Jane and Iona

[Garth Herrick]

Dear Holly, Janel, Patricia, Jane, Chris, Joan, Michele, Josef, Sharon, Mary, Terri, Jean, Marvin, and Denise,

Thank you all so much for your kind praise and encouraging responses! I feel a great debt of gratitude to you all, and your superlative reactions to my painting are a hard act to follow. With all the struggle and challenge I felt I was facing with this painting along with endless revisions and a seemingly unrealistic deadline, I feel truly honored that it is being received so well here, and humbled by all your collective accomplishments as well. On Friday, it was heartily received at a public unveiling in Reading, Pennsylvania, where Governor Ed Rendell and the First Lady, Midge Rendell were able to view it (although I was in Massachusetts at the time attending as a dinner guest at Edith Wharton's home and estate; what a life!). By the way, Jane's family readily shared their approval of it too on Friday!

The fact that you are all so approving is all the more amazing to me when I consider where I was with this painting just twenty-four hours before I delivered it, last Thursday. I am not sure how I did this, myself. The painting was in a state of considerable transition and revision. with a number of major corrections prospectively mapped out in hatches and dashes. The background was pretty much fine, but I ended up repainting all of Jane and Iona (face, suit, hands, scarf, skirt, dog, and more) in the intervening twenty-four hour period, without any breaks (I did not know this was possible to do at such a frenetic pace). What mainly made it possible to pull this off was being able to be absolutely certain that the paint values were exactly where I needed them to be. Once the paint was applied, I made virtually no value adjustments or corrections.

How my system of painting works is complex, and involves (currently) a 52 level gray scale I developed and carefully calibrated over many months of trial and error. This gray scale is archived in individual tubes of paint, from which I have painted small hand held reference scales for value comparison and analysis. Basically I can see in a fleeting glance if any value in the painting needs to be even subtly adjusted, even before everything is placed and indicated, in order to fit with the intended grand scheme of the painting. This gray scale is precisely calibrated with the Lab Color scale used in the reference image in Photoshop. I also have calibrated my printer to produce prints in precisely the value, hue and chroma I intend to paint; so a few handy reference prints really helped out too. The Photoshop reference, the reference prints, the 52-level gray scale and the painting are all simultaneously in perfect calibrated agreement. This does not mean it is better to paint this way than from life. Hardly! But the reality of commuting a great distance for every sitting, and even then being very limited with available scheduling, somewhat dictated a different, more comprehensive approach to finishing this portrait.

Initially I painted much of this painting directly from live sittings, however I found it challenging to maintain Jane's (not to mention Iona's) focus and attention. We did have some wonderful conversations though, after we discovered we hailed from the same neighborhood. This did immensely influence the outcome of this painting, but ultimately I relied mostly on the reference photograph to finish it. In the last hours, I found myself mainly adhering to an alla-prima handling of the paint, melding every transition together wet into wet, until it looked resolved (or resolved enough). Had there been more time alloted, I would have striven for perfection, but I am pretty happy with the finish as it turned out, last Thursday.

Jane gets all the credit for the color scheme, as she selected her own outfit. I was thrilled with this composition from the beginning. I shot several hundred reference photo variations, and out of them all this one really stood out for Jane's family and I. In the color development of this painting, I did not put any thought into rules about arranging warm against cool, or anything else, because I wanted to see this image objectively. The color development simply evolved naturally from observation.

Actually I am not sure what else to add here. I probably have rambled on too long already. I really appreciate the strong support and response from all of you. It feels great!

Thanks again,

Garth

[Renee Price]

This is a fantastic painting and I second every other adjective used here! And if your painting was not impressive enough.... Wow! I've tubed a paltry 9 values for 4 colors so I know how time consuming tubing is, so I can't imagine the amount of time and work you have put into your palette. I am impressed--not only by the quality and sensitivity of the painting, but also by the work ethic behind it. Magnificent!

Renee Price

[Garth Herrick]

Dear Renee,

Thanks! I think it is fantastic that you have tubed 9 values for four colors! I never did that; I merely created a referencing system to tell me where to mix and place my values. By the way, which four colors did you process into 9 values?

Garth

[Renee Price]

Dear Garth,

I mixed 9 values of neutral (ivory black, raw umber, & flake white), 9 values of yellow ochre (adding raw umber to darken values), 9 values of red ochre & 9 values of Indian Red (adding ivory black to darken and flake white to lighten). It took several days to tube them all, but it's so much easier to squeeze out only what I need. Later I added ultramarine in values 5, 6, & 7, and asphaltum in values 1, 2, & 3.

I would love to know more about the referencing system you developed. All those values! Wow! What colors did you use?

Again, your painting is excellent!

