Category Archives: Portraits

On My Own . . . Sort of

Posted by Aline on

No more class on painting the contemporary portrait.  No more Saturday life group.   Both are victim to the school calendar and to the need of the graduating Bachelor of Arts students at the NH Institute of Art for space to exhibit their senior projects.  (This is a wonderful exhibit, by the way; if you can get there during the run, you really should go.)  Even my Sunday morning ad hoc group was cancelled.  I had no organized artist activities for a whole week, and I had two whole weekend days with no workshops.  In short, I was on my own.

First I chose to clean up some paintings in waiting.  I went all the way back to my Florida trip in March for this one:

Marco Island Medical Center

The main focus of this plein air painting was the reflections in the big picture windows, and I was happy enough with how I portrayed them.  But the painting was unremarkable, dull, boring.  I thought I could jazz it up with new treatments for the tree and the grass.  Better now, right?

Next I turned to last week’s painting of our model in the brown recliner–painting No. 4 of her in that thing.  I did a little bit of this, a little bit of that, refining some areas, blurring others.

The Pose, Take No. 4

This might be Stage 2 in a multi-stage painting.  I’m thinking I would like the arm on the left more in the shadow, and perhaps all of her shadows should be darker.  I don’t care for the Barbie doll look of her features, but I’m not quite sure what to do about that.  What I do like is the new treatment of the aqua drape and  the background.

Another past painting touch up victim was last week’s “Iris Interpreted”.  I hope you like what I did to her face and the lower right corner.

Iris Interpreted

Finally, I struck out for new territory.  But it was territory based on last week’s drawing of the black and white couple.   Here is a glimpse of my set up as I copied the drawing into paint:

High Contrast in the making

Try as I might, I could not make his skin less white and her skin more black. That happens sometimes–the painting refuses to be what I want it to be.

I discovered the magic of a brayer on this painting.  The brayer is a roller of soft rubbery material.  It picks up and removes paint.   If you don’t clean it constantly, it also lays that paint down again somewhere else.  (I think it was actually meant to be a printing tool–and not one that comes in direct contact with the ink.)  You can see the effect in the background.  As I become bolder, I might even obliterate my carefully drawn figures in this way.

High Contrast

For the figures, I tried to keep the paint thick.  I was working on a slippery panel, so that was difficult.  Maybe that’s why I couldn’t get the effect I wanted.  Is this a good painting?  Good enough to forgive the flaws that I find so frustrating?

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Gallery at the Sage Gallery in Manchester; at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Library Arts Center in Newport; at the NH Institute of Art in Manchester; and at her studio by appointment.

Link to website: www.paintingsbyaline.com

P.S.  Honey is recuperating from her surgery, and is getting back her spunk.

Extreme Faces

Posted by Aline on

Thursday night in my Contemporary Portraits class, I decided to Go Big.  On a panel of 20 inches by 16, I filled all the available space with my model’s head.  Supersized.  Bigger than life.

Downcast

I started out with some idea of using the palette knife, but found that when covering a whole lot of canvas, a big brush is more efficient.  Then I found that I liked the big brush strokes as well.  The image becomes almost pixelated as a result.  (What word would I have found to describe that effect if we hadn’t got “pixelated” from the computer industry?)  You can probably tell I also deployed the knife here and there.

I am struck by the fact that, with the bigger format and the bigger brush, it was easy to forego the details.  Puzzling.  You would expect that the larger the format, the easier (in my case, read “more tempting”) it would be to paint in details like eyelashes.  The big brush must be the key.  I am now eager to find out what will happen if I deploy the big brush on a smaller panel.

However, this revelation did not come to me until just now, so when I set up for my Sunday painting, I chose the palette knife for a small, 11×14 surface.  First, I should explain that our model and pose has not changed for three weeks.  I already have two paintings done from that pose, which you can examine in the last two blogs.  The first was whole body.  The second was head and chest.  So Sunday I closed in even farther, thinking to replicate in miniature the big-head experience from Thursday.

Knifed Closeup

Interesting how you can see practically every scrape of the knife in this photo.   It looks so much more impressive online than the original  painting.  I think that’s because you can’t tell online how large the actual painting is.   Or in this case, how small.

By studying this image and the following ones, I finally figured out what was bothering me about this painting.  The nose is too narrow–way too narrow.  So I am going to have to fix that soon, before all the thick paint dries.

Last week I talked about how much I admired Bill Turner’s treatment of the blouse on our model, so this week I am providing the proof that was missing last week.  Here is Bill’s portrait, still not finished but I hope he doesn’t touch the blouse!

Bill Turner's portrait of Becky

And yes, I have to admit, the arm and elbow are pretty special too.

While I am sharing the works of other painters, I know you will enjoy this version of Becky, which was also still a work in progress  when I snapped this picture:

Bea Bearden's portrait of Becky

Bea’s specialty is the eyes.  She always paints spectacular eyes, and gets fantastic colors in the skin tones.

Note that the color of the hat in both of these versions of Becky.  Now compare the color of the hat in my version:

Girl in Green

I started out painting a black hat until Cameron told me the hat was green.  Although close up it was clearly more green than black, I  could not see the green when the hat was on Becky’s head and under the spotlight.  (I hear cataracts affect color perception, so maybe it is time for eye surgery.)  We don’t have to match the local color if our muse takes us in a different direction, but in this case, I was OK with imagining the green.  My blouse color, being more green than the other two, was a deliberate choice.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Gallery at the Sage Gallery in Manchester; at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway; and at her studio by appointment.

Link to website: www.paintingsbyaline.com

Speaking figuratively . . .

Posted by Aline on

is a lot easier than drawing figuratively.  And painting figuratively, especially without the coverup advantage that clothing provides, is hardest of all.  I admit that I am torturing that adverb “figuratively” –pretending that it can be substituted for the phrase “about the figure” in one sense and for the phrase “of the figure” in the other two examples.  I don’t make a lot of use of puns,so I figure (there’s that word again0–definitely no pun intended), I’m entitled to a little wordplay.  In face, half the fun of blogging is finding ways to make plays on works.

But figurativity is relevant.  This week, the subject is figures.  Beautiful figures in reality.  And paintings and drawings  that aspire to be beautiful in their own right.

My experimental palette knife work carried over into this palette-knifed figure study:

Girl in Brown Recliner

This painting is the output from one of our Sunday morning sessions.  Don’t you love the chair?  I do, but have to admit it looks better in person (in the painting itself).  I will get another crack at this model and pose, but instead of trying to correct errors in this one, I will start over with a new painting or drawing.  Paint that has been ladled onto the canvas with a palette knife just is not conducive to being overpainted.  Case in point: last week’s portrait, which I declared cooked after that session ended.  I would never try to add another layer of paint to that.  My first palette knifed portrait was not as heavily impasto’d, so I was able to rework  most areas.  (Both of those portraits can be seen in last week’s blog.)

Here’s another palette knifed portrait, but it’s also a little riské, so it fits in my theme for this week:

How Demure is She?

“Demure” is another one of my contest entries on Fine Art America, wherein I am given a photo of which to make a painting.  Because of the restrictions placed upon my use of the photo, I can’t reproduce it for you.  You will just have to trust me when I say that you would recognize this woman as the same one in the photograph, despite the radical colors and rough knife strokes I have adopted.  Or you can go online to Fine Art America and check out the current contest for “painting from photographs”.

I am kind of pleased with the ways I am finding to depart from the literalness of the subject matter without sacrificing the rigor of getting the essential elements right.

Not that I always get them right.  Au contraire.  Last Saturday I came away from our Saturday life drawing sessions with a couple of drawings that I felt good about.  This one, however, no longer looks good to me:

Reclining Woman

Through the fresh eye of the camera, I can now see that her head is way too big for her body.  I think of some deKoonings, Picassos etc. and ponder, so what?  They drew people with diminished bodies, and no one claims that they didn’t know how to draw.  Hmm.  Well, let’s move on:

Crouching

The arms on this figure got crumpled up somehow, but I still like the overall look of the thing.  It’s so . . . Degas.  Mind you, I am not all that admiring of Degas’ drawings, so this is not necessarily a self pat on my back.

Faring a lot better is this multi-colored drawing, which some of my fellow artists begged me not to touch after the first model break (20 minutes into the pose).  I continued working on it anyway, but not in any significant way.  I worked on the drape, clarified some values, things like that:

Seated Woman in Color

With an extra five minutes left for the pose, I sketched this head of the model:

Five-Minute Head

As you might have deduced, had you thought about it, our Saturday models come top-lit.  The light streams down from an overhead skylight, at least when the sun is shining.

