Portrait 2 -Are We There Yet?

I tell myself I’m going to paint today.

I am absolutely going to paint today.

I’ve woken late, and why not. It’s been a long week (isn’t it always) and I am just going to let myself chill out for a bit. I make coffee and pad around in my pyjamas. Side note – when my slippers were new my feet felt like they were floating on cosy clouds. They don’t feel like that anymore. Still warm, they have nevertheless lost some kind of quintessential magic, which I now miss a little bit.

I eat cereal and check my emails. Nothing much going on. In the background the painting is looking hopefully in my direction. I watch an episode of Parks and Recreation and I take a shower. I’m going to start painting as soon as I am dressed.

Louise texts me asking if I want to meet for coffee in Broadway Market. That sounds good. I should get some fresh air anyway. I put on my big coat and head out. We sit on a bench in London Fields with our cardboard cups of coffee, dog-spotting (one of the best things in life short of actually having a dog), then we browse some arty bookshops, and then we walk to Columbia Road flower market where I buy an orchid for £2 (possibly the greatest bargain ever). It starts to rain so we go for a pint and we a stay in the pub as the rain gets heavier and the afternoon stretches out into evening and Lou’s flatmate Hubie joins us. Then we pick up pizzas and we watch TV at their place and I roll home shortly before midnight.

An undeniably lovely day.

But I didn’t paint.

I come back to it the next afternoon. I’m not really feeling it, to be honest. I think I’m coming down with a cold, and I am tired and listless, and I don’t really know what to do next with the painting. I should do something though. After all, did I not just write a whole (very public) blog entry about getting on with it? I did. So I do.

The last couple of paintings I did in 2014 I was trying out glazes. You thin the paint down with a mix of Linseed oil and turpentine until it has a runny, watery consistency, then you apply that to the surface of the painting. Because it is so thin, it does not obscure the paint beneath, but rather creates a tint. You can slowly build up layers of glaze to create all kinds of delicate richness.

I’m not in the mood for that today, though. It’s just too precious and meek. Anyway, looking again at the photograph, all that loud colour suggests a more direct approach, for now at least. I may come back to glazing later on.

So I just keep going with the approach I have already taken so far, except I want to increase the contrast and start giving the painting more body. I don’t start anywhere in particular, just little dabs of paint here and there. Earlier on I was wary of introducing the Holi colours too early as I didn’t want the ‘map’ of values to get lost, but it’s beginning to feel like I won’t get very far without something. I don’t really understand how these colours are going to work – they are out of the range of my palette and I am actually a little nervous about using them. Still, they are very much a feature in what I am trying to portray, so I should just get on with it. I start gingerly working in some subdued ultramarine blue. The world doesn’t end, so I start making bolder moves with a wider range of colours – nothing too big, but enough to feel like I’m not tiptoeing around.

I’m never quite sure when to begin focusing on detail. In the underpainting I have a bit of a system, but once I get to this ‘middle-game’ things are a lot more fluid. I might go into detail in one area for a while but leave another untouched. Constant tweaks and revisions, trying to keep things in balance, trying to track down the elusive things that identify the image with the subject.

I want to do something with the eyes. They aren’t the brightest thing in the image, but they’re definitely the focal point, and they seem like a good place to start. I find an approximation of the greenish hue of the pupils, somewhere between Ultramarine, Yellow Ochre and White, and spend a few minutes going into a fair amount of detail. It’s not definitive and I will certainly need to do some refining, but it gives me a chance to get to grips a little with this thing. Looking at the ‘whites’ of the eyes, it’s hard to figure out what colour they really are. Certainly it’s not white. I mix up something a little less brilliant (a sort of pinkish grey) and try it out. It’s okay. Still too bright, probably, but putting this in makes me consider the shape of the eye, and the colours and tones surrounding it. The eye on the left (her right) looks huge, but I’m not worried about that really – I have plenty of time to refine things.

Painting this detail highlights the need to make other changes, to balance things out. In some ways it’s like the painting is constantly telling you where it needs to go. A bit of light on the cheek makes the nose look too flat, so you go there. Then the forehead looks to be in shadow, and so on. This can be useful and productive, but too much chasing around and the painting can spiral out of control. It’s essential to look, always, at the source image, and to keep stepping away from the canvas to view it from a distance. It helps me keep perspective.

I lose a few days to the rest of what constitutes life and when I come back I have to spend a while just looking at the painting, trying to figure out how to get back into it, and what should come next. I notice she is looking pretty orange; like the victim of a terrible accident in a tanning salon, in fact. Most of what is on the canvas at this point is still the sienna underpainting, so that’s not surprising, but rather than just continuing to add little dabs of colour here and there, I decide it’s time to apply a glaze. I want to cool the sienna down, and start to brighten things, so I use Yellow Ochre. Diluting it with glaze medium (which dries faster than just linseed and turpentine), I paint this loosely over most of the face, then use a dry brush to work it in and a dry cloth to take it away where it makes no sense or I’m just not keen. This doesn’t take long, and it’s not a profound change but it gives me something new to start working into, and it helps the canvas to accept the introduction of new paint; if that makes sense…

The ochre looks a little sickly and pallid, so I do the same thing with Cadmium Red. Application of these transparent layers of colour start to create the sense of something approaching skin. After that it’s back to the incremental application of little daubs of opaque paint; two steps forward and one back, through the next couple of weeks, as I start building the whole thing up, and bringing in the splashes of bright colour that cover large parts of her face.

Sometimes I paint for an hour and it is hard to discern any real difference. Maybe I am still being too timid. Or I do make progress, but then over a day or two the drying process takes away some of the clarity and focus the piece has when the paint is fresh, probably because I am trying to apply detail onto a surface that has not dried sufficiently. But I remind myself frequently that I am still learning, still little more than a beginner in this world; and there is so much to learn. And gradually she takes shape until I think she’s just about finished, or at least I am happy with the extent to which she remains unfinished.

Knowing when to stop is difficult. There is always something that could be improved or developed, but at the same time I don’t want to overwork and tweak and worry the life out of the painting. Eventually I put down the brushes and I just tell myself I am finished for now. I can always come back later on if I feel the need, but hopefully by then I’ll have moved on to some other piece.

It’s been so nice to get back into painting after such a long break. I have re-learnt a lot of things I had forgotten, and picked up some other bits I hadn’t figured out before. Hopefully the next one will be another progression, but for now I am pretty happy.

Portrait 1 – So Far, So Good

I was in Pushkar, Rajasthan, for the Holi festival in March. Celebrated around the time of the Vernal Equinox, Holi celebrates the arrival of spring and the triumph of light over darkness. On the eve of the festival bonfires are lit in the streets and there is drumming and dancing. Then the following morning it is the festival of colours. Thousands of people gather to throw paint at each other, while the local children stalk the narrow streets armed with water bombs and supersoakers, setting up ambushes for revellers and passersby, alike. There is drumming and drinking and deafening psy-trance soundsystems. It’s chaos, basically.

Anyway, in the aftermath I took some photographs of the friends with whom I was travelling, with an eye to at some point trying to paint some of them.

I met Caro at four in the morning a couple of days prior. I had been woken by a gentle tapping at my door and opened it to find two of my companions from weeks before, grinning at me in the 3am half light. Not wanting to wake anyone else we went and sat on one of the day-beds in the open aired courtyard space between the guestrooms and started swapping stories of our travels since we had last met. Before long this waif-like English girl appeared and informed us that we were sitting on her bed. The rooms had been sold out so the owners were letting her sleep out here. A long-term insomniac, she wasn’t all that interested in kicking us out, so the four of us sat there wrapped in blankets, chatting and watching the sun come up. After that we hung out for a few days, and I ran into Caro again in Udaipur a week or two later, where she was drawing and making friends with the locals.

I like this photograph. It encapsulates that time really well. The paint, the light, Caro’s extrovert, goofy personality. I like the movement of the image; the way it captures a moment. So I decided to paint it. And having started painting it, I have now decided to start writing about painting it. That is as far as it goes, though. I will try to avoid writing about writing about painting it…oh hang on…no…I just did.

Anyway. I thought I would talk about my process.  This may be boring.

Medium: I paint in oils. It’s what I like and they are what I have to hand, so no deliberations required there. I use mostly Windsor and Newton’s Winton range – they are student quality and nicely affordable, but much better than the introductory level stuff. I would like to use better paints but…money. I use linseed oil and distilled turpentine as paint thinners.

Ground: Most of the pieces I have done have been on largish canvases. It’s nice to work on a decent scale (compared to tiny sketchbooks), but I am left with a stack of canvases I don’t know what to do with. I don’t want them on my walls; they are too big and I don’t like them enough. They are also awkward things to give away at that size. Maybe at some point I will be good enough that such a gift wouldn’t be a bit weird, but I’m not there yet. So this time I thought it would be nice to do something small, and I chose a 20x20cm pre-stretched canvas.

Brushes: I mainly use a few fairly small flat hog brushes. I think I have a couple of rounds and filberts too, but I don’t have much of a system.

Colour: My early paintings were a mess. I would put every colour I had on the palette, and then get totally lost. I would be unable to remember how I found a particular colour mix, and the paintings themselves tended to be really unbalanced. These days I use just 5 colours: Burnt Umber, Burnt Siena, Yellow Ochre, Cadmium Red (synthethised – real cadmium costs a bomb) and French Ultramarine. I also use a lot of Flake White (again, synthetic as the real stuff is full of lead and is pretty toxic) and occasional bits of Titanium White for highlights. This is the palette which Anthony Connolly describes in his excellently useful book ‘Painting Portraits‘ – discovering the importance of restricting my palette was a real breakthrough, as it helped me structure things much better, especially in the early stages of a painting.

For this particular painting, I am going to have a bit of a challenge, as I want to capture the vibrancy of the holi colours, and so I might have to venture out of my safe zone a bit, but I’ll get to that further down the line.

Getting Started: I started with tinting the canvas. Thinning down some Burnt Siena with turpentine, I quickly painted over the whole thing, then used a rag to take excess paint off so it would dry quickly. Then I drew in a grid.

Working from a photo has its drawbacks, but it does make it easy to get the basic drawing right. The image is a bit small, so I put tracing paper over the photograph and used a ruler to draw a square grid, with lines 2cm apart, then marked in the position of the eyes, nose, mouth and the outline of the face. It’s a bit of a cheat but it’s quicker than doing it freehand and since I have a static image to work from, I don’t see why I shouldn’t do it this way. Next I scaled up the grid to fit the canvas and drew it on x1.6, then added in the outline by eye. Now I had this flat thing to start painting into, I realised it was late, so I went to bed.

I woke up early to a clear blue sky. I made some coffee and I painted in my pyjamas for about an hour. Working in Burnt Siena again, I marked in the general areas of light and dark in an attempt to give the whole thing some body. Since none of the paint is dry at this point, I would usually use a rag to pull paint off the canvas where I want the highlights to be, but this time I totally forgot to do that. In fact I only remembered about 15 seconds ago. Like I said, it’s been nearly 2 years since I painted anything and I am rusty. Anyway, this process starts to create something in the way of body, and it’s a good way of observing the image. A good amount of painting is just figuring out how to look properly, and this initial sculptural process forces you to do that without complicating the matter with colour.

After I got as far as I felt I could with the Siena (and a little bit of white for highlights) I let it sit for the rest of the day. It was a pretty good day. I gave a friend a massage, then I drove to Tring to help another friend undercoat her walls. This worked out especially well, because having made that kind gesture, we didn’t do any painting in the end, but just drank coffee and ate cake. Win.

I came back to the painting the next night. No one was around, so I moved into the living room, turned all the lights on, put on the new album by Hamilton Leithauser & Rostam (it’s good) and got back to work. This time I started increasing the contrast, using Burnt Umber, more Flake White, and a few dabs of Ultramarine for the really dark bits. With those three colours and white, you can get a huge tonal range. I was trying to avoid too much colour, but focusing on making a drawing.

I wanted to get a hint of what the crazy colours will do though, so I put some unmixed cadmium on her scarf. I also put in some background light to heighten the contrast. By now there was a lot of wet paint on the canvas and I was getting to that point where I needed to stop. Someone called me and I chatted for a while, absent-mindedly prodding, but I managed to stop myself before any damage was caused. That’s as far as I have got.

I don’t feel much of a likeness yet, and it doesn’t feel very expressive of anything, but I’m fairly happy. The next bit will be more dangerous, but also more fun. We’ll see how it goes.

There Goes The Fear

I took up painting a few years ago, almost by accident. I had no expectations, but I found myself liking it, so I kept going. Not consistently, but I would have little bursts of productivity. I gravitated towards painting portraits, for whatever reason – it just seemed to fit. Then two years ago I went to Wiltshire for a week to take a life-painting course with Tony Connolly of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. It was great. I learned a lot in a short time and, though I have no illusions about my abilities in the scheme of things, I was definitely starting to get somewhere.

Self portrait, 2013         Morley Beswick, 2014       Kimberly Del Menard, 2014

Since then I have barely touched a paintbrush. I had other things going on, and I was rarely in the mood; that peculiar sense of flowing inspiration which comes along once in a blue moon. When I was in the mood, I always seemed to find some reason not to get on with it. The light was poor, or I didn’t have any rags, or I couldn’t settle on a subject. So it goes, and so it has gone.

Then two days ago I started on a new painting; a portrait of a friend who I met in Pushkar in Rajastan. I don’t know what got me started. Possibly it was going to the wonderful Georgia O’Keefe exhibition at the Tate on Friday.