Renee

[Ngaire Winwood]

And Garth gets the Gold Medal in my opinion.

As a student I don't understand the tubing and 52 gray scale bit explanation, but hopefully this will be explained in more detail soon so students like myself can appreciate soulful paintings like this even more than WOW!. To me the composition and, and, and, ..................WOW! Thanks for logging on Garth.

[Michele Rushworth]

Garth, I wanted to ask you a question about your choice of background. It seems so informal and like a genuine slice of her life. I asume this was a conscious choice. Was it something you, the subject or the people who commissioned it asked for? It's so different from the formal, or at least, highly "arranged" backgrounds I see in almost all other commissioned portraits.

[Garth Herrick]

Originally Posted by Renee Price

Dear Garth,

I mixed 9 values of neutral (ivory black, raw umber, & flake white), 9 values of yellow ochre (adding raw umber to darken values), 9 values of red ochre & 9 values of Indian Red (adding ivory black to darken and flake white to lighten). It took several days to tube them all, but it's so much easier to squeeze out only what I need. Later I added ultramarine in values 5, 6, & 7, and asphaltum in values 1, 2, & 3.

I would love to know more about the referencing system you developed. All those values! Wow! What colors did you use?

Again, your painting is excellent!

Renee

Renee,

You are amazing to have mixed and tubed so many colors you can really use in a portrait! What I simply did was mix proportions of Ivory Black and Titanium White (both Old Holland, the Titanium white is pure titanium, no zinc) merely for the purpose of value comparison. I am not painting with these grays, well not much. They are rather cold grays. I found that the particular black and white I used had about as close to equal tinting strength relative to each other as it probably gets, which was great for keeping track of proportions. For this equality it was important that there was no zinc presence in the white. Some day it would be nice to catch up to you and have some colors ready-tubed in nine values, or so.

Garth

[Garth Herrick]

Originally Posted by Ngaire Winwood

And Garth gets the Gold Medal in my opinion.

As a student I don't understand the tubing and 52 gray scale bit explanation, but hopefully this will be explained in more detail soon so students like myself can appreciate soulful paintings like this even more than WOW!. To me the composition and, and, and, ..................WOW! Thanks for logging on Garth.

Hi Ngaire,

Thanks! Your compliment is way too much, I think; but I had a good chuckle.

I work quite a lot from digital images in my computer as painting references. However, I find it difficult and tricky to paint directly from my computer monitor, as a reference next to my easel. It is hard to judge values from an image composed of light, and translate this into an image composed of pigments. I am trying to bridge this gap with my numerical value index referencing system as a guide.

I use Photoshop which has some great tools. In Photoshop there is an Info Box that will tell you a numerical formula for the precise color the cursor is positioned upon. As the cursor is moved to a new spot, new numbers will be presented. Instead of the commonplace RGB mode, I use Lab as the image mode, because Lab has a number representing the value of the color in the formula. The value scale in Lab runs from 100 representing pure white, to 0, representing pure black. Essentially this is an 101 level gray scale built into Photoshop.

I mixed 50 mostly evenly dispersed gray values in paint, which have been assigned numerical values to relate to the Lab scale in Photoshop. From this I have painted handy reference charts to translate and compare values as I paint. If the cursor points to a shadow in the digital reference, and the info box indicates a Lab value of 37, I can rotate my handy value index to the paint chip closest to value 37, and compare that to the color I have applied or am about to apply to the corresponding shadow in the painting. This way I can quickly see if it needs to be darker or lighter, or if I happened to get it right on the first try, with simple observation.

In a nutshell, this is what my 52 tubes (including black and white) of gray are all about. I hope this helps to answer your question.

Regards,

Garth

[Garth Herrick]

Originally Posted by Michele Rushworth

Garth, I wanted to ask you a question about your choice of background. It seems so informal and like a genuine slice of her life. I asume this was a conscious choice. Was it something you, the subject or the people who commissioned it asked for? It's so different from the formal, or at least, highly "arranged" backgrounds I see in almost all other commissioned portraits.

Hi Michele,

Actually the background was not much discussed with the client. I simply painted what was already there. Some of the item happened to have much personal significance to the client, so it was satisfying that they were included in an incidental way. All that was changed from the reference image was Jane's ring on her finger, and the removal of my totally incongruent Gitzo tripod, which was lurking uninvited in the background.

Here is the photo reference, and the painting beneath. So you can see I took the easy route and just painted what was there. I liked the composition from the beginning, so I just left it alone.

Garth

[Renee Price]

Garth,

Thank you for explaining your value method--it was a great 'light bulb' moment. You've done all that work and you want to catch up to me?? Haha! I'm playing catch up!

Renee