OK, here are some guy drawings that I saved up from last month:

Seated Man

Contemplative

The composition of this one is interesting, and if his hand is a little too big, that’s better than being too small.  Our guy models use those poles a lot–not only do they give the model something to handle but they also give the model a place to rest his/her hand/arm, so as to provide more variety in the pose.  I also use the pole as a check of my  placement of limbs; if the angle of the pole is correct, the body parts have to come together with the pole in the correct way or I have got something wrong.  (Same model, same pole were featured in my mid-January blog titled “Why is this Man Digging a Hole in the Nude?”  Still a good question but now you know the answer.)

I suspect that I have written way too much tonight, but can’t trust my judgment.  It is  late, and I am  tired.  My usually upbeat Monday was discombobulated by the discovery that we had been burglarized; my desk, in particular, had been “tossed”.  My losses were not catastrophic, but still, it put me off my stride.   And Monday being Bridge Night, contains no slack.  (The cards were kind to me, which certainly helped put me in a better frame of mind.)

One last item of interest:

POP UP!

A pop up art exhibit will appear at the White Birch Brewing Company in  Hooksett NH Friday (5 to 7 p.m.) and Saturday (noon to 5 p.m.) this week.  April 13-14.  Food for the Friday night reception will be provided by cooking students from nearby Southern NH University.  Don’t sit this Friday the Thirteenth out, huddled in  your closet.  I believe a tour of the brewery with beer tastings can also be expected.  Whoo’ee!

Oh, yes,  I am participating.   I haven’t picked all the pieces that I will be exhibiting (and selling) yet, so if you have one you’d like to see there, let me know.  The theme is “New Hampshire Proud” but only one piece is required to represent that theme.  If you Google the theme, you will find elegantly composed publicity for this event. Support your local artist and your local brewery at the same time as enjoying food from your local  univeraity.  Doesn’t get much better, right?

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Gallery at 100 Market Street in Portsmouth; at the Sage Gallery in Manchester; at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway; and at her studio by appointment.  AND, for two days only, April 13-14, at the White Birch Brewery in Hooksett, NH.

Link to website: www.paintingsbyaline.com

Playing with Knives

Posted by Aline on

This week I am going to catch you up on the last three weeks of my class in painting the contemporary portrait.  (At the NH Institute of Art, with Cameron Bennett)  I have talked about this class before, but we didn’t have a live model then.  Now we do.  In fact, for the last two classes we have had two models to choose from–Rebecca and Randy.

This would be my fourth portrait of Rebecca over the past couple of years, but the first completely in profile.  Not exactly my choice–in my absence (Florida), a makeup class was scheduled.  The day before I flew South,  we had had a snowstorm here in NH and strangely, that class got cancelled.  (Strangely, because it wasn’t all that much of a snowstorm but it was almost the only one we got all winter, and a big deal was made of it.)  My Florida trip, so carefully planned to coincide with the Institute’s vacation week, cost me a class after all, and when I showed up the following week (in time for class despite a flight cancellation and rerouting to Boston), it was to find all the prime spots around the model had been claimed the week before.Each class is three hours long.  Three hours on a portrait of a live model is not very long at all.  A total of 4 classes had been scheduled for Rebecca’s pose.

Because the idea of this course is to do something outside the box (you know, “contemporary?”), I decided to try  using only palette knives.  I took one picture on my phone before all the canvas was covered:

WIP No. 1

At the end of that first session of three hours, I took home this version of Rebecca’s profile:

I was happy with the freshmess, the vivid red, the clear skin tone, the sharp edges.  I thought I was finished, except for a few minor details.  Eye too high, for example.  The likeness needed to be improved a little–Cameron suggested exaggerating the size of her eyes and mouth, then carving back on them in order to get closer to accurate.  He also complained about the harshness of the shadow on her neck.  I expected to be able to fix those items in perhaps an hour, then be on my way to something new.

Becky, WIP No. 3

Notice the earring?  I don’t think she was wearing it the week before, but now that she was, I had to bring it in, with its delicious shadow.  In this version, her lips are exaggerated.  I spent that entire 3-hour class bringing the painting to this point. Before the next class I would carve back on the lips, but not the eyes :

Becky, No. 4. Final?

Above is the portrait as I presented it  for critique at our last class.  I wondered if perhaps I had overworked the painting as compared to the underdone 3-hour version.   Nobody seemed to endorse that thought, but as a result of the critique,  I do intend to do something about the background on the right side–it is too flat and dull.

The critique having used up our first hour of class, we had only two hours left to work on actual painting.  I got a spot in front of Randy, our other model, and went to work, knives flying.  Cameron came around and suggested that I take photos as I progressed over the two hours:

image

There’s no white canvas showing because I slathered paint all over the canvas before starting to carve out the figure.  That was my new out-of-the-box experiment for this week.  Cameron saw what I was doing, and advised me to start the figure by scraping away the excess paint.  Otherwise I was going to be in for a big headache, trying to paint over thick, wet paint base.  I might have come to that conclusion myself, perhaps the hard way.  (Doing it wrong first.)

image

Here I was just trying to get biggest stuff (features) in the general proximity of where they should be.  Ear, nose, chin, neck.

image

Getting close.  Eyes too close together.

image

This, my final version (I think). shows his mouth finished and his right eye moved to the left.  See–I even signed it over there on the left.  My model claimed that he liked it.  Nose is too long, however.   Nose length is something I have trouble with–always too long.  If I were going  for the best possible likeness, and had more than two hours, I hope I would have scraped out half the face and started over with a smaller nose.  Which half?  Tough choice.

Likenesses notwithstanding, Cameron likes this portrait of Randy better than my portrait of Rebecca.  My granddaughter, however, displayed some funk, complaining that she could not see the features.  Obviously too young to see outside the box.  (Don’t worry–she won’t see this–she doesn’t read my blog.)

I’m happy about both paintings, but I do think I am happier with Randy.  Perhaps that is just the power of Cameron’s suggestion.

What is it about painting with the palette knife that appeals to me?  Mostly, it keeps me from getting bogged down in details. Because as much as I love the details, I love more to see how the merest suggestion of form is enough for the brain (well, most brains) to translate into form.  It’s magic.  Details of a different magnitude are still vitally important–if a single stroke of light can create the impression of an eyelid, so can such a stroke in the wrong place create a lantern jaw.  Done that.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Gallery at 100 Market Street in Portsmouth; at the Sage Gallery in Manchester; at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway; and at her studio by appointment.

Link to website: www.paintingsbyaline.com

14 Days, 13 Paintings

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Actually, there was briefly an additional painting, the first one, which would have made the total 14, but I wasn’t loving it, so I painted over it. Usually my first painting in a series turns out to be the best, but I’m glad when a pattern stops repeating.  I would like to think that at any point in the timeline I might be creating a masterpiece.  On the past two Mondays, as blog substitutes I posted snapshots of 9 paintings, taken on my cell phone.  I did not have the patience to work out how to add text to the pictures, although obviously I managed to do just that for a few pictures the first week.   (I should have taken notes.)

Now that I am home, I can upload photographs taken with my Nikon SLR.  (Until I got back to my computer, I had no way to move photos from my Nikon to WordPress.)  Because there are so many, I decided to put the entire array in a slideshow.  If you are very observant, you will notice that some of the nine paintings received improvements after the posting of the cell phone photos.

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One painting, you might have noticed, was not a plein air landscape of Marco Island; it was a portrait from a photograph for another Fine Art America contest.  But I did it on Marco Island, so it gets included in the slideshow.

To save me time, which I am desperate to stretch right now, I am also posting the individual images in order to give  you access to my comments for each one.  Just click on the image that interests  you, and a pithy remark may or may not appear.  The paintings below are presented roughly in the order in which I painted them.

Cleo, Watching the Sunset

Mary's Mahogany Tree

Papaya Tree and other tropical delights

Waterway

Corkscrew Swamp -- the Anhinga airing his/her wings

Lanai in Shadow at Sunset

Strong winds

Marco Island Farmer's Market

Corner Cafe (Mango's, in the Esplanade)

Bridge over Canal

Picture windows, reflecting neigborhood across the canal behind me

Missy, the 3-month old "teacup pot belly pig" who accompanies one of the vendors at the Farmer's Market.

My hostess, Mary Crawford Reining, is an accomplished artist in just about any medium you can name.  Unlike me, after we parted ways after our high school graduation, she never stopped making art, even though she mothered four children and is still married to their father.  (Domesticity may present the biggest obstacle to creative endeavor.)  Mostly, however, she seems to prefer watercolor and pastels.  I don’t know of a term to affix to her style, but I do believe she is what you would call a “colorist”.  You will see what I mean when you proceed to the next blog entry.  (I could not separate my photos into two different slide shows within the same blog entry.)  So continue on, please, for an entirely different art experience!

