There is a great distortion between what you see creatively
and what often is reality. I learned this most profoundly just recently while
doing a portrait of a friends’ daughter, the reason I chose the photo to create
was first its delicate beauty but even more it begged to be painted because it
seemed like a photograph of an Andrew Wyeth painting. I painted it differently
than I have in the past, portraits have always been a struggle for me but this
time I tried it smaller and with less detail and hoped it would be easier.
I didn’t sketch it like I have in the past; I blocked it out
in paint and adjusted the image by eye. It is amazing how the face very slowly grows,
as you get closer, farther away than closer again. The first images seemed
almost cartoonish and pasty. I watched the ghostly face grow out of a dark
backdrop and the closer I felt to succeeding the farther the actual success
seemed to be. This feeling of creative blindness seems to run through all of my
works but never more dramatic than this portrait.
First I am amazed to see how realistic the image looks and
the appearance gets very clear that I have succeeded and so quickly, that is
until I send it for feedback or show someone that has not looked at it for the
last few hours. The comments were less than encouraging: “scary eyes”, “ghostly”,
“If I were the customer I would be insulted”, as much as it hurts to hear, it
was true-she looked nothing like the photograph. As much as the image seemed to
appear during the painting process the reality of getting away from the
painting was a bit intimidating. I went back to the drawing board, I would see
her eyes staring from the painting for a moment than I would realize how bad
the progress was getting and the time I seemed to be wasting. The good thing
about this process is that the artist gets to refine the image and look at it
again and again and realize how being too close to any painting brings about a
loss of clarity in the creation.
There have been several times and several hours of working
where I felt like I was getting somewhere great only to realize afterwards I
had made it even worse. The great thing about this process is the honing of the
skill of seeing, even if I fail over and over again I continue to refine my
vision and break through the loss of clarity, I believe that working on this
portrait will help with all of my paintings in the discipline of seeing what
you see and not just what the brain thinks or decides it sees. There is a short
hand of seeing things much like how the brain can decipher text that is
jumbled, we see the image and capture what we think we see, we cut corners on
the reality and fill in the blanks.
The brain is overwhelmed with details so we tend to skip the
reality of details that would truly capture what we see.
During the teaching process I have helped the student focus
by putting a mask over all but a small portion of a picture to copy, this
allows the student to concentrate on detail and reality of what they see and
the brain has less ability to fill in the blanks and the proportion and scale
gives way to the true perception of a scene. I have also heard about people
turning an image upside down to copy what they see instead of what the brain
wants to capture instinctively.
In the end, I would not say I captured even a portion of the
beauty of the original nor the drama of the Andrew Wyeth painting but in the
end I believe I have honed my skills for seeing. I will do more portraits and
plan on continuing to perfect them, I have already turned down several
commissions because portraits are not my specialty although in the future it
may not be the case, I believe in leaving everything up to growing and
developing as an artist and as the eye perfects what it sees and argues with
the brain for what is reality, in the end the artist will create reality out of
the skewed perception he or she struggles with.
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