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04-25-2007, 01:30 PM
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#1
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'06 Artists Mag Finalist, '07 Artists Mag Finalist, ArtKudos Merit Award Winner '08
Joined: Nov 2006
Location: U.K.
Posts: 732
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Animated self-portrait (my father coming through)
Here is a self-portrait I thought I would post. It doesn't actually look like me, but more like my father. This happened unintentionally as I was changing my facial expression while I was painting to get the painting to work. So I named it "Self-portrait (my father coming through)".
I thought I would post it after reading Alexandra Tyng's comment about having to wait until she started looking like her father before she could paint him. I have not been able emotionally to directly paint my father since he died a couple of year's ago, so this might be, perhaps, an indirect way of doing it.
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04-26-2007, 08:57 PM
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#2
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UNVEILINGS MODERATOR Juried Member
Joined: May 2005
Location: Narberth, PA
Posts: 2,485
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Thomasin, now you've made me curious--I want to see a picture of your father. To me, this is recognizable as the same "you" that is in your other self-portraits, although this has its own mood and shows a certain aspect of you. But since I haven't seen the real you, I have nothing but paintings to compare this (and the others) to.
I think, in a way, features have an androgynous quality. So many daughters look like their fathers, and so many sons resemble their mothers. I find it fascinating to look at the masculine and feminine versions of the same basic features as they are passed through generations of a family.
Back to the painting: I love those strokes of richer color in the neck, and the way you've used the texture and different paler shades in the sunny part of the face. The shadows in general are rich and colorful, not a bit dull, yet they recede. Beautiful!
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05-01-2007, 05:11 PM
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#3
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'06 Artists Mag Finalist, '07 Artists Mag Finalist, ArtKudos Merit Award Winner '08
Joined: Nov 2006
Location: U.K.
Posts: 732
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Thank-you, Alex, for your confidence in my work, and your positive comments.
It took me a while to get round to searching for a photo of myself and my father that looked similar in pose. I didn't have many, but here are two that give you some idea.
Yes, I look much more like my father than my mother, and my brother the opposite and, come to think of it, this happens to a lot of people I know. Very interesting. Slightly astray from the point, do you find that your portraits of other people look like you or have a feeling of you in them?
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To everyone else - please feel free to be honest. I think to get anywhere really, one has to receive the negative feedback as well as the positive. I, for one, think that the ugliness of the face in "Animated Self-portrait" is quite off-putting, and I wish that I could paint people who were prettier, more appealing. And the shadows and modeling look, to me now that I have been away from the painting for a month or two, more like burn scars than moving skin. This was an experiment and I took from it what worked - the colour in the shadow and the drawing with paint - and left the rest.
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05-01-2007, 07:07 PM
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#4
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Juried Member
Joined: Sep 2004
Location: Madrid, Spain
Posts: 483
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Thomasin,
I am also struck and impressed by your use of vivid/warm colours in the shadow areas and yet they manage to recede and not jump forward.
I have taken a long look at this self-portrait and compared it with two others from your site (Self-portrait as Shelmerdine and Self-portrait with migraine) and although I see similarities in some aspects, I see how your handling of the paint has evolved in 2 short years--from a more refined, "polished" finish to a more energetic juxtaposing of shapes of colour, and with a lot more impasto. I also notice how you are less inhibited by the "tightness" of drawing and are letting colour have more protagonism. I am curious, if you will permit me, are all of your works moving towards this direction, or is it just in the area of self-portraits? And was this a constant effort or was it a natural flow? I am curious mostly because I have seen this happen in other artists
__________________
Carlos
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05-01-2007, 10:56 PM
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#5
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SENIOR MODERATOR SOG Member FT Professional, Author '03 Finalist, PSofATL '02 Finalist, PSofATL '02 1st Place, WCSPA '01 Honors, WCSPA Featured in Artists Mag.
Joined: Jun 2001
Location: Arizona
Posts: 2,481
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Dear Thomasin,
This painting is lovely, dynamic and rich and sculptural. So fabulous thanks for sharing.
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05-02-2007, 11:25 AM
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#6
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'06 Artists Mag Finalist, '07 Artists Mag Finalist, ArtKudos Merit Award Winner '08
Joined: Nov 2006
Location: U.K.
Posts: 732
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Carlos - thank-you very much for your comments and your very interesting question (although you flatter me too much comparing me to the two artists you mention).