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Gallery at 100 Market Street in Portsmouth; at the Sage Gallery in Manchester; at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway; and at her studio by appointment.

Link to website: www.paintingsbyaline.com

Painting from Life, Compared

Posted by Aline on

In terms of number and variety, my output last week may seem disappointing–my figure workshop with Peter Granucci skips a week and  last week was a skip week; then my portrait class with Cameron Bennett was taken up with critiques and a demonstration painting by Cameron; and finally our Saturday life group (SLG) was cancelled because our model was sick with the flu.  However,  the Sunday clothed-model group met as planned, and resulted in a piece that makes me happy.  No, make that thrilled.

Profile of Sabrin

This is Sabrin, the same model that we had the last two weeks.  The first week with Sabrine I painted a 3/4 portrait from a 3/4 view on the lighted side (see that week’s blog).   The next week, I drew her in profile in charcoal (last week’s blog).  This week, I found myself again on the side with a profile, but with an exciting new headdress and the full three hours to paint.  I actually finished in about 2 and 1/2 hours.  The panel was small–only 12×10.

Her headdress pattern comes from gold threads.  I created the impression of a gold pattern by simply drawing through the wet paint with my “color shaper”, which is a rubber-tipped point.  I used the same technique to create her earring.  When the paint dries a little more, I will add some sparkle to the gold threads, her earring and the gold chain around her neck.

You might be able to see that I added cerulean blue to the highlights on her skin.  The light bounced off her skin so brightly that it was hard to determine exactly what color it should be (never pure white!  Lois Griffel’s voice echoes in my brain).  I decided to use the blue of the sky, even though she was lit by a combination of natural light from the window and a spotlight from the same direction.  The blue works, I think.

I have to confess I got the idea of using blue light from two sources–one is Peter Granucci who uses the blue light on rocks and other surfaces lit by the sun, and the other comes from a class at the Institute conducted in the same room where I take my portrait class with Cameron Bennett.  The students left their works in progress in this room and their assignment was apparently to paint the lit surfaces of a human figure in a bright aqua blue.  Sounds bizarre, right?  But it was remarkably effective.  My experiment with the same was much more subtle.

Last week, the piece I was happiest with was a painting of a portrait from a photo I did not take, indeed from a photo of a person who was a total stranger to me.   How does the one compare to the other?

Contest Portrait, Final

I love both of them equally.  I can’t come up with a way to measure the merit of the painting from life over the painting from a photo–even knowing intuitively that the former ought to be better than the latter.  But maybe any judgment would be contaminated by one common attribute that helps them both–I didn’t care about getting the exact likeness of either one, which freed me to just paint beautiful, as I see beautiful.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Gallery at 100 Market Street in Portsmouth; at the Sage Gallery in Manchester; at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway; and at her studio by appointment.

Link to website: www.paintingsbyaline.com

A Splurge of Portraits

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“Splurge” seemed the right word, so I looked it up, and indeed, there is a secondary meaning that covers what I feel I have today:  an extravagant display.  Beginning with the figure workshop with Peter Granucci last Tuesday, through the class with Cameron Bennett, and and ending today with my last–no, my most recent–edits of the Sami and Noodles portrait, my week was full of figures and faces, most of them falling squarely under the category of portraiture.  Oddly enough, my favorite of the week is the most unlikely candidate.  I entered a contest to paint a portrait from a supplied photograph by Shan Peck–he is the photographer and the contest administrator and the juror.  It’s not a big deal, just a fun thing to do, and it became a project to do in my class with Cameron.  I can’t reproduce Shan’s photo here–he made a point of forbidding any use of it other than to paint the portrait–but you can link to it here.

Since we were encouraged to upload our works in progress, I snapped a few of those on my cell phone (had to figure that out first–what a banner week!).

WIP for contest

Contest Portrait, Final

Our Sunday model, Sabrin, was slated to keep the same post and dress as she had last week, so I went prepared to draw a charcoal portrait of her.  She was very late in arriving, however, so another artist volunteered to sit for us.  As a result, I came away with two charcoal portraits, one better than the other.  The first did not capture a good likeness.  If I had had the time, I hope I would have achieved a likeness.  As it stands, I believe I exaggerated the size of her nose.

HH Profile

The profile of Sabrin came out well, I think, likeness or not.  Her mouth was very interesting and challenging to capture.

Sabrin, in charcoal and profile

While we are on the subject of portraits, I took another crack at the portrait of Sami and Noodles.  It’s harder to capture children, I think, because you have to keep a light touch.   Their features are so delicate.   For that very reason, though, painting portraits of children makes for terrific practice in making marks at the precisely correct spot to provoke a translation in the viewer’s brain that matches reality.  Our eye/brain supplies so much of the information that an artist who tried to lay out all the information before you, especially in a child’s face, comes across as heavy-handed and awkward.  As a result of trying to avoid heavy-handedness, I spent most of my time today painting out the details that I had so carefully laid in earlier.  I may not be there yet, but at least I know where I want to be.

Sami and Noodles

I’m not done yet.  Remember, I promised a “splurge”.  Tuesday, Peter suggested that my last drawing was worthy of working up to a finished piece.  I had that drawing pad with me Saturday when my car broke down, so I was able to pass the time waiting for the tow truck by working on that drawing.  Never has such a usually tedious wait passed so delightfully.

G, in pencil

Nude woman in chair

Wait, there’s more.  Saturday morning (the regular Saturday life group) I completed two charcoal drawings with which I was happy.  One of my favorite models–it’s remarkable how much difference a good model can make to the drawing.  Last week’s was uninspiring.  This week’s–well, it’s what keeps me going back.

R, reclining

R, seated, in blue and yellow

I think that’s it.  Seven days, seven happy figure/portrait projects.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Gallery at 100 Market Street in Portsmouth; at the Sage Gallery in Manchester; at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway; and at her studio by appointment.

Link to website: www.paintingsbyaline.com

Skin Tone Struggles

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Sabrin, No. 1

My painting of Sabrin (pronounced Sabrine) is the result of one three-hour session with the model yesterday.  It was quite the exercise in skin tones, and I am still not happy with the arm closer to us–it’s too gray.  It’s so easy to tip over from a fresh color into mud, and I believe white is to blame most of the time.  I must have painted her chest a dozen times trying to get the value and the color just right.   While I labored over the skin color and her facial features, I succeeded in portraying the hands with my initial strokes.  So I am leaving them alone.  No finishing touches for them.   I wish I could produce an entire painting with that kind of verve and bravura.  Some day, perhaps.

Earlier in the week, I reported to Cameron Bennett at my contemporary portraits class with the two works I had done the previous Sunday (see previous blog).  Got good marks on one and failing marks on the other.  He didn’t like the quick head sketch one bit.  Not one tiny bit.  The other, the whole figure pose, was “charming”, but the head too small and the neck too long.  I received orders to fix that.  He gave me some really interesting suggestions on how to go about fixing a head that was already very good, just too small.  The best one:  take a photo of the original painting and use that to copy a larger version onto the original.  I never would have thought of that.  Here is that painting again, so you can see what we were talking about:

Adrienne in her tough guy outfit

He especially liked the feet, by the way, singling them out right away as a major contributor to the charm of the gesture.  Yea!  (I had started with the feet because they were my favorite feature of her pose.)

In other news from that class, I may have finished the reclining nude that I started last week.  Her head is looking too small to me now, but it is farther away so maybe I can argue perspective.  I labored over painting her face with just enough definition and would hate to have to start that over again.  You might recall that this is one of the heads that Cameron did not like in the original charcoal version of it.

With about a half hour left in the class, I started on another translation from charcoal to oils, this time looking for some new aspect to try out, to make my work “contemporary”.  I decided to paint the skin tones without white–or less white–and to isolate the red and yellow ochre ingredients.  Red for the shadows.  I ran out of time just at the point where I had wiped out the face in order to start it over, so what you will see below is truly a “work in progress”, not just an almost finished work needing a few tweaks here or there.

Study in Perylene Red and Yellow Ochre WIP

I also managed to put in a few hours this week tweaking older paintings.  One that is nearing a finished state is my original portrait of Sammi and Noodles.  I added yellow reflections in Noodles’ eyes, which gives away the origin of the image as a photograph.  But so what?–the image just cried out for that yellow in just that place.

Sammi and Noodles No. 1, almost right

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Gallery at 100 Market Street in Portsmouth; at the Sage Gallery in Manchester; at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway; at the McGowan Fine Art Gallery in Concord; and at her studio by appointment.

