I’m unable to paint at the moment due to house redecoration duties which must take priority! I have had a little time, however, to look back over some old work and the period when I tried some life drawing and painting. For me this subject has always been a challenging one for two reasons. Firstly I had a fairly sheltered upbringing and although my mother loved art, my parents came from a generation where nudity and anything considered slightly risque was taboo. Exposure to any naked or partially clothed figures was virtually non-existent until I was well into my teens and even then it was not until the mid 1960s that I had any real access to the subject through photos, art or in film and on stage!
Secondly, unlike most trained artists, I have not spent countless hours studying anatomy and drawing or painting models in life classes and have therefore had to rely on other reference sources. I have tried to learn as much as I can from studying the great masters at first hand in various galleries in Western Europe, viewing works by Botticelli, Titian, Velazquez, Caravaggio, Ingres, Goya, Manet, Klimt, Alma- Tadema, Freud and many more. As I said in my last blog, there is no substitute for confrontation at first hand and I have spent many happy hours working out how these exceptional works were created.
The ability to recreate the human form, getting the proportions right, accurately reproducing muscles and flesh colour in female and male subjects is always a struggle and tests my observational skills to their utmost limits. I find myself endlessly returning to the National Gallery in London to look at the Rokeby Venus (Velazquez), Samson and Delilah (Rubens), and Bacchus and Ariadne (Titian) to study the techniques used, particularly the brushwork and flesh tones used. Similarly, it is always important to see contemporary figure painting at its best and the BP Portrait Awards and other prestigious exhibitions often include excellent examples in their shows. There are one or two paintings that I have attempted in the ‘People’ section of this website containing semi-naked figures – the lovers in ‘The Ship Song’ for example – but in sifting through some earlier works, I found two experimental painted male and female studies:-
When I was focussing on life studies, I also went through a phase of creating very close up facial portraits in a chopped off style that was quite popular a few years ago and I have included an example of one of these compositions to round off this blog.
