Emily for Julia Kay's Portrait Party

Emily, oil on polypropylene, 35 x 45 cm  SOLD

here is a portrait of Emily that i knocked off for Julia Kay's Portrait Party (my semester break fun) over the last couple of days.

The original photo supplied to JKPP by Emily can be seen here.

I painted onto white polyproylene panel knowing the brilliant white reflective surface would contribute a luminous quality to Emily's skin. The painting came out nothing much like an Alex Kanevsky (see my earlier post on his technique here). Seems my mark-making is just more restless and variegated than his calm and methodical layering.

Emily has amazing eyes  and skin, and i wanted to feature them by juxtaposing a finely worked face in a sea of painterly  marks.

Placing idealized features directly beside abstract expressionist fields of impasto alla prima color, where the clothing, hair and background are none realistic,  has the effect of bringing out the porcelain doll quality in her photos. Can one legitimately  mix styles in a painting?

self-portraits of a gargoyle in a Claude Mirror

Blue gargoyle, oil on polypropylene panel, 44 x 60 cm

Finally gotten round to playing with my reflections in my ‘Claude mirror’ (here). I wanted to see if they had any capacity to reveal something truthful about the mirror-gazer (me, in this instance) that an ordinary mirror could not. I also wanted to explore what kind of mark-making might be most suited to images of this type. I wanted to continue with polypropylene sheet rather than canvas, but didn’t want to just fall back on Kanevsky palette-knife and paint-mixing techniques. I want to develop my own voice, discover my own lexicon of mark-making.

And so after a little trial and error i found a kind of drybrush method that used paint directly from the tube. Being a latter-day Fauvist, i like working directly from the tube, keeping the colour as pure and intense as i can. I am not troubled by monochrome painting in the least. On the contrary, it imposes a kind of rigor and discipline that i like to struggle against.

So this is today’s effort – self-portrait of a blue gargoyle. I intend to produce two more, a gargoyle trilogy, in order to become quite familiar with this technique. My intention is to then choose one of the three gargoyle paintings and produce a fourth, larger portrait from it but using palette knives instead of dry brush.

Gargoyle No 2 - a bit more gentle humour in this one. If the No 1 betrays my melancholic disposition, then this more candied image hints at my loopy side.

Purple gargoyle, oil on polypropylene panel, 44 x 60 cm

And, No3. In this third and final gargoyle i have paid closer attention to the direction or 'grain' of the brush marks in an attempt not only to suggest a more naturalistic contouring of the facial features, but at the same time create a greater sense of abstract 'swirl' or movement in the work.

Green gargoyle, oil on polypropylene sheet, 44 x 60 cm

plus, some detail and fun with a camera which suggests you don't need a Claude Mirror, just a camera with a wide-angle macro lens capability to 're-configure' your own art into more surreal forms.