Haven’t posted here in a bit but I have been busy in the studio. I have half a dozen new paintings started and a couple more panels primed and ready to start. I wanted to document and share the progress on this one in particular though.
The subject is the delightful Dr. Hinkie. He has been teaching our son Theo to play the violin for the past few years and I’ve been interested in painting his portrait for a while now. I finally got the nerve to ask if he would be willing to be a subject for me and he has graciously agreed to do so.
Here’s the initial transfer of the composition onto a prepared 16″x24″ ACM panel. Standard working process for me at this point – I’ve copied it over in charcoal and then gone over the lines with a black caran d’ache pencil to get the rough placement of everything ready for actual paint layers.
Normally I would follow this up with a “wipe-out” but I’ve found that while the effect of the wipe out is quite satisfying, it actually does destroy much of the underlying drawing. I begun to utilize a color-staining approach instead recently and have found it much easier to get into the early layers of paint that way. Or at least I feel like I’m needing to do less work correcting drawing errors in the early layers this way.
Here’s the initial color block in. I’ve just tried to mix up something close to the local hue and block that in with a very thinned out oil paint. While the cara d’ache pencils are water soluble, which means they shouldn’t be oil soluble, they are still affected by the lavender spike I use a thinner for the oil paint. It’s always tempting to try to mass in with the thinned paint it’s a quick way to start to lose the transfer line drawing. Best to save it for the next layer and accept the block in for what it is.
This is dry to the touch now and I should be able to start in on the first full body layers of paint this weekend. From the original reference photographs there were slats from plantation shutters visible behind Dr. Hinkie, normally I edit out anything from the background, but in this case it felt like these horizontal lines echoed the staff lines found on a sheet of music and so (at least for the time being) I wanted to leave them in.
I thought that with a strong light source from the right in this composition this might work well in the tradition of an interior genre painting. My college art professor liked to call these “corner space portraits” but I think that was something of a personal colloquialism rather than a agreed upon category used in history books. There is a long tradition of seeing a bit of the light source in the painting, often a window, in the corner of the painting.
I blocked in the background mass with a green. Something I’m still playing with at this point but I’m tempted to try an “old-master green” for the background. It’s a beautiful green hue that used to be fairly common in painting (Holbein loved it for his portraits) but it’s not used in modern pigments as it was made from arsenic at the time. A close approximation can, of course, be mixed from the right yellow and blue. But as the subject is himself a master musician, it was the first place my mind when trying to think of what might work well in the background.
A long way to go yet, but off to a strong start. It’s nice to be back to human portraits after so much work the past few years painting dice portraits.
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