Link to website: www.paintingsbyaline.com

Two Steps Forward, One Back

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Adrienne in her tough guy outfit

It was a great week in terms of activity.  Wednesday the Granucci workshop group met for 4 hours of live nude drawing.  Thursday the Bennett class met for painting the contemporary portrait.  Saturday the Saturday Life Group met for its usual three hours of live nude drawing.  And Sunday I joined a new group that meets for three hours to paint or draw from a clothed model, who keeps one pose for the entire time.

Peter (Granucci) started us on shadows, and I am happy enough with my results to share with  you for the first time some of my drawings from that workshop.

Two quick poses from Granucci workshop

Exercise in Shadowing

Thursday night, I took in my drawings from Saturday and Wednesday in order to choose one to use as a basis for painting.  I narrowed it down to two:  the more developed one above, and one from last week, the reclining figure.  I was happy with both of the faces on these two, until I asked Cameron (Bennett) for advice on which to choose for my painting.  He didn’t like the faces.  I was so taken aback that I forgot to ask why.  Anyway, together we chose the reclining figure to paint:

Translation into Oil

Our model on Saturday was the same person who was modeling for SLG the first time I joined.  That was perhaps 4 years ago, and she hasn’t changed a bit.  I have mentioned before how I just accept a bad angle and try to make the best of it.   This week I tried, but I did not make the best of it.

Rear View

Extreme Foreshortening

In fact, I may have done better with the shorter poses, which were in pencil:

Series of poses from SLG:--5, 10, 20 minutes

Sunday morning I  joined up with my friend Bea to go paint at Adrienne’s studio, the same studio where we meet for the Granucci workshop.  Adrienne had arranged for a Sudanese model dressed in her native regalia, and Bea in particular was looking forward to painting the dark skin tones–she even prepared a special palette.  But the Sudanese model never showed up–signals got crossed or were not even received, apparently.  So Adrienne herself modeled for us, too upset to paint anyway, she said.  She held the same pose for the entire three hours, with generous breaks every 20 minutes or so.  I finished a small painting of her entire figure (the painting that leads off this post) and had a half hour to spare, so I started on a painting of her  head.  I was hoping that the limited time would push me to capture the essence with minimal strokes, a la Caroline Anderson (whom I have adopted as my muse, as recounted in earlier posts).

Alas, on my way home, the tape I had used to keep the full body portrait secured to its support came loose, and smeared the head portrait.  In the course of repairing the head, I lost the freshness and simplicity of the original.

How to Sport a Fedora

The full body one was easy to repair, and I don’t think I lost anything essential to it.

So I am kind of down in the dumps at the end of a relatively productive week, which is probably why I couldn’t bring myself around to getting this post out on time.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Gallery at 100 Market Street in Portsmouth; at the Sage Gallery in Manchester; at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway; at the McGowan Fine Art Gallery in Concord; and at her studio by appointment.

Link to website: www.paintingsbyaline.com

New Nudes

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Proud, in Color

I scored a few points in the contemporary portrait class Thursday, by painting from my own charcoal drawing titled “Proud”, which I featured in last week’s blog.  Keeping it loose, in the spirit of Caroline Anderson, was what I was after here.   I don’t know whether to call it a “work in progress” or an experiment.  I suppose if I go back to it to correct my mistakes, it was a WIP.  If I let it be and move on to another, it was an experiment.  Overall, I am not unhappy with my progress in losing my edges.  It takes a bit of acclimatizing.  I will get to a point that I think looks pretty good, but then I think I can make it a little better, and in the course of trying to make it better, I make it worse.  I’ll bet that sounds familiar to the artists reading this blog.  And that’s how I ended up ruining the head.  Sigh!

From Saturday Life Group, I could not decide which of two drawings I preferred to share with you, so I will share both.

Layabout

Layabout is a conventional, yet disturbing pose, which was hard to compose on the page.  My favorite part is her head.

Twist of Limbs

In Twist of Limbs, I got more aggressive with my charcoal, and I was enjoying the result.  However, you probably can’t see that her legs are crossed.  There must be a word for a section of an image that contains all the action compacted into one small area.  An area of concentrated complexity.  I took it on as a challenge, which is probably why I attacked the image more aggressively than usual.

You may or may not care to know that I finally attacked my big Mount Washington Bike Race painting.   I finished sketching in the major figures, leaving additional figures to the end where the composition may call for them, and I applied some paint, thinly.

Work in Progress

After finishing this sort of underpainting, my plan is to use this painting to experiment with some new techniques,  lost edges and palette knife.  Palette knife should be particularly useful in building the rocky surface of Mt. Washington.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Gallery at 100 Market Street in Portsmouth; at the Sage Gallery in Manchester; at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway; at the McGowan Fine Art Gallery in Concord; and at her studio by appointment.

Link to website: www.paintingsbyaline.com

Concentrating on Portraits: Faces with no Features?

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Of all the works I labored over this week, the above detail from a charcoal drawing comes the closest to being an actual “portrait”.  It looks like the model.  In fact, the entire drawing could be called a portrait in that it not only looks like the model, but it conveys the model’s attitude, which I have called “Proud”:

Proud

If you are a regular reader of this blog,  you already know that I am taking a course in contemporary portraiting at the NH Institute of Art, with Cameron Bennett.  One of the points that he made in our first class was that anything representing the subject can qualify as a “portrait”–if that is what the artist intends.  (One out-there example brought up by one of my smartypants classmates was Andy Warhol’s tomato soup cans.  She/he said he practically lived on tomato soup; therefore the soup-can paintings could be considered self-portraits.)

So suddenly I feel free to call my anonymous figure paintings “portraits” too.  I’m thinking of the studies I painted from the photos I took at the  Mount Washington Bike Race, discussed and reproduced in several of my posts from last fall.  As you will see below, I’m still working from those photographs, and I’m still trying to work more loosely.  To that end, I have stuck printouts of Carolyn Anderson paintings all over my easel to help me remember how little I need in order to convey eyes, nose, etc.  (Forget the mouth altogether.)  All this fits splendidly into another theme or goal, which was urged upon me by various art teachers to whom I have paid good money to criticize and guide me.  And that goal is to eliminate the detail.  I was never quite sure which details I should eliminate, so now I am on track to eliminate all of them, so that should produce something like progress, eh?

Last week I was struggling with a portrait of Sammi and Noodles, which got way too detailed.  (To see it, go back to last week’s post.)  Thursday night, I went to class bearing that sorry effort, along with my photograph of Sammi, and my drawing from the week before.  (All in last week’s blog.)  But I (wisely, I think) decided to make a fresh start on a new painting of the same subject.   Again I was seduced by the dog Noodles.  (Maybe I should just give up and do nothing but pet portraits.)   The depiction of Sammi was horrible.  I can’t show you how horrible because I smeared it out even while Cameron and I were shaking our heads over it.  He got into the spirit and started moving paint around with his fingers too, in random and varied directions, to show me how Carolyn Anderson would probably have attacked the painting.  (I use the word “attacked” to convey both possible meanings.)  Then at home yesterday I practiced on both versions of Sammi and Noodles, and here they are as they exist today, side by side:

No. 1, version 2

Sammi 2

xxxxxx

xxxxxxx

I’m not satisfied with either one, but don’t you agree that version 2 shows me moving in the desired direction?  I decided it was time to move on and apply whatever I learned to another project.  Here is the result:

Fans

I’m feeling good about this one.  The paint is very thick and still very wet, which is why I could not get a decent photograph of it . .  .  also why the colors may be a little too muddy, but I’m not going to worry about that right now.  The important thing is, I conveyed the gestures and attitudes of these three people without painting distinct features on them.  My previous Mt. Washington studies (yes, this too is from that race) had started to become that kind of thing, what with the loosely painted crowds.   Notice the crowd depictions above!    Maybe too abstract?  Hey, I’m feeling my way here.

But back to the portrait, the real thing, that I started you with today, the charcoal of “Proud”.   My favorite thing from this week.  I believe–I could be wrong, but I do believe–that there is no offending detail in that portrait.  I am going to take it in to class this Thursday and see what Cameron has to say.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Gallery at 100 Market Street in Portsmouth; at the Sage Gallery in Manchester; at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway; and at her studio by appointment.

Link to website: www.paintingsbyaline.com

Why is this man digging a hole, in the nude?

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J's back, three-quarter.

"This should have been easy"

Portrait of a young man resting on the handle of the shovel, contemplating the hole he has dug for himself.  Why is he digging a hole for himself?  Unimportant.  Why is he nude?  Hmmm.  He’s in a nudist colony?

