Details and Impressions

I've been somewhat lethargic these past few days, but I've always made it a point to work on some drawings or my current painting even for a few minutes each day.  The painting above is going along well, albeit painfully slow.  I've just ran out of burnt sienna and I can't progress with the face or the arms wrapped around the little girl. Come to think of it, I'm running out of blues as well.  

I should have listened to an online article I read recently about starting on smaller canvases first.  This work doesn't have that much details to show to merit such a large area.  Perhaps half the present size of this canvas would have sufficed, making my life easier, and saving me a bit of paint as well.

I wanted to do an impressionist rendering of the man's shirt and pants, blurring the folds in the process, but I'm having difficulty diverging from painting wet on dry.  For one, I have no idea in controlling streaks of colors to produce shades and highlights.  When I think of wanting to warm the painting, I'm still thinking of applying a thin layer of yellow later on, rather than applying the yellow along with the other colors as I paint wet on wet.  

It's sort of scary, to work wet on wet.  I still keep memory of a very early attempt at painting in mind.  When I was a lot younger, and after a number of visits at the NSW Art Gallery, I was captivated by the Gallery's impressionism collection.  I remember even buying a publication that showed and commented in much detail Pierre-Auguste Renoir's works.  I wanted to do something like that, and in a fit of assiduousness, I went about stretching my first canvass, applying primer and finally  painting.

With nary a preparatory sketch and any form of reference in hand, I started drawing in shapes onto my canvas and without a trace of trepidation, started applying in large blobs the cheap acrylic paint I bought from a school supplies store.  It didn't take long before I finally manage to muddy a lone tree and grayed the dress of a young girl.  Also, it didn't take long for the muddy paint to dry either.  After a few more attempts at rectifying the mess I have done, I finally covered the whole canvass with primer once again, only to find that an outline of a girl and tree could be seen as a relief on the primed surface.  Disheartened as I was, I tore off the canvas and ended up sulking for a few days.

For this painting, I also wanted to render the face and arms with significantly more details to allow it to standout against the feathery background.  It's almost the same concept in photography when you'd focus on a subject and render everything else in front of and behind the subject blurry.  But rather than mimicking the effects of optics in a photograph, I wanted to feather the background here using impressionist strokes  and raise the subject by being more exact with facial details.

It's one thing to say it, and quite another to do it.

That's one of the reason why I'm blogging right now – I have a need to concretize my ideas which for the meantime I cannot transfer onto a canvas because of technical inadequacies. 

Even as I work on this painting, I have a few more that I am developing in my mind.  Whatever I learn from this present one, I will have to apply to my later projects which I think is far more technically complicated, and more symbolically rich.

The thing is, I developed this little girl painting when I couldn't satiate my interest in photography.  With only a camera phone in hand, I had to make do with VGA resolution pictures and very poor dynamic range.  Then, the only thing that mattered was composition, framing and an aesthetic subject.  Communicating anything deeper was not in my list of priorities.

But having worked with photography for so long now, I have come to realize how difficult it was to communicate symbols in a picture.  Such things get lost in the clutter of details, and even if you manage to isolate it, the way we have been trained to look at photographs make us dismiss these symbols and assume that their presence in the photo is accidental.

In painting, no element can be accidental.  For one, the painter had painstakingly painted that object and integrated it into his composition.  With so much work put on an element, the viewer must certainly ask:  why?