My biggest painting yet just got bigger!
Yes, it got bigger. In fact it tripled! It’s not always easy to tell when you crop a picture on a computer screen what it’s going to be like, or feel like, when it is scaled up and made out of paint. The great thing about not having very much space is that I have to live with my paintings. I walk past them, I stub my toe on them, I move them to hoover (or more accurately, I hoover around them!). They become part of the furniture. It means that as I’m living with them, I’m looking, not always directly, sometimes out of the corner of my eye, sometimes a passing glance or a daydreaming wander.
The big portrait was bugging me. And when paintings bug me, I know one of two things will probably happen. I’ll make it great or I’ll ruin it. This is one of the most exciting things about creating. The fine line between the two. What if I turn this one into three panels? I liked this idea because it was bold.
The second panel was very easy to paint. In fact it was just one block colour. I wanted to offset the face and inject some space into the composition. When I have doubts I think to myself, well if it doesn’t work I’ll just paint over it. It gives me the courage to just try new stuff. I’ve painted over quite a lot of things in my time!
On to the third panel. I needed an ear. I needed a neck and most importantly; the lines around my eyes. One of the most wonderful and unexpected things to come out of portrait painting is my love of lines in faces, particularly around the eyes. To me, the heart of a person is in the eyes and you can’t get to the heart of the eye without the surrounding area. This whole panel was so close up it was almost abstract and this led to a feeling of freedom because with this one I’m not worried about the likeness. I’ve got that in the first canvas. I painted the first bit with the panels alongside each other. The canvases had tripled and so the room around them shrunk. There was such an abundance of stretching and crouching that by the end of the day I felt like I’d been to a yoga class! Does painting yoga exist? Could be a new thing.
I finished painting this canvas on its own, without the other canvases around it. Mainly to do with logistics, but as a byproduct I found I wasn’t putting expectations on the outcome when constantly comparing the two and it gave me the confidence to use marks and colours freely. When I finally finished the last panel, I put them together. They resonated with each other, but I wasn’t completely convinced. A niggle set in. I felt I could push this whole thing a little bit further. Why not eh? It’s gone this far. To be continued…