I struggle with the titles of my nudes.  The models must adopt a pose that they can keep for 20 minute stretches (sometimes longer), so the figure is contemplative, dreaming, sleeping, reposing. . . well, you get the idea.   One could simply title this one “Nude Male”, but that would not distinguish it from all the other nude males in the portfolio.  One could number one’s nude males.  Or one could come up with some witty thought superimposed on the model, which is what I attempted to do today.  I was inspired by the captions attached to the animals photos that circulate the internet, which captions awe me with their inventiveness.  I think, however, that it works better for cats and dogs than it does for  a naked human being.  The caption needs to acknowledge the nudity somehow, to make it work better for the nudes.  Something like, “Only five more minutes and I can put on my pants.”

On this point Degas’s bathers had the advantage–their natural nudity, nakedness, did not have to be explained away.  (By the way, that exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts will be closing February 2.)

Today’s nude was the pick of last Saturday’s life drawing session.  Sunday I finished the reverse-painting-on-glass and delivered it to the owner, who was pleased.  I also finished the Covered Bridge.  In response to an excellent observation from one of my followers, I removed some offending slashes of white, which I guess I had intended to symbolize water laps.  When you paint loose, the results can be brilliant,  or when not so brilliant, just careless.  An artist needs another, more objective eye to catch those things, and it  doesn’t have to be another artist’s eye either.  I always listen to a criticism and act on it, unless I am very sure of my own contrary view.  (Many times, the stated objection does not actually identify the real problem–it could be something nearby that throws the viewer off.)  In addition to making that and other various improvements to the body of the Covered Bridge painting, I painted the sides of the canvas in colors approximating the action going on the main canvas.  The painting can now be hung without a frame, as a “gallery wrapped” painting.  That is important to me, as the artist, because otherwise I would have to invest in a frame in order to exhibit the painting.

The rest of Sunday was devoted to another project:  homework for my fifth (at least) course at the Institute with Cameron Bennett on portraits.  But this time, something different–for him and us.  We are trying to BE different, paint somehow “out of the box”, using as possible inspiration other contemporary portraitists who are painting in styles newly invented or at least newly applied.  The only artist on the list supplied by Cameron whose name I even recognized was Chuck Close.  I am not drawn to emulate his monumental portraits.  The artist I am drawn to is Carolyn Anderson.  Her portraits are so loose as to be almost not even there.

Detail from portrait by Carolyn Anderson

In class I tried to emulate Anderson in pencil, drawing a portrait from a photograph:

Drawing from photo of Sammi and Noodles

After drawing my careful image, I erased a lot of it so as to leave ghosts of the image.  This exercise was the starting point of my painting effort yesterday, but yesterday I tried to be looser right from the get go.  Nevertheless, when I reach the point where I thought everything was correctly placed, there was a lot of smudging and subtracting.  Not enough!  This is still a work in progress–don’t judge it too harshly, and remember what I am going for:

Sammi + Noodles portrait

This isn’t going to be easy!  Especially for me, who has been accused of getting too hung up on the details.  I love the details.  It’s a mystery then, why I am so beguiled by Carolyn Anderson’s way of painting.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Gallery at 100 Market Street in Portsmouth; at the Sage Gallery in Manchester; at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway; and at her studio by appointment.

Link to website: www.paintingsbyaline.com

From My Sketchbook: TV Heads. PART TWO

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So that (Part One) was last year.  This year (meaning 2011 even though we are technically no longer in 2011), images were not  as dutifully labeled.  Where I can put a name to an image, either through recollection or recognition, I have done so.

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You may have noticed that I stopped using a charcoal pencil midway through 2011, as an element in my effort to back off, go  soft, go slow, and lighten up.  Those seductive, dramatic darks in my earlier drawings probably gives them an unfair advantage in any comparison to graphite drawings.

I have a sketch of Harry Pearce from MI-5 in both collections.  I think the likeness is better in the earlier one, but the craftsmanship may be better in the later one–?

MI-5's Harry Pearce

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On the other hand, I really admire the curve of his lips in the 2010 version.

I’m pretty happy with this group of four (wish I could have got Brandeis on the same sheet of paper):

Prohibition players (from Ken Burns' "Prohibition" part 2)

But are they really any better than, say, my Art Garfunkel?

Art Garfunkel

I wish I knew enough to be able to say for sure, one way or another.  Truth is, I haven’t a clue.  If doing it today I would have darkened the pupils of his eyes, but is that a significant difference?  Well, even if it is not all that significant, I guess I will take it.  If every year I find a better way to represent one face part, eventually I will get it all together.  Just have to live long enough!

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Gallery at 100 Market Street in Portsmouth; at the Sage Gallery in Manchester; at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway; and at her studio by appointment.  And if you happen to eat at the Bedford Village Inn, check out the painting in the foyer.

Link to website: www.paintingsbyaline.com

From My Sketchbook: TV heads. PART ONE

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I hereby confess that I am a TV junkie.  I know, I know–so lowbrow, so wasteful of time.  I really love movies too.  But every second while I am just sitting on the couch watching the TV screen, I feel guilty.  Sure, I could watch TV from the treadmill or the exercycle, but most of the time, upon pondering that option, I’ll agree that it’s something I really should  consider seriously . . . tomorrow.  Instead of watching TV at all, I could be, I should be painting or drawing or at least updating the records I used to keep of my paintings.

So, to assuage my guilt,  I keep sketchbook and pencils handy to the TV, in order to sketch from the TV screen.  In order to capture an image , I have to pause the program.  It does kind of interrupt the flow– so not something I can do when sharing the TV viewing with another human, but the dogs are perfectly OK with it.

I have collected some drawings from last year and this year, and boy, do I hope to discover that this year’s are better than last year’s!  Some nights (I mostly watch TV after sundown) I am on, others I am off; some nights nothing inspires me, other nights I am pausing the screen every five minutes.  As you will see, “Prohibition, Part 2” holds the record for number of images captured during a single program.  MI-5 is probably in second place.  But I started with ads.  My first screen captures were from an ad for an antidepressant.   They get right in your face, and the expressions are so mournful.  This one shows a blocking style that I was working on for a class at the time:

Face of a depressed man

For the rest of the year, I had permission to use shading.  Can you identify these faces without looking at the caption?

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Depressed Man was not supposed to show up in that presentation, but I don’t know how to delete him without deleting  him from the library altogether.  I think the only way to do it is to start a new blog entry.

So I am going to divide this week’s blog into two parts, just to make viewing the images more palatable (using a slide show).  I am ending this half here.  For the second half, move on  to part  two.

Comments Off on From My Sketchbook: TV heads. PART ONE Posted in Drawings, Portraits

Three Hours of Life Drawing

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I hesitated to expose an unedited display of everything I did in the course of a life drawing session–not all of it is worth going down in history–but I’ve got this blog to feed and I have done so little art this week that I am desperate.  First you have to agree not to sneer.  If you can’t promise that, you should refrain from going any further.

Our Saturday Life Group seldom varies from the following regimen:  five quick poses of one minute each, then a five-minute pose, then a ten-minute pose.  These total 20 minutes and earn a 5-minute break for the model.  Then a 20-minute pose.  In theory, at this point we have used up only 45 minutes of our three hours.  Over the next two hours and  15 minutes, we will typically ask for two different poses, broken up by breaks every twenty minutes.  The length of each “long” pose is usually between 40 and 50 minutes.  Once, maybe twice, since I have been a member, we got one longer pose over that two-hour period.  At that duration, I can start thinking about drapery and background, because I generally work  fast.   My Tuesday workshops with Peter Granucci are, more and more, informing my choices on Saturday morning, and one of things I am working on is speed.  Slowing down.  Getting it right in the beginning.

But one-minute poses don’t allow for getting much of anything right.  What you must do for a one-minute pose is quickly decide what you want to capture–the gesture, for example, is a good choice.  I had been using newsprint paper, both purchased and saved from packaging (one of my art suppliers uses crushed paper as packing material).  Peter frowns on using inferior paper for even the quick sketches–you should be practicing on the same quality of paper that you intend to use for your masterpiece.

So (coincidentally) this week, I decided to obey Peter, and left the newsprint at home.  Here are my five one-minute poses:

The first one, the one on the left, is my favorite.  I went for the delightful posture, and attacked it by first marking a few key points, then connecting them.  You can pretty much see those marks, which are slightly darker than the other marks.  After that pose, I pretty much fell apart and struggled to find my way.  But it doesn’t really matter–whatever comes of these exercises, they do warm you up, get you moving your arm and thinking in the  right mode.

Here is how far I got on the five-minute pose:

Getting it right entails measuring and lining up.  I do a  lot of that by eye, but sometimes I need to do some actual measuring and lining up using a straightedge.  For this one, I don’t remember using a tool.  I think I placed the forward foot in relation to the calf of the closer leg, but it doesn’t look correct now.  Instead of making sure that I got that relationship absolutely correct, I was busying myself with the more interesting light and shadows.  Aside from the mistake in foot placement, this drawing is not bad for five minutes, but it illustrates how haste makes waste, and why I must slow myself down even when I have only five minutes to complete the drawing.

