Portrait Oil Painting

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

I was amused recently when one of my close friends, a painter, said (as he has on more than one occasion over the past year) that he thinks that I am a strong enough artist that Angel [Academy of Art here in Florence, Italy] will not beat out of me what is so good about my art. It is funny how some of us have this discussion about the four major classical art schools here in Firenze and how they differ, as well as how they do not. And most of us strive for our own independence.

Educating myself on the work of others is something that I have changed my opinion about over the years. I did not receive the traditional art education and before coming to Firenze, I knew very little about art history. I sometimes choose NOT to see the work, being curious about what kinds of images I would create without much influence of much anyone else. Other times I feel that looking at the work of others helps me hone on my own taste and grow faster. Much in the same way as my picture taking, each time I see an image, I refine my own sense of composition. It is helpful to analyze my emotional response to try to find that elusive quality that makes me FEEL something in one artwork, and feel too little in a similar effort.

I am where I need to be at the moment, despite my impatience. I find when I paint at Angel that I am trying to piece together many different approaches. Here is a small detail image of a portrait of a model Mauro that I am working on at the moment. This image reminds me of my approach with pastels when I do street painting. I have since gone in and refined the shapes in the face. Shapes are the most important thing and I find myself getting lost in them. But here, I am playing with putting the background color into parts of the face. This follows one idea that every part of a painting is a combination of the same colors. Each part simply varies in how those colors are proportioned. Let us see where this path takes me . . .

Art Anniversary Promotion: Get more art for your buck. Hurry, this one-time offer expires on 15 February 2013.

Painting from Life

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

I spend three hours every weekday morning painting from a live model named Magda. She is really lovely. I have three canvases going on: one seated pose on Mondays, one half-seated/half-standing pose on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and then a standing view of her back on Thursdays and Fridays. The first two projects are being done on a white campitura (field colour) or in this case, a white-primed canvas with nothing added. The last project is on a toned canvas. There are different approaches one takes in a painting depending on these kinds of early choices and I wanted to learn what my preferences might be, and more importantly, why.

I first sketched in the gesture of her standing figure, using S and C curves to put in the romance of the piece. Later I tightened up my drawing by adding the straight lines to define specific angles (what I think of as the architecture). I want to give the figure enough architecture for solidity and strength of the figure, but keep enough romance in her so that she does not appear stiff and hopefully will elicit some emotion in the viewer.

For the sketch, I used raw umber and just enough white to cut the warmth of the thinned umber. I need to learn to use paint when I paint. That sounds stupid and logical, but I tend to use very little paint and this leads to a thinned, glazed color. Glazing usually makes a color look warmer than an opaquely painted paint. If I use more paint and get my tones, hue, and chroma correct, then even as the oil paint becomes transparent over time, my painting will look as I intended it to look, even after many years.

You may see some light patches in the campitura, especially down near the leg on the left, where the model carries her weight. This is because I must improve my drawing skills. I had the knee too low and used mineral spirits to remove the paint on my original sketch. It also removed the background color. You may also see that I chose to raise the front part of the knee by scribbling in dark background below the knee, lifting it in the process.

The background comes first since I must relate the skin colors to it. It is amazing how a line drawing that looks proportionally well done, looks very different in paint. Mine always seem to grow, in a similar fashion to how I experience “stone expansion” when carving. That is the phenomenon in which I remove plenty of marble in a day’s work, but the next morning the sculpture seems to have grown over night and I see how much more must come off. This work never gets dull! Really.

After the background, I start to add the lights in the flesh. I will do several layers of this, in a large part because of the transparency of oil paint. I want my lights to remain light, not darken over the years to become closer to the darker campitura underneath them. Timing is everything and I have tried to keep a pace on this project that allows the paint time to dry before I take on the next steps.

The last step you see here is my trying to create the forms of each part of the figure. I want to portray the volume of the rib cage and the hips, the head, and the arm and . . . you get the idea. I want them to have the proper amount of turning so that you can distinguish between a cylinder, an egg, and a more boxy mass. You may notice that even though I had designed the shadow shapes in my drawing, I painted over the spine in an effort to make the rib cage one united form. The big picture is always more important than details and everything is related.

Thank you for reading and following my artistic journey. Please do not forget to take a look at the recently available sculptures by my dear friend Vasily Fedorouk: http://www.borsheimarts.com/vasilyfedorouk.htm

Classical Art Klimt Leopold Museum

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

While the Leopold Museum in Vienna, Austria, brags about holding an extensive collection of Austrian Expressionism artworks by Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt, among other Austrian artists, I was surprised by the works I saw there.

For the last three years, I have been studying more seriously, or at least with a more rigid schedule or focus, classical art. At my age, I thought I did not want to take time out for this, but ultimately I realized that I was not improving on the former path that I was on and I needed to slow down and learn what I missed years ago.

For this reason, I was thrilled to know that Gustav Klimt, so famous for a looser, more illustrator style, could produce really beautiful, painterly works in a classical style. Check out these two portrait paintings of an old man. They have the same title, which was translated in different ways. “Der Blinde” was called “The Blind Man” for one painting. The other, on the other end of the same wall, was translated to “Portrait of an Old Man.” They both look tight from a respectable distance, but up close, the strokes are minimally wonderful.



This portrait of a little girl is the size of a normal postcard (6 x 4”). Look how tight this is compared to the style that Gustav Klimt became known for, Austrian Expressionism. He definitely could draw! And once he knew he had those skills, then he knew that his hand, eye, and brain were all on the same page and he could begin intelligent exploration.
More tomorrow . . .


And I leave you with an image I took outside of the Parliament building in Vienna. There are more, but I will spare you. And I hope you like the “Eye Tree” I do not know the real name of this tree, but I liked it a lot. It reminded me of childhood scary stories in which the woods were always watching. Trees truly are magical. Note the “art nouveau” type patterning in the leaves between the “V” and the funky face in the lower right -- Nature aids art.

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Pencil Drawing - Seated Female Model

On the 24th of October, I did a pencil drawing of a new model, Eugenia. I have been interested in doing drawings on dark paper with the light shapes being prominent. But I only had a grey paper with me. I began the 1.5-hour session by sketching the figure in with a pencil. But I ended up liking the drawing and only added a wee bit of white pencil to try to round out the form. I am pleased with this figure drawing, especially because of the relatively short duration of the pose.

While I am working to improve my seeing of shapes accurately and this means a study of classical proportion and realism, I am not sure how far I will take this. What I really enjoy about the process of drawing that I am learning now is that I can leave some elements of a work of art only implied, such as the chair and hands. There is enough of a chair drawn there so that a floating figure does not confuse the viewer’s brain and the gesture is visible without all of the details in this pencil drawing.

She is 23 centimeters tall – from foot to head. Signed and dated. If interested in this drawing, you may add her to your collection for only $50 (US) plus $15 shipping from Italy to anywhere in the world. Just send me an e-mail!