All tagged Painting
Luckily, I managed to garner great inspiration from this piece. Nawal has an inherent glamour to her, and the specific pose in this image reinforces and bolsters her appeal in this regard. It's rather moody, but also natural - a hard mix to capture. But it's uniqueness meant that I found it easy to shape and build - it has a stark and definitive motif around which the features can be placed.
Representation in terms of angle, proportion, size and colour is. of course, the primary importance - but feeling and atmosphere, the ghostly, not-quite-definable qualities of a portrait, are what truly capture the subject and give the initial impact.
I want to emphasis the textures of the room, from fuzzy fur to the obdurate brickwork; from luscious leather to the cold, steal log-burner.
I've already completed a portrait of Ann, for which I will release a blog entry soon, painted from an indoor scene. This a study of her in an outdoor light. There is no heavily glint of light from the corneas and her shiny indoor complexion reacts with the light differently in the sunshine. It picks up lovely colours in her skin tone.
A commission of John completed as a surprise gift for his 70th birthday. His partner, Anne, said it was a "great success".
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.
"Enough detail so that as your peripherals drink in the background they are unaware of the lack of sharpness until they focus on it"
"In her elegant and statuesque pose, Darcy gives of an aura of strength and grace"
"I didn't want to relinquish the crudeness that was bestowed upon the painting with the thumb and finger painting. I think it adds a charm"
Sometimes extra detail crystalizes the emotion of the painting with greater precision - sometimes it robs the painting of the passionate effect that a less complete stage of the painting had emitted. The trick is to trust yourself - once you have it, leave it or risk losing it.
It's an artistic representation of a reduction of despair - as though despair could be simmered in a pan until in reaches a thick, sticky bitumen.
With Intimacy, I'm trying to capture her experience, give the observer a peek into her existence, her life.
