At the Museum: 36"x18" oil painting in progress

At the right is the beginning of the painting. I've positioned the main shapes on the canvas and the basic color distribution.

At the left is the painting in its present state. I was in Paris this March for a few days and had a two day museum pass. So it was museums morning and night for those two days. This is painted from a cell phone photo I took at the Musee d'Orsay. (In my determination to travel light, I left the camera at home, so I have only a few cell photos of the trip.) It was my first visit to this beautiful museum, a converted train station, that houses much of the artwork of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Portrait in Burnt Umber, and some thoughts on fugitive colors and Rembrandt

This is an 11"x14" oil sketch on canvas board, painted from life in 2008, in Anne Saitzyk's introductory painting class. We were limited to one color, burnt umber, which had to be painted fairly thickly and uniformly on the support. I actually painted the portrait into this by rubbing out paint with towels or fingers. There are a few places where I used a brush to get more darkness. (By the way, this is the same model as for Long May She Wave, but a much more realistic depiction.) This was a terrific exercise for me because it let me use the paint without needing to master using a brush at the same time.

This makes me think of fugitive colors. Something I learned at the materials seminar last Saturday is that Rembrandt used a palette loaded with fugitive colors (colors that fade badly over time). About half his palette were fugitive colors, so that there is no way for us to know what his paintings really looked like when fresh. Even partially faded, his portraits are amazingly compelling, and I feel lucky to have examples at hand to study, at the Norton Simon in Pasadena.

A few hours later: I made it over to the museum and spent some time looking hard at the Rembrandts. There were some places where it seemed very likely that colors had faded and changed, other areas that looked fresh and immediate, especially in his partially completed portrait of his young son and in his self-portrait painted during the prosperous times.

There are many, many other Rembrandt self-portraits in existence, including very moving ones painted during bad times at the end of his life (the one I've seen is at the Louvre). Taken together they are truly formidable and tell his story clearly. (You can find them easily on line at www.rembrandtpainting.net/rembrandt_self_portraits.htm .)

Later still: I've been reading the material at the above web page and it's fascinating. One very interesting term is "tronies," which describes certain "portrait" paintings that are not really portraits, in the sense that a tronie is not commissioned by a particular person, of a particular person. Instead, tronies are paintings, of exagerated expression, interesting types, the outlandish perhaps, which were made to be sold on the open market. Some apparently consider the Rembrandt self-portraits as tronies, useful to the artist as character and expression studies, popular and self-promoting as works of art.

My 2008 student version of Gustave Courbet's Early Self-Portrait, aka "Is that Johnny Depp in fancy dress?"

Gustave Courbet painted his dramatic self-portrait very early in his career. My copy (from an 81/2"x10" reproduction of the original painting), posted here, is on cardboard in oil paint. The original is astonishingly good--and also astonishing because apparently Johnny Depp has a look-alike in another time and place. (Great jumping off place for a science fiction story).

As general matter, I learned a lot by copying the work of others. This (finding something you liked and copying it in grays in the same size as the original) was an assignment in Ron Llanos' painting class at Art Center at Night. (If you're curious about Ron's critique, he thought it was okay, except for the whites of the eyes, which I made too white. He was absolutely correct. I didn't go back and change the painting, so the error is still visible.)

Flower Seller (Work in Progress)

Okay. I heightened the colors and contrast in values in some areas, I made some marks with my white and dark oil sticks and with brushes and (some) with my fingers. I'm as done as I'm going to be, until I let it rest and re-evaluate. I'm thrilled and relieved to have painted on this larger scale, 30"x40". It was much more fun than I thought it would be.

Adding leaves and stems

I've added some leaves and stems. Now, it's time for lunch and then I get to take the dog to the vet.

Painting flowers

I'm really focusing on the large shapes. I'm also incorporating some of the purple-ish flower color into the rest of the painting.

I don't worry about getting the colors (that is, for example, pink, blue, yellow, green) accurately; I do work to get the values (the relative light and dark of the colors) accurately.

Getting Some Paint on the Canvas

After the initial sketch, I stopped for several hours. I was intimidated by the white space. Usually, if I am starting a fresh canvas, I start not with a sketch but by putting down an underpainting. Mine is usually some mix of paint colors that are dark. I tend to use paint colors that are less opaque, like ultramarine blue, alizarin crimson and Indian yellow, but really it's also just as often whatever I have the most of that is left over on the palette from my last painting. I apply it as fast as I can with the largest brush that I have and usually rub it with a paper towel so that it's uneven and very thin in places, so the white of the canvas shows through. Basically, I mess up the canvas deliberately, so that I can then be fearless about painting on it.

With this painting, I have titanium white, Naples yellow, azo yellow, transparent yellow iron oxide, naphthol red, anthraquinone red, alizarin crimson, ultramarine blue, manganese blue hue and olive green on my palette. I mixed the paint with a palette knife to get some more neutral colors, then used my three-inch hardware store brush first, then my two-inch hardware store brush, then an approximately one-inch flat hog bristle brush to apply this paint. (I changed brushes mostly so that I could paint quickly, without wiping off the brush in between.) I also used my dark oil bar to paint lines.

Initial sketch

This is what I hope will be my second painting from my visit to the Vancouver, Washington farmers market.

I'm painting on a larger scale: this canvas is 30"x40." It's also a canvas that is fresh out of the wrapper (very unusual for me, since I tend to use and re-use my painting supports).

Anyway, since I actually had a white canvas to start, I decided to plan my painting directly on the canvas. I used my dark oil bar to lay down some lines that, while I will soon paint over them, at least give me some assurance that what I'm thinking of can fit well on the canvas.

My plan is to keep adding Flower Seller posts as I paint (this is this morning's work), until I either complete the painting or it morphs into something else.