Next up is a ten-minute pose, which seems wonderfully luxurious at this point in our sessions.  Usually I switch to charcoal at this point, but Saturday I decided to stick with the pencil because I must use it in Peter’s workshop.  Using a pencil forces me to slow down.  Because the pencil is so confining, I also chose to draw smaller, which led to two drawings on the same page–the ten and the twenty-minute poses:

With both of these, I tried really hard to slow down and get all the parts in the absolutely correct places.  These are OK, I think.

For the last two “long” poses, I gave myself permission to do my drawings in charcoal.  It seems weird to me now, but I used to be afraid of charcoal.  I can remember asking permission to start my first charcoals drawings with a pencil sketch.  Probably I was worried about being unable to erase, which is really silly because nothing could be easier than to obliterate a charcoal mark with a swipe of a finger.  But the best thing about charcoal is your ability to create shadows with a smear of a finger.  So much quicker than hatching with a pencil.

I like this one best.  We got two 20-minute poses and I was finished with the pose then, but some people wanted more, so she went back into it for another 7 minutes, and I used that time to create another version of her head.  She has a wonderful face to draw.

The final long pose was one I struggled with, which is a little strange because you would think this pose is easy:

I got hung up on her hand, and redrew it multiple times, and am still not happy with it.  But the bigger problem lies most likely in my beginning — too fast perhaps.  Looking at the pose now, I think she looks too uncomfortable.  Yes, she was leaning on her far-side arm, but her legs should look more relaxed.  I’m pretty sure I did the requisite measuring and checking, but something is not quite right.

After our session concluded, we went over to Joey’s house for the most wonderful party, to celebrate a great season of drawing.  We will start up again in January.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Gallery at 100 Market Street in Portsmouth; at the Sage Gallery in Manchester; at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway; and at her studio by appointment.  And if you happen to eat at the Bedford Village Inn, check out the painting in the foyer.

Link to website: www.paintingsbyaline.com

“I See Naked People”

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“I see naked people” was adopted last year by my life drawing group (SLG, or Saturday Life Group) as its motto on the occasion of its 20th anniversary.  I didn’t get it at first.  It’s supposed to evoke the little boy’s shocking statement in the movie ” The Sixth Sense “:  “I see dead people”.   We had t-shirts made up with the slogan on the front and an outline of a nude figure on the back.  I wore mine fearlessly to Home Depot and the like, oblivious to the curious stares until someone would ask me about it.

Recently, as a result of several visits to an exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, I came to realize that what we see in SLG isn’t naked people at all–we see nudes.  The MFA exhibit was the Nudes of Edgar Degas.  The best of his nudes are pastels of  nude women engaged in some kind of bathing activity with their backs turned to the viewer/artist.   One of the many innovations credited to Degas was this rendering of a person unclothed on purpose, that is, for a purpose of her own, rather than a person unclothed and posing for the benefit of an artist who wishes to draw or paint a nude figure.  The naked women by Degas were disturbing, therefore, stripped as they are of an artistic rationale.  Nakedness is shocking, nudity is art.  (If you think this is odd and hard to grasp in this day and age, consider the outrage that greeted Manet’s “Olympia”–she was depicted as a prostitute awaiting her customer, in a pose that had not shocked anybody when it was assumed by Venus, the goddess of love.  See the Wikipedia article here.)

Anyway, this week I am treating you to some nudes.  And what connects my nudes (albeit tenuously) to the foregoing two paragraphs is the word “people” in the SLG slogan.  Usually I don’t see naked or nude “people” because usually I only see one person/model at a time.   Models charge for modeling (clothed or not, but they get a little more for taking off the clothes), so it is  a luxury to have more than one model posing at  a time.  Especially since you can look at only one at a time, really.  I have trouble understanding why simultaneous multiple models would even be desirable– getting one figure right is challenge enough.  Be that as it may, I guess we had some extra money accumulated in the kitty, so one morning  a few weeks ago I went into SLG to find not one, not two, but THREE models undressing for our benefit!  Fortunately, I could not see all three of them well enough to incorporate all three into a single drawing.  Two was hard enough, thank you.

Double the Pleasure

We had two hours (less break time) to work this double pose.  Our third model took his pose on the other side, forming a kind of triangle.  Yes, he was a male.  Radical!

This past Saturday, we were back to the normal single model, suddenly seemingly so easy!

sketch, standing figure

seated figure

I remember complaining in the past about getting more than my fair share of back views, and although I still do seem to get a lot of backs, I’m not complaining anymore.  I have been humbled.  Backs are hard enough to do.  The challenge is to keep it simple even while suggesting the complexity of the bone and muscle structure beneath the skin.  I am still working all that out and thus may be faulted for overdoing the complexity thing.

While rooting around in my stacks of older drawings looking for something suitable to submit for an exhibit, I came across this one:

His Dreaming

Funny how a drawing I don’t even remember making could magically appear and rise to the top of my favorites.   I am fascinated to see how I used a light brown chalk to highlight his hair and applied those white strokes of light just as if I were as expert as, say, John Singer Sargent.  Yet I recall nothing of the process.  Probably it went fast, and was followed by something else that loomed larger in my mind.  I usually make a note of the length of pose and the date on my drawings, so I am able to confirm that it was a 40-minute pose, and it turns out I had to accompany my granddaughter to a court hearing right after the drawing session.  Yes, a court hearing could obliterate whatever came before it.

After patting myself on the back for the discovery of “His Dreaming”, I tore up many, many others that embarrass me now.  God forbid I should be subjected to the fate of Degas with  my inferior projects unearthed after my death and exhibited in a museum (I should be so lucky, but this is “My Dreaming”) alongside the good stuff, where pompously overinflated amateurs (like myself) can sniff and proclaim them to be worse than unremarkable.

That I am getting better is proved by the callousness with which I tossed my inferior stuff, and I think my progress can be attributed to the work I have been doing with Peter Granucci.  What we do in his figure workshop is all practice, practice, practice, so there’s not much to show off–yet.  He has promised that exhibit-worthy projects lie in our future.  (As if a venue could be found for an exhibit of nudes.  Naked people.  Oh, the horror.)

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Gallery at 100 Market Street in Portsmouth; at the Sage Gallery in Manchester; at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway; and at her studio by appointment.

Link to website: www.paintingsbyaline.com

Studies, Ending, Beginning

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This is the last study for my large Mt. Washington Bike Race painting.  I numbered it “4” but in fact it is 5 if you count the two portraits in the series.  I have started on the big canvas, but the drawing is so rudimentary that I am saving it for a future post, when I hope I will have something of interest to display.

Meanwhile I would like to share with you a minor triumph–well, sort of a triumph and certainly a very minor one.  Last Summer (can’t believe it has been that long ago) in the Portraits course I was taking with Cameron Bennett, he crushed me with the observation that an eye was too low on a copy of a Serov portrait that he had assigned us as homework.  Here is a link to my report on that last effort.  Last week I finally got around to correcting that flaw.  I used a ruler.  I laid the ruler under the eyes of the original, then under the eyes of my copy.  I couldn’t find any discrepancy, yet I had to agree the there was something fishy about my eye.  Of course, the color was wrong, but could that obvious flaw have create the misimpression that the eye was too high or low?

Original, by Valentin Serov      

My copy of Serov portrait (A)

My copy, after retouching eye

Original Portrait by Valentin Serov

Finally, one more workshop piece, from our (NH Plein Air artists) most recent meeting of the Peter Granucci workshop series, which ironically, requires indoor practice from photographs.  The subject this month was snow.

 

Snow Shadows

A Best Week

Posted by Aline on

Some weeks are so full of reportable stuff that I have trouble choosing my topic.  Other weeks, I have trouble scaring up a single decent topic.  I could save up half of the good-week stuff for a dull week, but who wants to plan for dull weeks?  Not me.  On the other hand, I don’t want to bore you either, and really now, wouldn’t  you rather hear about struggles?  This week I can report on a bit of a struggle and its accompanying triumph so that’s what I lead with.

Part I.  Alpaca Love.  You remember the alpaca farm/ranch from last month?

Alpaca Farm v.1

Alpaca Farm in North Conway

This was the plein air painting from the Bartlett weekend, to which, I announced, I would be adding an alpaca closeup.  I had one good alpaca closeup, so I went with that, even though I’d have preferred the animal to be facing more towards the viewer.  My closeup did not include the legs either, so I was winging it with regard to the posture and thickness and general shape of the legs.

