Portrait Demo: “Red”

Here’s a demo portrait painted last Thursday for a workshop.   24 x 18 inches, oil on cheap stretched canvas.

Since I didn’t have a model stand, which would have put his eye level even with mine or slightly higher, I compensated by holding the camera low to get the angle I wanted, printed out the photos, then drew a quick charcoal study from them.  

The charcoal study is a crucial step. If the goal is to not merely “paint what you see,” but create a harmony on the canvas, it really helps to do a drawing first.  Right away you are already in the realm of a translation of the subject into line and mass, light and dark.    Hierarchy is established, along with the suggestion of transitions and linking positive and negative space.  It’s almost cheating!

Vine charcoal flows easily on tracing paper.     As always, examples of great paintings are pinned up where I can see them easily.   Sooner or later something good is bound to filter into my work from them!

vine charcoal on tracing paper (24 x 18)

The model is my friend Red, who has posed for me before.    Natural north light is the light source, bounced off a white board as a “fill” light on the shadow side of his face.  The overhead lights are turned off.  I did aim a halogen flood at the canvas set low on a dimmer switch  to add a hint of warmth, since the finished piece will be viewed under mixed lighting conditions.

Demo on easel (24 x 18)

The block-in is done mostly with a wadded piece of paper towel which makes it possible to

• paint thinly without using paint thinner
• block in large masses without getting hung up on “detail”   (It forces you to paint from the shoulder instead of the wrist)
• cover a lot of area very quickly

Don’t tell anyone, but the block-in of this painting was done without looking at the model.   It was painted from the charcoal drawing and from memory.  “Why”, you ask, “are you paying a model to sit there if you don’t have the sense to look at him?”

Robert Henri says in “The Art Spirit” that the ideal art school would have the model in one room and the easels in another.   Degas and Pissaro said that too much exposure to the model is detrimental.  Isaac Levitan pretty much came out and said that if you aren’t painting from memory, you aren’t really painting.   John F. Carlson said that all good work is done from memory.  (Don’t get mad at me, I’m just passing on what the big guns said).  So I’m trying to take their advice and grow by painting from memory.

The model is there as reference for color, form, mood, personality etc.   But the painting is based on how Red looked at one fleeting moment.  That’s where memory painting comes in.

My goal was to create form out of chunks of paint rather than rendering detail.

Etiquette for using a model:

1)  They are your guest of honor and should be treated like it

2)  Always pay the model, even if they put up a fight (Norman Rockwell taught me that in one of his books)

3)  Set a timer to give the model regular breaks.  (20 minutes works well with most models, with a 5 minute break).

If you are like me, painting people can be intimidating.  So, instead of painting people, I’ve made up my mind to paint colored shapes.  THAT I can paint.  I can’t paint hair, or a nose, or a shirt, but I can paint a colored shape.