Painting takes time.
Painting is a process of applying paint and then responding to it, and sometimes it takes many months of doing absolutely nothing to the painting in order to get it right.
31 August 2008
This is a portrait of Bill. Ten days before I took this photo of the painting, the subject had turned 100 years old.
8 September 2008
I was hoping to get Bill’s portrait done sooner rather than later.
10 September 2008
The painting was a gift to Bill from my father to celebrate his special birthday…
28 September 2008
...and I wanted to finish it within the year.
29 September 2008
But, as I worked on it, I began to realize what a challenge the portrait was going to be.
4 October 2008
Profiles are good for capturing precise features…
6 October 2008
...but they make capturing mood and expression—breath and movement—very difficult.
7 October 2008
What’s more, the quality of light that I was looking for was a subtle effect…
15 October 2008
...and Bill’s lovely white hair was almost too contrasty for it.
26 May 2009
So the painting sat in my studio for over 7 months, from the October 2008 with the previous process image until May 2009 with this one.
27 May 2009
Sometimes I hid the work behind stacks of bigger paintings.
28 May 2009
Other times I had it in plain view so that I could stare at it and try to figure out what to do next.
29 May 2009
When I finally put paint to the canvas again in May, the background started to look interesting…
30 May 2009
...but I was still having a lot of trouble with Bill’s face.
1 June 2009
I blamed my troubles on the brightness of his hair…
2 June 2009
...so I washed it over in gray.
2 June 2009
That inspired me to go over his whole face in swathes of translucent color.
4 June 2009
I was working with the canvas flat on the floor, pushing around puddles of watered down paint—something I usually do more of earlier in the process.
7 June 2009
The painting looked like this when my dear friend Megh came over in mid-June. She is one of a handful of people who watches my work carefully and often sees what’s going on in my process better than I do. She said of Bill’s painting: “it’s so soft!” Though she said it nicely, I remember behaving apologetically about it; I was embarassed by the piece as it was. I put it behind another work and steered our conversation elsewhere.
8 July 2009
When I did take the painting out a month later, the first thing I did was try to impose structure on the portrait with hard white lines.
17 July 2009
But it was only by modulating the softness that Megh had pointed out that I finally found Bill.
Gwenn Seemel
The Centenarian
2009
acrylic on canvas
26 x 22 inches
(detail below)
The best paintings don’t start out the way they finish: they’re layers upon layers of discovery.
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CATEGORIES: - Practice - Process images -
marilyn grad...
You have become one of my favorite process artists and blogs. I am in awe and admiration of your art and process. Is it possible to subscribe to your blog? Did I check correctly?
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