To answer your question, it seems that all my work these days is moving towards a more inventive and less inhibited stage, where the physical qualities of the paint help define the texture and structure of flesh. For a long time (since those happy, free days at university) I felt there was something very important lacking from my work, although I wasn't sure what. I thought that by refining my painting towards a brilliant realism (which I never achieved) would solve the problem, but it didn't. It just made me more precious and nervous and the paintings reflected this. After looking at one of my latest grandiose disasters in 2004, my very intelligent artist mother suggest I was putting much too much in the painting. This was a breakthrough in ideas for me because I realised that all the work taken to make the flesh look smooth and life-like (which it didn't anyway) I could achieve with just a few strokes. And when I began putting this into practise I started to see that I had much more time and energy to concentrate on other aspects of painting, such as composition, narrative, contrast, colour (things taught (and known) in primary school and stupidly dismissed when I became a "real" artist). So that was a first breakthrough.
The second breakthrough, in the past couple of years came again when I got stuck trying, again, to refine too much: not being willing to shift the figures' boundaries or outlines, or scrape off and rework when things started to feel uncomfortable. So this time, after speaking to a very intelligent university lecturer and told perhaps to add more colour to the shadows and move on to "the next level" (I hadn't a clue what that was in practice, but it did seem like the magic door to the artistic elation I was in need of). I tried and failed a few times and then decided to give it all up in favour of photorealism so I could stand a chance of being a BP Portrait award finalist. And in putting down the first areas of colour for my photorealist work, "Animated self-portrait" started to happen, and I thought the paint was looking much more unexpectedly interesting than a photorealist work might be.
So the intentions were conscious but the actual discovery of satisfying paint marks was accidental and unintentional. I did recently get tired of the choppiness of the marks in "Animated Self-portrait" and rediscovered Velasquez' rounded sculptural marks which I love using and out of that came "Figure in Turban".
And, finally, I am taking very seriously my beginnings of a painting because there is such a pocket of time there where you are uninhibited with your ideas and marks - because of the very likely event of them being covered by the "real" painting (like singing with all your soul and sense of fun in the shower because no-one can really hear you). The beginnings of a work, I feel, are essentially honest and revealing of just where you are as an artist, and so I am trying to leave beginnings showing or keep all marks the beginning ones, just working on composition and narrative i.e. keeping the marks really the means to the resulting painting and not making them the end in themselves.
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05-02-2007, 11:27 AM
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#7
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'06 Artists Mag Finalist, '07 Artists Mag Finalist, ArtKudos Merit Award Winner '08
Joined: Nov 2006
Location: U.K.
Posts: 732
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Thank-you, Chris, for your warm and generous comments. As always, they are very much appreciated.
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05-02-2007, 04:49 PM
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#8
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Approved Member
Joined: Sep 2002
Posts: 1,730
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Hmmm..... realism, I am both attracted and repelled by it.
You can become a slave to it, for me capturing things just so on a human's face is almost obsessive. It also has to be as beautiful a feminine face as I can find.
However, making a face and that lives, breathes and communicates and paint that lives as well is not the end all and be all of draughtmanship. Realism and realistic are two very different things.
Your portrait breathes, there is space, there is honesty, there is no charade.
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05-02-2007, 05:29 PM
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#9
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Juried Member
Joined: Sep 2004
Location: Madrid, Spain
Posts: 483
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Thomasin Dewhurst
The beginnings of a work, I feel, are essentially honest and revealing of just where you are as an artist, and so I am trying to leave beginnings showing or keep all marks the beginning ones, just working on composition and narrative i.e. keeping the marks really the means to the resulting painting and not making them the end in themselves.
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It is seldom I agree with an opinion 100%. This is one of those few times. In my own work, I have felt many times that the initial first stains and marks on the canvas came closer to what I was after than the actual finished piece. I personally think that the "artist" or "author" is more evident in his notebooks or sketchbooks. I am more attracted to studies in charcoal, pen, pencil or watercolour or even oil studies than finished, polished, framed pieces. I have always felt that the initial stages of a painting have a certain affinity to the notebooks and sketchbooks, only larger, and I think that it is 90% of the creative process. The remaining 10% that, at least in my case is put in to please the client (or I don
__________________
Carlos
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05-02-2007, 08:47 PM
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#10
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UNVEILINGS MODERATOR Juried Member
Joined: May 2005
Location: Narberth, PA
Posts: 2,485
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I don't find this portrait "ugly" at all. I love the marks around the mouth. They seem a little like "morphing" (you into your father) and a little like animated facial expressions. I don't know how you did it but it is very successful. Thank you for finding and posting that portrait of your father. There is a definite resemblence between the two of you. He looks like a complex person with a good sense of humor.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Thomasin Dewhurst
Slightly astray from the point, do you find that your portraits of other people look like you or have a feeling of you in them?
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That would make an amazing topic for discussion. Can we put it in the Cafe section?
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