Alpaca Farm v.2

Alpaca Farm v.2

Pretty awful, right?.  I wouldn’t even show it to you before–I couldn’t let it sit out there as if finished when I was going to have to repaint the red alpaca closeup.  First, I had to find a better reference photograph.

As it turned out, when I got around to searching my own photographs, I had plenty of good alpaca poses.   Thanks to my powerful Nikon SLR camera, alpacas photographed in the way distance still gave me enough enlarged detail to paint a loveable blond alpaca in just the right pose, in just the right spot.

Alpaca Farm, v.3 (Final)

Part II:  Supercyclists. Earlier this evening, I delivered two paintings to my son in celebration of his birthday.  One of them  you have seen already.

Andy as Supercyclist

It depicts him right after finishing the race up to the top of the Rockpile (Mt. Washington).  Paint still wet on the second one delivered, is my painting of his friend Kori, from the same time, same place.

Whew!

I love the foreground in Kori’s painting.  Strange that where the focus of the painting is the figure of the cyclist, what I love most is how I painted the ground.  I would have liked to paint the face more expressively, but I didn’t really have room for that.  The two paintings are each 12×9, so the faces are quite small.  I wanted to get the likenesses as close as possible, so I had to be careful.  Andy’s worked out better because I had only light and shadow anyway, but Kori’s nose, mouth, eyebrows had to fall in the exact correct places, and no smearing please.

My major painting plan, for which these two 12x9s have served as studies, is still on, but the faces in the big one are not going to get any bigger since the plan is to encompass the entire rockpile.  I think I need to reuse this scene in a longer painting so as to include more of the shadow, and larger overall, so as to allow more of a slapdash face.

Part II:  Lovely Nudes.  Finally, for a change of pace, how about a collection of lovely nudes from Saturday Life Group?  My best from two weeks ago, and all three from this week:

Arrangement of elbow and knee   

Leg on Blue Draped Pillow

Right Side with bent elbow

The back from a left angle

I am wondering if I am getting too heavy-handed with the charcoal.  The “Leg on Blue Draped Pillow” has more charm to it, I think, because I had the pose for only 20 minutes and had to keep a light touch.  I would like to know if you agree.  Or disagree.  Either way, it was a good week.  Here’s hoping for another one coming up!

Tomorrow (Monday) I pick up my painting from The Rockport (Mass.) Art Association.  Unsold.  They invited me to apply for membership, and I thought I would if my painting sold, but it didn’t, so I didn’t.  A bit far to go for the sheer joy of exhibiting.  Although I do hope to get in a plein air painting day tomorrow, which makes a trip worthwhile.  Also tomorrow, paintings are being changed out at the Sage Gallery in Manchester, 70 Lowell Street.   Please visit this new gallery.

My old website, with multiple painting galleries yet to be transferred to this WordPress location, can be accessed at this address:  www.paintingsbyaline.com.  Also there are  all the images attached to earlier blog entries.  Eventually I will move everything here, but it takes a lot of time.

Tale of Woe

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. . . Snow woe?  Weather woe?  Maybe lack-of-power woe.  “Power.”  Have you ever thought about the usages of the word “power”.  We use it to describe an attribute of people who attain positions where they can control the lives of others.  Power is also an attribute of an individual who can control his/her own life.  So why does  “Power” also refer to  electrical current to run lights, furnace, phone, internet, microwave, TV, DVD, and radio, to charge cell phones and Palm Pilots?  Because without all those abilities, one is powerless.

Without power (in the technological sense) One is also cold, hungry, and sleepless.  So I write this tale of powerlessness–obviously not from home–in a state of grogginess.  For the first time in my life, I slept with a Great Dane.   I invited her into bed with me when her “mom”, my granddaughter, bailed on us to go spend the night with a friend with “power”.  Honey, the Great Dane, usually sleeps with Tabitha, my granddaughter.  Tabitha thoughtfully lent us her comforter and Honey was dressed in a woolly sweater.  I wore my thermally correct underwear and a snuggly fleece robe-type thing over that.  We were warm enough.  Well, I was warm enough.  Honey was shivering and twitching all night, while I concentrated on hanging on to my share of the bed and waiting for the sun to rise.

Actually, I wasn’t all that hungry because I got to spend a wonderful 4 to 5 hours at a party with artists earlier in the day.  Mill Brook Gallery in Concord held an opening for an exhibit that was enchanting in its originality and breadth.  http://www.themillbrookgallery.com/  I had been invited by Patrick McCay, one of the featured artists, who is my EEE teacher.  (EEE stands for Explore, Exploit, Express–in whatever medium, whatever style.)  Two of his paintings already had red dots on them when we got there.  “We” because I did not have the use of my car yesterday but got a ride with two other artists, Bea Bearden and David Wells.  Through Bea and David I also found myself welcomed to a pot luck supper after the reception.  What a pot luck supper it was!  It deserves commemoration by publication of the entire amazing menu, but I cannot do it justice on the wing with descriptions like “quiche-type thing” and “rice and beans”.  I didn’t go near the pies–no room for dessert.

So in truth I was warm enough and not hungry at all, and only sleepless now.  Yesterday, before going off and partying, I used a few daylight hours to tinker with three paintings that I had started in EEE.  The third one is my newest one, which you have not yet seen.  In order to get enough light in which to photograph it, I brought it to the office with my camera.  No tripod though, so it looks a little fuzzy.

Taking a Bow

As the cyclists arrive at the top, someone throws a gray blanket over their shoulders, which keeps them from getting too chilled after their sweaty exertion.  The top of Mt. Washington is, even in August, likely to be a chilly place.  Andy, who happens to be my son, appears to be wearing a ribbon of some sort, which I only noticed in the course of working on this painting.  Will have to find out the significance of that.

The train car in the background is part of the  Cog Railway.

In this painting, I believe I have become more of an impressionist, which is kind of  what I have set out to do in the EEE class.  My highest goal is to emulate  Sargent and Sorolla, which to me means using the brush strokes expressively.  I really enjoyed working on this painting.  It is another of the studies for the larger work I am hoping to get to, the one of the whole top of the mountain with the crowds, the cyclists, and the mountain vistas.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Gallery at 100 Market Street in Portsmouth; at the Sage Gallery in Manchester; at the Manchester Artists Association Gallery in Manchester; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway; at the Rockport Art Association Gallery in Rockport, Massachusetts.

Link to website:  www.paintingsbyaline.com

Progress on the 6×6 paintings

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At home

I just laid down my brushes and photographed the 6×6 plaques that I am painting for the upcoming Women’s Caucus for Art exhibit.  I “previewed” this project back in September and that was the last blog entry I was able to upload using my old iWeb program, so I’m feeling a little nervous about approaching the 6×6 subject matter again.  But I’m not superstitious, am I?  No.  Not at all.  So here goes:

WHERE AND WHEN:  The exhibit is to take place in the Chimera Gallery in the Picker Building at 99 Factory Street, Nashua.  It opens Saturday, November 5, at noon.  Saturday hours are noon to 5 o’clock.  It closes the next day, Sunday, at 4 o’clock.  The Sunday hours are noon to 4 o’clock.  The reception will take place Sunday, between 2 and 5.

These are unusual hours.  In years past, we have left the exhibit up for about a month, thinking to accommodate Christmas shoppers.  But almost all sales occurred during the reception, and people seem to be shopping for Christmas earlier and earlier each year.  (Pavlov’s dog experiment comes to mind as an explanation of this phenomenon.)

The exhibit is unusual in another respect:  Not only 2011 plaques will be exhibited and offered for sale ($66 each), but also plaques from years past–a retrospective of sorts.   This being my third year as a member of the organization, I will be exhibiting 12 plaques.  My 2009 four consisted of Lotus Studies, which has become a stand-alone piece, as I discussed in the September blog.  You can revisit the earlier blog here.   You can also inspect the condition of the new pieces as works in progress.  Today they may still be works in progress, but progress has been made, and only a few tinkering details remain.  I hope!  But first, I will show you the three brand new images, then follow up with three from before, as improved.

Noodles, a Cockapoo-Poodle

I met Noodles last week in Bartlett.  He belongs to Sami, the innkeepers’ daughter.  Noodles is still a puppy.  A sweeter dog cannot be imagined.

Alpaca Love

Why this title?  Impulse, inspired by the expressive face, which seems to be regarding a beloved.   I painted this portrait from the same photograph that I am using to insert an alpaca close-up in my Alpaca Ranch painting.  (See last week’s blog.)  I painted this on a plaque from 2010, on top of the original painting.  You can see a ghost of the 2010 image in the shadows.   Obviously, I didn’t like the 2010 painting and am very glad of the opportunity to obliterate it.

