Eakins Study

" Study after Eakins" oil on linen on board, 8"x10". Eakins father sounds like he was the perfect "artists' dad". He supported young Eakins decision to study art. He stuck by his son when he was ousted from the Pennsylvania Academy of Art teaching staff, under what must have been very trying conditions for this stolid family man. He also took Eakins side in the dispute with his sister and her husband, who was a former Eakins student, eventually asking them to leave his household. The pose that he's in also looks very tiring and considering the way that Eakins usually worked on his portraits he probably put in some long hours modeling. In the end though he must have been pleased with the result as Eakins painting has to rank as one of the best portrayals of an artist's father by his son.

Eakins Senior

Last week, I attended a lecture relating to academic art by the artist Graydon Parrish at the Grand Central Academy of Art ( great lecture, very informative!) Since I had some time to kill before the lecture I thought I would drop in at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and look at some of the artists that would be featured in Graydon's lecture. While there I also went looking for some of Eakins work because I've been doing a lot of reading about him lately. Strangely enough, the Met currently has a lot of the American wing paintings on exhibit in some kind of storage room, locked into glass cases. In a way, it's good because very few people seem to wander in there and it facilitates prolonged study. Anyways, I spent a good deal of time looking at "The Writing Master". I've seen it before and it always captivates me. Eakins was a student of Gerome, and Gerome always claimed that Rembrandt was his favorite artist. Other than the story telling aspect though, I can find no Rembrandt influence in his paintings. Eakins painting of his father is a different story. This painting seems clearly indebted to Rembrandt without overly emulating his style. So in between drying times on other paintings I decided to give "Eakins senior" a shot. The reproduction I'm using is only about three inches tall and I'm working on an 8"x10" panel. I'm experimenting with the method I see demonstrated on Tony Ryders site which is to use an open palette (no pre-mixed color strings) and to window shade my brush strokes working from a dark base (the paint on your palette). It's fun to change things up once in a while. I'm sure this is nothing like the way that Eakins worked so I consider this more of a study than a copy.

Turban Ebauche

I blocked in the color, thinning it with oms, over the raw umber nad black wipeout. My main goal at this stage is to ballpark my color scheme and to have some color on the canvas to compare the eventual finished work. I will be asking myself questions such as; is this warmer or cooler than it looks now, darker or lighter, less chroma or more chroma. Because windowshading is such a think-on-your-feet type of painting it's helpful to have an underpainting to make comparisons with. I will use the poster study sort of like a color swatch, in that I will be putting my strings of color directly onto the poster, to make sure that they at least start off as an exact match. This helps to keep the color consistent and not piecemeal.

Croquis, Etude', Ebauche

These images are in reverse of the order that I wanted to post them. Anyways, I thought on this one that I'd try something different, break out of my comfort zone. The small sketch on looseleaf paper is my thumbnail from my imagination. I made quite a few of them, this one is the closest to the final image. Next, while I had a break at work, I made a study using acrylic paint on a canvas panel.(what I have my students use in class). That was also painted from my imagination. The drawing was my attempt to arrange a setup that was pretty close to what I had imagined and then make a life drawing. After making the drawing I realized that the composition worked better with a vertical format so I cropped it and transferred it to an 8"x10" canvas. I did a wipeout using umber and the next day I did an ebauche (the top image). If I'm pleased with the result I will square up the drawing to a larger canvas and set up the still life objects in my studio, so that I can get a little more detail and form. I started painting the fruit and potatoes today and so far so good. The landscape background is a little bit of my backyard and mostly a remembered river scene. My tentative title is "Voyage".

Turban, Rose, and Goblet

Here's the poster study and wipe-out for a new still life, "Turban, Rose, and Goblet" 11'x14" on oil primed linen. I was looking at some of Charles Bargues paintings the other day and I wanted to do something with the color key that he used in one of his Bakshi-Bazouk (sic) paintings. I twisted up the turban from two pieces of silk like cloth. The rose is yellow and has that bright Naples yellow appearance that can be found in so many of his paintings. Anyways, the "turban" is going to be fun and challenging to paint. It has some whiplash highlights that remind me of graffiti. I love doing poster studies. You can really let your hair down and just go for it. I'm also finding them very helpful with getting a grip on overall tonal structure and color composition. It takes you off of the micro and on to the macro, thinking of the painting as a whole entity rather than a collection of nicely done parts.

Morgan Complete

I ended up painting right through to the last minute of the last session. whew! Nine sessions, three hour segments, once a week, and because I worked with a group of artists it only ended up costing me about fifteen dollars a session. I would love to keep this going and just continue to do eight week sessions but the artists that I work with are not classical realists and they found it difficult to keep their interest over the long period of time. I worked on a 9"x12" inch canvas because 27 hours is barely enough time to do a detailed figure painting. 50 hours would be more to my liking. I'll be taking figure or portrait painting at GCA this fall so that will keep the ball rolling. One of the artists in my group was asking me if I found it difficult to transition from still life painting to figure painting. She's a landscape painter and she was having a lot of trouble switching gears. I told her that what I do is try to keep the process as uniform as possible so that whatever small gains I get from a painting can be repeated and built on in the next one. If you re=invent the wheel for each new painting it's hard to chart your progress. For instance on this one my progress was mostly in the area of conceptualizing the light and getting the right chroma for the skin tones. The models skin tones were a lot less chromatic then I envisioned them in my first pass. I had the spotlight almost directly over her head and slightly behind her. Once I started to ask myself what that light should look like on each part of the form I was able to get the overall light structure to look more unified. My problem area was and is painting the shadow side of the face. I din't want to just leave it an undistiguishable mass without in some way indicating the position of the eye. A lot of squinting and re-painting and I'm still not satisfied. This will be my starting point for the next one. Get this right before moving on.

"Maud" completed

I did a little bit of touching up on the outline of the cheek and the nose and that's about it. I could see that I had added a few pounds to her face, she was looking a little puffy. Other than that I painted it pretty directly, in one go, over the wipeout. I'm not sure if that's how Eakins would have painted it. I was planning on going to see the actual painting at Yale last week but it was a 95 degree day and I didn't want to deal with traffic during a heat wave. I may go next weekend.
"Maud after Eakins" oil on linen on board, 8"x10"