Friday, October 21, 2011

No Talking Tuesday # 212



No list.


The Tuesday found me in Seattle, painting my friend Anthony.

He decided to commission me to paint a portrait of him every year for the rest of our lives.

We decided that he would incur the cost of getting us together each year (plane tickets, etc.), treating me to one "nice" meal, and in return I would paint his portrait and leave the finished painting with him with no additional cost.

The two of us seem to somewhat regularly shuffle around which cities we live in, so this year I flew up to Seattle from San Francisco for about a week. The nice meal was at an amazing small-plate french restaurant that more than qualified as per our terms of agreement.

I spent the week with Anthony and my good friend Brad, the three of us going out to eat regularly. They both know of my passion for ducks, which includes eating them. For whatever reason, Seattle restaurants/cafes have a preponderant amount of duck options on their menus. And since I can't very well choose a non duck based meal over a duck-licous one, the first six meals (2.5 days) I was in Seattle, I succeeded in having duck for every meal.

The point of the trip being painting, and not eating ducks, sadly didn't go as well... I decided to paint in a semi traditional method, doing a charcoal sketch, deepened with ink washes, and heightened with gesso on heavyweight paper that was soaked and nailed to a board to dry, that I then sealed with acrylic matte medium, and painted with thinned oils.

Unfortunately I wasn't careful enough with my measurements with the drawing and ended up doing some back tracking in the painting, which suffered in its own right from my having neglected oil painting in the last few years. The end result wasn't too impressive, and I decided to abort and start over.

The second painting was more carefully measured by taking a photo, gridding it and transferring a rough drawing to a larger gridded drawing, which I then worked on as a drawing with charcoal and heightened with white chalk.

By this point however we were running out of time, and finding myself disoriented by the changing light conditions, could only really make progress for a couple hours in the early morning.

So by the end of the trip I only succeeded in doing a decent oil painting of someone who looked kind of like Anthony (but not really), and a more accurate charcoal drawing, but which wasn't painted.

Anthony was disappointed but understanding, I for my part was shamed and made to feel the consequences of neglecting one of my mediums for so long. It was a humbling experience that has lit a new flame under my ass to get back into oil painting.

I took a photo of Anthony before he drove me to the airport, and will make up for my failures by doing a strong painting of him from this photograph. I'm confident that this painting will reflect my ability, and satisfy his expectations, and next year I plan to be able to come through during the live session, and not have to resort to painting from a photo afterwords, as I am this year.


Below is a in progress shot of the first painting, before I layered on the oils:






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