Portrait Drawing with Angela Cunningham

Last week I took a portrait drawing workshop with Angela Cunningham at the Fine Arts League of the Carolinas in Asheville. It was quite an experience, six hours a day in a darkened studio drawing in a very focused and precise way. In pencil. One drawing only.

The class was a condensed version of drawing practice at the Grand Central Academy in NYC, where Angela is a fourth-year student and instructor. She is a wonderful teacher, patient and approachable, serious about the work yet relaxed. Her lectures and demos are direct, clear and informative--she doesn't get sidetracked, distracted, or ahead of herself or her students--and her critiques are helpful, specific and kind.

Our model, Elisabeth Guibert Thomas, was ideal. Her face is beautiful and interesting, with great structure. (She's also a fun and interesting person.) The other students came from a variety of backgrounds but all are accomplished artists, though not all were familiar with the "classical realist" approach. Angela's blog has photos of the class in progress and of some of our results, mine included:

Sincerity, Originality

"Thinking more of sincerity than of originality, conscious that originality that is not the product of sincerity is but peculiarity, and that sincerity alone points the road to the only originality anybody is capable of." -- Harold Speed, Oil Painting Techniques and Materials

Speed's Oil Painting is a classic, written in 1924 (thanks, Barbara, for pointing me back to it). There is much wisdom in it, though his style is sometimes awkward and dated. Sincerity is an old-fashioned idea, but it informs my best work and the work of others that I most admire.

Tiny Touchups

Kitchen Counter came back from exhibit with just a little edge wear.

Paintings at Carteret Contemporary Art

We just got back from a North Carolina road trip, visiting family and friends and taking paintings up to Carteret Contemporary Art. A couple are new and there are also a few that haven't been seen in some time. Jack Saylor will be the featured artist.

The one below is called At the Beach House (16" x 18", oil on linen). Another in the pink bathrobe series, it's on a rougher linen than I've been accustomed to using, and maybe that's what got me painting a little more loosely. There's even some knife work.

If at first...

"All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." --Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho

Singularity, Revelation

"In a mass society we have the sense of being anonymous: therefore we look for the silent moment in which our singularity breaks through, when emotions change, without warning, and reveal themselves." --V.S. Pritchett, Introduction to The Oxford Book of Short Stories, 1981.

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read."

Groucho said that.

When you put your work out there, you never know how far it may travel: O cão que comeu o livro... ("the dog that ate the book"), a Portuguese-language blog, and Klimtbalan, one in Spanish. In the main, I'm very flattered, though Klimtbalan snagged photos that aren't particularly good, and one (reproduced grande!) is of an unfinished piece I'm not happy with. I use this blog to share in an informal way, mostly work in progress with friends who aren't near enough to come by for a glass of wine in the studio. The website I try to keep more formal and more structured, so it's a little troubling to see things piled one on another, out of any context in the case of blog images, and out of the chronological and thematic order of the website. But I guess it's all outside of the dog now.

Another in the Column Series

Or maybe the pink bathrobe series. Or the Trailer Series, of which it would be the last. 16"W x 18"H, oil on linen.

Polarizing

A polarizing filter on the lights as well as the lens (no change to the painting). The face has one more layer of paint on it than the neck area, which is shinier. I think this trick will make a difference in photographing paintings that have opaque color painted into glazes--in photos the opaque paint seems to float above the glaze, whereas in real life there is a more subtle optical mixing going on.

Tabletop Fog

WIP, oil on linen on panel, 16"W x 20"H. Not the real title (it has none so far), but I like the unfinished hand lost in some otherworldly realm. Still a way to go.

The Re-Do

In the last couple of weeks, as I finally get out from under the last of the move, I've pulled out the unfinished or problem pieces and tried to make some decisions about them. A couple were, I decided, unsalvageable--generally something basic was wrong with the concept or the composition--and those I recoated with a gray ground. It can be a grand relief to make a bad painting simply go away.

Then there are the paintings that are not so bad they need to disappear; they're the ones I need to recast in my mind as unfinished or with problems that may have solutions and work a little harder to bring them together.

The painting Column from July of 2008 has continued to bother me. It's been out and come back again. It was a difficult painting from the beginning; the deep chromatic red in the background seemed to overpower everything, the figure was stiff and her head not quite right, Milly got her tough cow-punching feet on it once, and neither I nor Chris could seem to get a good photo of it. The only thing I really liked was the, well, butt crack. But those hips seemed worth the trouble of another attempt at a better piece, and a canvas with paint on it moves along more quickly because I like the surface better.

Here's the re-do:

And the two together: