22/02/2014
Blog entry 51:
Due to my being inspired mostly by oil painting, and many considered 'masters' of paint using oils, I feel it only right to practice with this media. As a painter, I realise that I have huge and fantastic competition and feel that I need to improve hugely to have a chance at being recognised as successful. I have throughout my Ba(hons) mainly used acrylic to find my personal voice: first combining it with biro to allow myself more control in finishing small details without too much difficulty; and as I got better I was able to paint full images in acrylic and then combine acrylic and watercolour (shown most prominently in blog entry 3) Although these different techniques are ones that I do not wish to disregard, I am aware that I need to add more strings to my bow so to speak.
In some artistic circles acrylic paint being looked down on due to it supposedly being easier to use, I personally disagree with acrylic being anything other than a good media or that it is 'easy' to use, however I have never used oil paint and how can I possibly call myself a painter without being familiar with it at all?
Before beginning I was already aware that oil takes a much longer time to dry than acrylic ranging from a day to a few weeks, meaning that I would be working onto wet paint constantly, I decided that this could either be difficult due to my not being used to working in this way, or might actually be a good thing due to finding when I was working on my acrylic skin tone experiments (blog entry 46), that because the rate at which the paint was drying, I found that areas I intended to work into wet had begun to dry and my paint brush was in fact sticking to the surface of the partially dried paint leaving unwanted marks.
My first attempt at using oil paint (oil on canvas approximately A3 size):
(This piece of work in some stages was done late at night so I have taken photographs both with and without flash to show how the work might look in a lighter environment, however due to the paint being wet, the flash in some areas has created glare.)
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| Mapping out basic light, dark and mid tones with charcoal |
When looking at how other practitioners use oil paint I found a you tube video tutorial called A Day in the Life of David Gray, by painter David Gray. The tutorial shows that Gray uses charcoal to map out areas of tone before beginning, and stetting the charcoal, as I have done above using hairspray.
To watch this tutorial please follow the link below:
(Gray, 2012)
I have not used charcoal since I was in life drawing sessions at college, and I found the medium interesting to work with and intend to experiment further with this.
For my drawing I decided to keep it rather simple and focus on painting a portrait of a character similar to that of the Narrator character I had created during task 1 (blog entry 6) I have positioned the character's hands in front of his face palms together as if praying to explore the idea of hand gestures that might depict the divine or the experience of the divine (explored in blog entry 31).
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| Oil paint palette |
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| Mapping in areas of light colour (without flash) |
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| Same as above photograph (taken with flash) |
I often find it difficult to follow the 'guideline' within fine art which suggests that only 3 tones of paint must be applied first, especially when mixing my own colour with oil paint, and although I did try to follow this, I was not particularly successful in doing so, due to this I intend to do more experiments that practice this guideline in a more restricted way.
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| Adding in basic eye colour (with flash) |
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| Adding more layers of paint (with flash) |
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| Adding more layers of paint (with flash) |
From working with paint in the past, I know that lower layers need to be added quite early, such as eyes, which I know are going to be surrounded by eyelids which come further out than the eyes themselves, so I followed protocol.
I made the decision to use black to help add in dark areas along with other mixed shades, due to my finding that I am fond of the way that black dulls the colours, this is intended use of materials which might not be advisable when first learning to mix colour. I did not used black when painting my acrylic skin tone experiments (blog entry 46) and found that I did not enjoy the way everything looked too vibrant, I feel that this did not suit my style.
Although I trusted the way in which Gray worked in the video (linked above), I was still unsure as to how exactly he has fixed his charcoal, so I had the small worry that when I added the first few layers of paint, the charcoal might smudge or mix with the paint: To my surprise I found that the charcoal did in fact stay in place, so I am now confident I can use this technique again without affecting the paint.
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| Adding in background (with flash) |
Due to this being my first time using oils, I decided to keep the background very simple, bearing in mind the Borges text, I decided to make the background dark to suggest an area with dim lighting such as the library. The contrast of the background with the skin tone was instantly noticeable, and I made the decision to have the character seemingly fade into the background, to suggest a divine or magical atmosphere, as researched in blog entry 31.
Often when painting I find that I usual get to this sort of stage where I have mostly finished the underpainting and psychologically tell myself that I cannot get any further, this issue causes me much difficulty when painting and is hard for me to put into words exactly what it is that stops me from being able to continue; however whilst creating this work I managed to push through that barrier which was a huge victory for my personal practice.
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| Building up detail (with flash) |
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| Building up detail (with flash) |
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| Building up detail (with flash) |
Once I had pushed past my personal barrier and had completely finished the underpainting, I began to build up basic detail by adding dark line and then adding dark tones, emanating out to lighter tones, this was achieved more easily than using acrylic, due to the flesh tone I had used to do the underpainting was still wet allowing me to create a more gradual build up of dark to light. After building up areas of dark, I added in areas of light to make the imagery less flat and to suggest a light source, which had to be relatively strong to pick out such detail in such a dark environment suggested by the background.
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| Building up more detail (with flash) |
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| (without flash) |
Still following the same protocol of working furthest away to closest, I added in most detail to the face, and then made myself a simple guideline to the shape of the fingers using black paint outline.
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| (With flash) |
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| (without flash) |
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| (without flash) |
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| (without flash) |
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| (without flash) |
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| (without flash) |
Whilst building up detail on the hands, I also used expressive marks around the edge of the face to make it look more like it was fading into the background, as I have mentioned in a munger of my blog entries, I am very inspired by combining older paint methods with more expressive marks, I feel that with this media I have been able to explore this further.
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| Final outcome (without flash) |
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| Final outcome (without flash) |
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| Final outcome close up (natural light) |
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| Final outcome (natural light) |
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| Final outcome close up (natural light) |
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| Final outcome (natural light) |
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| Final outcome close up (natural light) |
Sticking to my theme, I decided that I should try to make this piece seem more androgynous, in a subtle sense, simply posing the question for those who look close enough: is it a an or a woman? Although at first the face seems rather male, I have used the hands as a device to not allow the viewer the full picture of what the face looks like thus not having enough information to decipher for sure if this is meant to be male or female.
The expression with the characters hand and face are intended to be interpreted in many different ways, and open to interpretation. The character could be in a state of shock or more closely linked to my theme, in a state of prayer, and many more interpretations can be made. By doing this as Borges did with The Library of Babel, I am relinquishing some of the power I obtain over the artwork as a practitioner.
This experience has most defiantly inspired me to experiment further with oil paint and improve, I have found new love in this media and am very pleased with what I have achieved and am very inspired to move it forward.
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