Me and Eakins

So the other day I was hangin' with Eakins and I asked him if he'd mind if I took a stab at copying his portrait of Maud. He laughed and said "you think you're up to it, boy?". I said "well no, but that never stopped me before". He said "well go on then, it's your funeral." I asked him to give me some advice and to write down a list of the colors and mixtures that he used but by then he'd had enough of me and threw me out of his studio. So with the painting in hand I went back to my own place and began to try and figure it out. It seemed to me that he mostly used earth colors, burnt sienna, yellow ochre, raw umber, along with flake white and ivory black. He used a little bit of a strong red for accents, I'm guessing vermillion, which I didn't have any of so I used cadmium red light. I've seen Eakins spend months on some portraits and others he knocked out in a single session. I'm guessing that he painted this one pretty directly so that's what I did too. I can see a few things that are off and that will need fixin' before I would dare to show it to him, but I'll wait until the whole things done before I start fiddlin' around. Damn earth colors dry up so fast that by the end of a day's work I can't make any last minute changes because the colors already drying and lightening. I'll oil it out eventually and then I'll show him.

More Tea Pot and Morgan

I'm just about finished with "Tea Pot and Oranges" oil on linen 11"x14" and "Morgan" oil on linen 9"x12". I've been working very hard with the figure painting to conceptualize the light and try to more accurately guage the correct value and chroma. I started to ask myself questions about how the arm for instance would be lit from a light that was almost parallel to it. This made me go back in on the second pass and pretty much repaint everything, carving down the light where it's turned away and adding light where it faces the source more directly. I have just the chest area left to complete, which is good since I only have one more session with the model. I've been spending a lot of time looking at two artists this summer; Eakins and Chardin. I'm working hard to apply the things that I percieve in their work to my own practices. Not stylistic things so much but more of how they present their truths to the viewer. I've been influenced as well by something I read by Graydon Parrish concerning the mixing of a specific color. Something like, first identify and mix the hue, then get the hue to be the right value, then mix up a pile of neutral color that's of equal value, and then mix the neutral pile into the hue pile until you arrive at the correct chroma (intensity). I don't use it for every color in the painting but I have been using it for some things with interesting results.

Tea Pot

Tea Pot and Basket of Oranges

After some deliberation, I decided that oranges would probably work best in the composition of this painting. I was contemplating peaches but I didn't see any that I liked at the fruit store. I've had a hankering for painting oranges anyway after seeing Michael Klein's exhibit at Arcadia which featured a great still life of a crate of oranges. They're set back from the more intense light that falls on the pot and cloth, which allowed me to continue my experiments with chroma intensities. In particular I've been looking at Chardin and the way that he sometimes washes the chroma almost completely out of parts of his paintings and yet they still seem wholly plausible. They have the intensity of smoldering embers in a burned out campfire.

More Canoes

The third pass is nearly completed. I have a few changes and touch-ups to do after oiling it out. Lately I've been experimenting with a different color mixing system. Normally I would lower the chroma of a color by adding earth colors and then a little white to retain the value. Due to some of the practices that I've learned about from other artists I've been lowering the chroma by mixing it with a neutral base of the same value. It's been interesting to me to see how far down you can cut the chroma and still have it work within the harmony of the painting. It allows the fuller chromatic passages to really sing out. Anyways I used the method pretty extensively in this one and it's a neat little tool to have in my arsenal.

More "Maud After Eakins"

I decided to model the block-in to help clarify my thoughts about how to proceed with the painting. My guess was that just like a photo of a person tends to highlight the darks and lights, resulting in a flat appearance, the photo of a painting would probably result in the same effect. So I decided not to copy the values exactly as they appear in the reproduction but to instead conceptualize the forms with regard to their angle to and distance from the light source. The way that I imagine Eakins, with his training, and interest in optics, would have worked. I spent a lot of time working and re-working the face trying to show the compressed range of values in the shadow side of the face without having it look spotty, or like a topo map. I think having this drawing as a guide will definitely help with the painting. If I had the time, I would make a drawing like this for everything I'm painting, including still lifes. There's something about the slow process of pencil modeling that helps me to slow down and really start to understand what's going on. I tried out a new kind of pencil that was recommended to me by one of my instructors. It's a mechanical pencil that holds .3 size lead, which is small enough to model forms without ever having to be sharpened. It's not quite as subtle as a sharpened point but it's pretty close and you don't have to stop, ever, which allows one to easily reach that heightened state of concentration.

"Maud" after Eakins

Last summer I did a copy of one of Sargents little Capri girl paintings so this summer I decided to try an Eakins. The drawing and painting are both 8"x10". I transferred the block-in with tracing paper and then did a wipeout with burnt umber. I tried to give it the look of one of Eakins unfinished paintings so I added Flake white to the lighter areas by scumbling over the wipeout. Since taking these photos I've already started to model the pencil drawing. It's amazing how broadly Eakins would paint the forms before adding just enough refinement to make them live. I don't know why I'm making such a small copy. I guess it's because I have a box of wood panels with glued linen laying around. This is going to be a fun challenge.