PART THREE PORTRAIT AND FIGURE

PART THREE PORTRAIT AND FIGURE

Before I started to do some work figure portrait and self portraits, I did a lot of research and I realise that most artists do that kind of thing. It was not easy to chose to focus on one artist who especially influenced me . I was confused sometimes between what artists present in their work and what the narration is. Sometime we see simple portraits, nothing special when we first look and when we look closely we see emotion, feeling and expression which the artist transfer onto his work straight from inside. Special portrait and self portrait is something in which all kind of emotion and feeling goes into straight from inside the artist. I realise all artists work we need to judge only with understanding of what some artist presents in himself. What kind of era he was in, what behaviour was in that era and what customs they had.

I started looking at artists that are familiar to me, what artist present outside his work, what life and meaning was.

So I looked for the greatest Polish painter of the Young Polish movement. Olga Boznanska was   born in 1865 and died 1940. Because I am Polish this painter is very significant to me and I know alot about her. This spring, there was a massive exhibition of her work in the National Gallery of Warsaw so thats why I think it’s important to write about her and learn some lessons from her work.

Boznanska’s art was greatly influenced by Wilhelm Leibl and Edouard Manet. Her work is a combination of realism and impressionism. She’s also one of the greatest of Poland’s portrait painters. Boznanska’s portraits include images of both adults and children, people solemnly posing or lost in thought. Her works, dematerialised and ethereal emphasize the spirituality of her models and are psychologically expressive. She, using dynamic brush strokes and vibrant colours, produce the effect of narrowing and flattening of space.

Her work had a lot of mood of intimacy and melancholy sometimes she uses very nervous brush stroke marks and shimmering colours always something atmospheric going on in her work. She often use range of palette dominated by browns, greens, grays and blacks and used whites and pinks to counterpoint her work.

My favourite paint is the well known painting is “Girl With Chrysanthemums”. This painting focuses on the model’s face. Conveying both their emotions and the mood of the moment, we can see traits of character of this girl. This painting looks like it’s been painted only using very few shadows of grey and brown colour but in reality Boznanska used about 80 different pigments to produce this piece and in the eye alone she used 8 pigments. She sophisticated everything in the harmony of tones using her great skills.

http://www.artinconnu.com/2008/06/olga-boznaska-1865-1940.html

Another artist which I got to know and everyone has probably heard of is Friada Kahlo, July 6, 1907 – July 13, 1954, she is mostly famous for her self-portraits. In looking at her work I wasn’t only looking from the perspective from art critics who sometimes describe her work as primitive, naïve and sometimes surreal but I also looked at her private life and read an interesting novel based on her life called Frida by Barbara Mujica, this enable me to look at her work from a personal perspective which showed the pain of her illness, her sympathies with the communist party, her romances and her life with her famous husband Diago Rivera. By reading the book you can admire all of her self-portraits and look at each one from a different perspective. You can look more deeply at the portraits from her perspective.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/411193.Frida

 

 

 

PROJECT OBSERVING THE HUMAN FIGURE

EXERCISE DRAWING THE HUMAN FIGURE

For this whole part of the project, I found a live drawing class and I did a lot of quick sketches that took around 10-20 minutes. On my blog I presented some samples of the different poses of the female and male models. Because they were very quick sketches, it wasn’t in proportion. But observing human life drawings is a good way to get to know human bodies and drawing them is a good way to improve observing skills.

EXERCISE LINEAR FIGURE STUDY

With this exercise I found it difficult as I didn’t know how to do the exercise- was I meant to paint and use lines and then later fill the linear painting with bold colours or use lines throughout the painting? In the end, I did a few paintings using few acrylic paints which resemble drawings. I tried to add some tonal valuation like in normal paintings.

 

EXERCISE TONAL FIGURE STUDY

For this exercise I used acrylic paint as well and I started paining a simple outline which I filled in later with more colour. I especially concentrated on how the light appeared on the model.

 

PROJECT LOOK AT FACE

EXERCISE SELF PORTRAIT

For this exercise I used acrylic and I painted two self portraits. The first portrait was in brown colours. It was difficult to show the eyes and I think I painted the eyes too close together. I carried on the brush making and line painting like in the previous exercise and tried to shape my face to make it seem three dimensional. At the same time I wanted to add some character to my face and not look for the similarities only.

