, the differences are infinitesimal and undetectable - but paintings are massive collections of instinctive moments. Once these moments are totted up they equal the finished piece: the atmosphere. ”

I need to know the person. What is a painting otherwise? The mere capturing of a specific appearance given to us by the angle, lighting, clothing - the expression that happens to be on the individual when someone clicks the camera shutter? How often do we look at a photograph of ourselves and say: "that doesn't look like me!"?

The days when portraiture was explicitly haughty and a preserve of the rich are gone - but the realities of modern life mean that long sittings for a "live" construction of the painting is impractical. Although nothing can replace this one-to-one rapport - information brings a character alive in within the mind of the artist. 

I want a number of photographs, each portraying the individual in a different manner, but a manner indicative of their hobbies, their pleasures, their living environment; photographs of them with their family, relaxing, looking at the camera, looking away. With all this I can start to create a sum-total image of their essential appearance, that which is not incidental, but intrinsic.

I Listened only to Leonard Cohen when I painted his portrait - it oozes the melancholic insightfulness that underscores his whole anthology

Music

What music do they listen to? What song, or which composer, brings them alive? I think music is the best example of what the artist must know before he can claim to know what he is trying to paint, where he is heading to? I always listen to their music when I am painting them.

Does it have any effect on the outcome of the painting? "Without atmosphere, a painting is nothing" said Rembrandt, but what is atmosphere when applied to a static painting? Atmosphere is it's unique impression, its passion, it's energy. It is a quality quite removed from the more apparent qualities. A painting's realism or accuracy doesn't necessarily affect the mood it emits: a more crudely painted picture can have far more atmosphere than a photo-realistic piece that took 1000 hours. 

Every stroke matters. Every stroke, every dab, every swipe is a mini-universe of art in itself. Two painters can paint the same subject, form the same angle, with the same paints and in the same style - but the atmospheres are distinct - either different or one oozing, and one deficient. Why?

Because the surrounding are infused into each stroke. From stroke to stroke, the differences are infinitesimal and undetectable - but paintings are massive collections of instinctive moments. Once these moments are totted up they equal the finished piece: the atmosphere.  

Louis Armstrong's vibrant, ad hoc Jazz and soulful trumpet playing led me to this - he's larger than life and wants, needs, to burst forth and free.

The innumerable cellular processes of the body vibrate and alter in minuscule derivation in time to the equaliser of one's surroundings - every irrevocable addition to the painting is a memory of the moment that has passed - a testament to the exact mood present in the equilibrium of the artist and their surroundings at the time it was enacted - and although one stroke or dab does not disclose this mood, the larger the collection becomes, the more apparent the atmosphere: just like a dropping a single grain of rice makes nearly no noise at at all, if you drop 10'000 grains at one time, the noise becomes far more perceptible.