Mid Painting Corrections

For me at least, paintings never go perfectly. And that's OK. I took some photos of the process to correct a mistake in this large painting. The first image in this blog shows my initial sketch of the model. This is conte pencil on newsprint paper. In this drawing, I got the mouth and nose correct. In the middle of the painting, I stood back and looked long and hard. Also my classmates and the class instructor, Cornel Rubino, looked at it with a critical eye. We decided that the mouth and nose were wrong in the painting. The mouth was idealized and not a good representation of the models mouth. Sorry, I did not take of photo of how it looked then. So I examined the model's mouth and nose more closely and did a sketch. The model had a very large upper lip and a small lower lip. The second image shows this sketch. The nose is good, but the mouth is still wrong. Try, try again! Image three shows the second sketch of the mouth. This is it! So then, I painted the mouth and nose again. I also modified the edge of the face near the mouth. Image four shows a close up of the final mouth and nose. The final image above shows the scale of the final painting.

Size Matters

This is a painting I am calling Insolent Boy. I painted it at the Arrowmont School for Arts & Crafts in Gatlinburg, TN. I spent a week at Arrowmont in a class taught by Cornel Rubino. He was a great instructor: meeting each student where they were and encouraging them to advance on their artistic journey. It was a fabulous class where I painted very differently from anything I have done in the past. The class focused on large paintings; all the paintings were at least 7 feet tall. Each day of the week I completed a painting. On Monday I did a pastel drawing of two figures nine feet tall by four feet wide. Tuesday I completed a horizontal painting in acrylic of two figures 9 feet long. On Wednesday, I did a nine foot tall acrylic of a rock star. Then on Thursday and Friday I worked on the painting above. It is on two pieces of paper for a size of 7 feet square. I painted directly from a model. This painting took two days to complete using a ladder a lot of the time to reach the high places. This is about 3 layers of paint, though some areas like the lower right hand corner have only one layer. I allowed the paint to drip when it did it naturally. The photos above are in my studio in Charlotte. I had to re-arrange everything to get this painting up on the wall. I am still working to hang and photograph the other nine foot tall paintings.