 

HEAD AND SHOULDER PORTRAIT

For this exercise I painted a portrait of my wife in acrylics. I find it difficult to paint someone that I know very well -was I painting from observation or from memory? I tried to not make it a normal portrait, just a moment stopped for a few seconds on my canvas. Painting a model from observation is not only work for the artist but for the model as well. I treated this exercise like a short colour study. I think I needed to do a couple more paintings with the model to then get onto the final study, or work quickly with all the mistakes but show the feeling and emotion. When I looked for portraits of other artists I don’t exactly look for similarities with the model but for the final work.

CREATING MOOD AND ATMOSPHERE

For this exercise, I did a lot of research and looked at many paintings and I thought very long about how to exactly create mood and atmosphere because when I look at other paintings I can always find different kinds of mood. I started looking through my photo album and tried to find some inspiration for the exercise. I tried to avoid a simple feeling like a mother holding a child, or a mother weeping over a dead son on a battlefield etc. but attempted to do something unusual. Finally I found a picture I took of my wife, on a walk in the greenery and I thought it’d be interesting to transfer it to a canvas. I painted using oils on canvas around 100cm x 100cm. The enlarged picture did not have good resolution but that was a good thing in this case as the detail of the background disappeared and model appeared in the natural way on the first plain.

What I liked in this picture was the very natural pose because the model did not know I was taking this photo so it made it more realistic and natural. The model isn’t in the centre as half the body isn’t in the shot but in my opinion this painting catched some atmosphere and it catched a moment in time.

Conveying character

Before I started this exercise I did some research and I found the artist Ransome Stanley who  produced photo realistic portraits in dialogue with animals and showed it in an unusual way. They convey many different characters from character of people to the character of animals. First painting I painted for this exercise was a portrait of my daughter, from a photo. When I took the photo, my daughter was looking under the sun and had a natural grimace. Her eyes were were squinting. I wasn’t happy with this painting but conveying character is not only finding a face with characteristic grimace but we need to investigate more deeply in that way and look what is under the face and inside from the person and then try to convert to the painting. I did another portrait of my wife. One time I was observing the face of my wife and I saw how relaxed she looks when she looks at the TV and her face portrayed a warm character. I quickly painted her to catch that moment of feeling. I think that even if you don’t know my wife you can feel the same emotion as she. This work was influenced after I looked at the work of Salustiano Garcia Cruz from Sevilla.

He produced most of his work in Renaissance attire in deceptively simple abstract space. Most of his portraits are on a black or red background but the faces are realistic and beautiful but overwhelming.

Ransome Stanley was born in 1953, London, UK. He lives and works in Munich, Germany. He views the media as an archive, from which he selects and combines to create imagery through the staging of various image planes.Stanley draws on images from bourgeois culture of the nineteenth century, Western images of Africa and colonial clichés of exoticism to raise questions about race and identity. His paintings are often photorealistic portraits combined with animals, literature or pictures within pictures.

http://www.jackbellgallery.com/artists/31-ransome-stanley/overview/

Salustiano Garcia was born in Villaverde Del Rio, Sevilla in 1965. His  work consists of  images which aspire to be more than almost-too-beautiful portraits which symbolise the very act of looking. His paintings are set in simple abstract spaces in presumed Renaissance attire. The technical perfection of the paintings is the pretext to seduce the viewer. He creates a connection with the viewer by adding a sense of beauty with the emotion and expression of the gaze.

http://www.salustiano.com/red/

PROJECT PEOPLE IN CONTEXT

EXERCISE FIGURE AND INTERIOR

This exercise I didn’t do very successfully. I painted my wife sitting on my sofa and I used acrylic paint. I tried to paint the model in same way as all the interior. I think this was maybe the right way to show some interior scenes. In the end I made some mistakes. I think the model looks like an element of the furniture and didn’t show up well on my painting.

EXERCISE TELLING A STORY

During the time of doing this exercise I was influenced by Adrian Ghenie, a young Romanian artist who mostly presents people in the context of using unusual form of expression like showing people without too many details on the face, too many details on the body but in the end its very easy to understand all emotion and context. And I tried using some of his techniques and I found a picture of my daughters and wife walking on the beach and I painted with acrylic and when we see that painting we can only guess by the background colour that they are people who are playing with the water or looking at something. I think the main thing in this painting is another natural moment rather than posed that I can transfer the photo to the canvas.

After, I did another one in a more experimental way, looking only for the pose of the models but putting it on a dark background. I showed this in a different context without the context of the sea. I tried to be experimental and do something with different meaning.

Adrian Ghenie, born in Romania in 1977. Ghenie’s themes are power and its abuses, as well as forced exile and migration. He guides us through both figurative and abstract images to show us his interpretation of history, using his highly unconventional compositions and stupendous techniques.

http://www.pacegallery.com/artists/144/adrian-ghenie