I’m a little nervous about this painting. This happens a lot. Initially the stakes are low. There’s just a stained canvas and an impulse to paint. But as I make progress through the underpainting and it seems to be going well, I start to fret. The painting is so fragile at this point, and I know how easy it is to mess things up. I’m still pretty new to this. In fact every time I come back to the brushes, I worry I will have forgotten how to do it. There is a lot of guesswork and I might make a mistake.

Don’t get me wrong. Without failure, without being open to risk, there is no growth. I know this. As Beckett said – ‘no matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better’. I want to get better. I need to get better, in fact, because I have a wealth of shortcomings. But when something is going well I want to keep it that way.

There is another danger, which goes like this: I start to paint, and it’s going well. I start getting a likeness. It’s on the canvas, but it’s also something happening in my head. This is one of the things I really love about portraiture. One of the first paintings I did was of a picture of my mum down the river from our house on a windy afternoon. She is turning towards the camera and leaning back slightly and she looks like she is about to say something amiable (as she does). There is something about her in that image – the posture, the angle of her head – which is undeniably her, and I caught it. The painting itself was naïve and poorly executed, but nevertheless, there she was.

Some time later I painted my friend Coops from a photo Andy Small had taken for our band. It wasn’t the most expressive of images, but as I worked I could hear his voice, sense his mannerisms; his funny little quirks; the incessant flow of his riffing, punning verbosity which I so enjoy about him as a friend.

Andrew Cooper – 2013

It is this sense of tuning in to the person (as I see them anyway) and putting them on a canvas, that I love about making portraits. I get caught up in it. In the moment of finding this thing, I feel very alive. In fact I feel ecstatic.

But I stay too long. There is always a point where I should stop. I should step away and come back in a couple of days once the oil has had a chance to dry a little and is ready to be worked on again. But I don’t want to stop, so I keep going and the paints start to bleed together in unwanted ways. Or in my self-satisfied excitement I become cavalier. I start dancing around, caught up in this glorious moment. I start wielding the brush like a rapier, and this becomes my focus. Not the work, or the subject, but the act of painting itself. I stop looking. I stop being attentive. And then before I know it I’ve committed some glaring, hideous crime against the painting. The likeness is gone. The colours are an unsubtle mess. At worst, I am so caught up that I don’t even notice. I just go on, blithely daubing until finally I actually look at what I’ve been doing.

And then I feel sick. Twisted up with fury and frustration at myself and my hopeless ineptitude, and spinning out into a general state of misery that can last for hours It can get pretty ugly. It’s annoying; not least because I do know, as I said before, that failure is important.

These days I am better at keeping a sense of perspective (and knowing when to put down the brushes), but awareness of this tendency is another thing that prevents me from starting. It is easier to leave it for another day, another week, another year. There is comfort in knowing that maybe, if you had given it your all, you could have been a contender. And it is tempting to bask in the shadowy glories of what might have been if you had really applied yourself.

Well, enough of that. I’ve been guilty of that way of thinking for way too long.

Time to just get on with it.

London Loves

I’ve been out of love with London.

Was I ever in love with London?  I’m not sure.  We’ve had our little romances over the years, but since I got back from India it hasn’t held much appeal.  Still, today was one of those beautiful early Autumn golden days when London likes to pull out the stops and remind you what a wonderful place it can be when it’s in the mood to be so.

I finished work early and found myself at a loose end and in a slow, wandering kind of mood, so I took a long way home.  Up Kingsland Road out of Hoxton, through Dalston, Stoke Newington, Stamford Hill, stopping in for a pint at a pub called the Bird Cage, the best thing about which is its name.

There’s a lot to like about this walk; an endless variety of life.  Barbers advertising Senegalese hairstyles proclaiming ‘This is what you want’; the shop called ‘Many Items 98+’, which surely promises goods priced above 98p.  Burley Fisher Books, where I browsed for ages in indecision before the shopkeeper took me under his wing and guided me through a maze of books until he found one I was absolutely in the mood for.  Bemusing hipster boutiques with motorbikes for decoration which sell beard oil and angle-poise desklamps.  Turkish Restaurants, chicken takeaways, bars, cafes, charity shops.  Snooker halls haunted by pale working class boys in tracksuits and black trainers and quiffs, staggering drunks and lycra-clad cyclists jumping the traffic lights.  Hybrid buses and white vans, Hassidic Jews in fantastically dowdy clothes, Moslem women in brightly coloured hijabs.

There is a state of mind I find when I am travelling; an alertness and a capacity for wonder.  Usually back home in the UK I don’t feel it.  I slumber through daily routines of work and bus journeys and my adoptive city seems drab and uninspiring.  Someone (Dr Johnson I think) said that he who is tired of London is tired of life.  I never agreed, but today I have to concede he may have had a point.

…sorry…I didn’t take any pictures…