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June 28, 2008

more than one way to skin a cat

Not that I’ve ever tried. There’s also more than one way to paint a portrait. Ingres, at the sharp end of 400 years of studio tradition would blend and layer transparent oil paint until an amazing lifelike likeness was achieved.

Ingres.jpg

Matisse, on the other hand, held that the colours didn’t matter so long as the tones were correct. He would pitch solid colours next to each other in thick daubs and let them fight it out.

matisse.jpg

Ingres had a process, a system, to achieve his famous translucent skin tones. [Though he obviously had something else for when his students copied his process assiduously the results fell far short of the master.]

I don’t have a process, for one thing I often can’t remember from one session to the next how I achieved a certain effect. I like the actual act of painting. The physical business of looking and seeing and then trying to arrange a few colours and tones on a panel to give the effect of what I am seeing and feeling.

em-cu-077.jpg

I like pushing the paint about - I like to see the whole thing at once, complete in every stage, so I can determine how it should progress. It is more a continuous experiment than an accumulated process.

I enjoy the struggle of putting paint up and seeing what happens. I like to keep all the colours working on the panel all the time, letting the picture appear rather than going through proscribed actions with a predetermined outcome.

Posted by john at June 28, 2008 08:44 PM

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