At Home

This is our Great Dane, Honey,  getting comfy on the sofa.  The strong desire of Great Danes to seek comfort is well-known.  The white spots in the photo are light reflecting off globs of wet paint.  This image also conceals an old one that I will not miss.  (Two more of the 2010 reborn plaques are shown in the September blog.)

Red-Breasted Plover

The Plover was featured in the previous blog. I made refinements, not changes:  The canopy on which he stands sinks a little more under his weight, which I hope explains what kind of a surface it is.  The red reflection on his breast is a little more intense.  The feathers have been touched up.  A light reflection has been added to his eye.

Poser

Another one from the previous post, with no changes to the Snowy Egret’s persona, but I did insert the words taken from a Wallace Stevens poem “. . . the feathers flare And bluster in the wind. . .” because they describe what is happening.  I wouldn’t want anyone to think the bird looks like this all the time.  I’m thinking I should add to the blustering plumage on the right side of the image.

At home

This is Sundance, a former resident of my household.  Despire his appropriation of my bed in this picture, he now prefers to be on his own.  Of the works in progress, this painting received the most of my attention.  His posture was unexplained before.  Now that  you can see he is slumbering away, sunken in pillows, I think this image is very appealing.  I am betting that if any of my plaques sell, this will be the first one to go.  (Going by my own weakness for cat images.)

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Gallery at 100 Market Street in Portsmouth; at the Sage Gallery in Manchester; at the Manchester Artists Association Gallery in Manchester; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Rockport Art Association Gallery in Rockport, Massachusetts.

Link to website:  www.paintingsbyaline.com

At Last! A Good Plein Air Day

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Last week, I told you about the Eight Days of Weeks, National Forest celebration, that we NH Plein Air artists turned out for. This week, on Saturday, our numbers at the Flume hub were reduced to just Sharon and me but we celebrated the Weeks Centennial with personal highs–two paintings each that we were happy with. Above is the covered bridge over the Pemigewasset River on the grounds of The Flume. We got a lot of traffic going by, and it was fun interacting with the visitors. By the time we got hungry, the paintings were done. I took this photograph while we were packing up, just in case the painting got bought at the wet painting sale, but of course, no one showed up for the wet painting sale. Late last night in my studio, I took photographs of my entire week’s worth of artworks; I use articifial “full-sprectrum” light that I thought produced images that are good enough. However, the images of the bridge were not nearly as good as the one I took in the field. Makes me think I should stop trying to photograph my painting indoors.

After hanging around for the wet painting sale that wasn’t, Sharon and I headed farther north to enjoy the late afternoon light on Profile Lake, which lies below Cannon Mountain, right in Franconia Notch.

That high point, Sharon tells me, is something called “Eagle Cliff”, but I couldn’t see the eagle in it. Perhaps it has lost crucial parts. Sharon could still see an eagle, but Sharon sees images in just about anything–a habit somewhat annoying to artists whose clouds and rocks are the subject of her scrutiny.

Sunday we found ourselves together again at a Peter Granucci workshop in Londonderry at the studio of Elaine Farmer. The subject of this workshop was wet-surface reflections, including sand and pavements. We also got into the combination of reflection over what might be visible underneath the water.

This is my copy of a detail from a painting by Alfred Thompson Bricher, a White Mountain painter born in Portsmouth, NH. The painting that we copied is called “Time and Tide.”

This one was painted from a photograph. My photograph here is pretty awful–colors are off, but I think you get the idea.

Last Thursday was my last class with Cameron Bennett for a while. He had read my blogs and seemed much less critical of my efforts, but that may be my imagination–as I progress to becoming more critical myself, it may seem to me that he is overlooking egregious errors. Here is Rebecca again, from the other side:

This too was painted in the direct painting method that I used for the homework as described in last week’s blog.

And here is my final effort on that Valentin Serov copy (I erred last week when I identified the Russian portrait artist as “Kerov”):

I worked on this even after the last class last week, trying to get the right eye placed correctly. I had already put hours and hours into that eye, and considered devoting the whole blog this week to the Mystery of the Traveling Eye. I might revisit this topic when I have a better handle on it. If that ever happens! Right now I am so disgusted that I ‘m not even giving you a chance to compare my final (for now) copy to the original.

So it has been a full week for me, and thus wonderful.

Details (Death to)

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“It’s all in the details” — a statement considered wise when the subject matter is policy. What about when the subject is art? Recently, I visited an exhibit of Dutch and Flemish paintings from the 17th-18th century, wherein the details were really important. Before photography, paintings were valued as records; the tiniest of details were appreciated. But in this day and age, details can be a hindrance to artistic expression. Representation, as opposed to abstraction, is even looked down upon in some quarters. Abstraction is the ultimate in detail-elimination.

Only last week one of my followers commented, “Your drawings are magnificent.  Great attention to detail.  Superb!”  Alas, his approval, to the extent based on my attention to detail, may be misplaced. I have to acknowledge a contrary judgment–that in general, attention to detail is not a good thing, and that in particular, my attention to detail is more of a handicap than an ornament to the quality of my output.

Which is just a long way of saying, I expend too much energy on details.  At one point during the Red Chalk workshop, Rob Liberace asked me to dial back on the details–I was making a virtual skeleton out of our lean model.  Referring to the portrait above, “Kitsch,”  Cameron Bennett suggested last Thursday.  Ouch!

Two experts within a short time identifying the same weakness–there must be something to it.  How did I get to this pass?  Certainly my plein air painting never permitted excessive detail.  One theory–my speed in getting to a near-finished state leaves me all too ready to look for areas to refine.  Instead of reexamining the broadest strokes to make sure those are as perfect as I can get them, I start on what I used to consider the next step–developing the details.  Another theory–I am just not that good an artist.,

Take this week’s portrait from a live model, posted as the cover image for this blog.  As soon as I caught Rebecca’s likeness and properly placed and sized all her features, I spent considerable time working on the details, or what I was then considering the nuances of her features–especially her mouth and eyes.  It was at the end of that session that I got the “kitsch” remark. Ouch–that still hurts!
Here is the current portrait next to the earlier one done in black and white. Big improvement anyway. (But we had less time to work on the black and white, I think.)

At least when copying a work done by a master, I cannot be criticized for the sin of detail. The detail, or lack of it, comes already supplied. Here is this week’s homework assignment, from a self-portrait by 20th century Italian artist, Pietro Annigoni.

The whole point of copying, may I remind those of you who abhor the slavishness of copying, is to train the copyist’s eye. If I cannot see how my ear is different from the original’s ear, how can I expect to paint a good representation of a real, live ear? So there is the original, on the right, with my copy on the left. Sitting on my easel, my copy looked virtually perfect to me–I fantasized Cameron accusing me of tracing the image.

Here, not so perfect. A decent copy, but far from perfect. I gnash my teeth in frustration! How did the bloody head get so elongated in the original, with me not noticing? This is why artists resort to projecting drawings onto their canvases from photographs, a practice frowned on by purists, and one that certainly does nothing to train the eye. Fury it is that motivates them!

I hereby resign myself to getting beat up upon by Cameron this Thursday because there is no way I am repainting that ear. (In order to narrow the head, I would have to move the ear.)

But back to the topic–Death to Details. With this new anti-detail directive freshly absorbed, giving a nod to Peter Granucci here as well since he also has tried to wean me away from focusing on details when drawing from a live model, I took out a painting that had never satisfied me.  This was a painting based on a drawing made with a live model.  I had no details to refer to –the painting itself was several references removed from the original drawing since I had painted over it several times trying to find a version that pleased me. Could I solve this painting by eliminating even more details?

The only part of this painting that I liked was the hand and the drape at the bottom, so I felt free to mess with the rest of it.  I tried muting the background.  I changed the hairdo.  I refreshed the skin tones and created large splashes of light. Finally, taking a cue from the hand that I did like, I outlined the figure in black.  Suddenly, it looked interesting.  I never use black ordinarily, so this was definitely weird.  I scumbled (a technique for applying a glaze but with a dry brush) more black into the background and it got even better.

Ultimately the color, and maybe the contrast may save this painting.  But my curiosity to obliterate detail is what motivated me to revisit this painting.  Maybe that makes no logical sense, but hey, that’s left brain for you!

Meanwhile, and D, I’m talking to you, don’t praise my attention to detail.  It’ll just make me squirm uncomfortably.

This blog started out over two years ago (!) with no particular angle on my painting adventures, but has begun to develop as a chronicle of my efforts to grow as an artist. So I have come up, finally, with a name for it: Painter’s Progress–playing on the phrase “Pilgrim’s Progress”, a religious tome from a time period when details in paintings were expected and desired.