Some time ago
 

Moderator's Note: I split this topic from the Untitled topic by Holly Snyder in Oil Unveilings here.



It looks like this post was some time ago.

But I just wanted to tell you how much I like this painting. Really great job.

Rick

Painterly
 

Hello Holly,

what a nice portrait, it is technically good, but also it has that quality of intimate relation that makes it more interesting.

I wanted to say something about being painterly: for me to be more painterly the best way is painting LIVE. When you paint edges from life what you should or should not blur just comes to your eyes as soon as you look for it. The way colours are interwoven, how one colour is found on both sides of an edge, these are things that will not appear in a photograph, you'll have to make them up.

I think that you do learn a lot by painting from photos, and I did almost nothing else up to now. But when you arrive at a stage when you know what to look for when you are painting (again edges, temperature, direction of brushstrokes etc) you might find that it's easier to paint from life then from a photo.

I recently read an essay by Antonia Byatt about portraits. She was saying that a photo (and a portrait from a photo ?!), because it is a record of a moment lost in time, that will never return, is ultimately about death. A portrait, painted in a certain period of time, not to mark the instant but to look for someone's personality and special features, it's about life.
I think it is a very interesting approach. I just started my first portrait of a young girl from life and I immediately felt it was worth the effort: it is coming out painterly without me thinking about being so.

I posted the canvas after the first (short) sitting.
To go back to your beautiful work, I agree with Chris about the blue of the irises being maybe too blue, but overall i think it is great, also the accent on her left eye really works
Ciao

Ilaria

Nice painting, Ilaria!

Interesting that you post this, Ilaria. Recently I've been painting from life in multiple sittings and what is happening is that I am finding that people move very slightly and if I like something better than what I've painted earlier, I change it. This is another reason to keep things loose and painterly early on.

This is also making me think that I am a terribly subjective painter - I'm looking for what I like best about a subject, and I'm emphasizing it, or else I'm tweaking the painting to make somehing even more beautiful in my own judgment. When you work from a photograph you have only the judgment of the photograph. Of course you can tweak this too, it's just that it's one step removed from the actual physical experience of being around your model.

I'm also convinced that human eyes see things differently in terms of perspective than does a camera but I am still trying to figure this one out.

Marvin said something recently to the effect that an artist really only paints him/herself in every portrait... Marvin come in and correct me here if I'm quoting you incorrectly?

Ilaria, I would really like to read that essay.

And Holly... once again, a lovely painting, full of life.

Painterly
 

Linda, I think we should start a new thread, as this one is becoming about us rather than Holly's painting!
Byatt has wrote a lot on portraits. I will try to scan both from the pages I am referring to, which are the introduction to a catalogue of the BP Portrait Award, and from her book on portraits in art, but I need a little time
ilaria

I think it would be an interesting conversation.

What I find aggravating is that the argument always compares the best of the life painting experience with the very worst photo reference. Some of the worst paintings I have ever seen were painted from life.

A camera never makes a judgment. When a subject is before the camera they are also on the move. The artist is making the same subjective judgments, only before the fact. The best photo reference is also the best judgment of the artist. Having witnessed the many movements, angles and subtleties that were presented to, and cajoled from, the sitter.

It is also a moment of inspiration producing all the ingredients of a great portrait, such as a perfectly lit face, great composition, lost and found edges along with wonderful color harmony. All these things captured forever for the artist to ponder, manipulate, condense, expand and interpret.

Linda, that's essentially what I said. To clarify further, what I was eluding to was my feeling that in a successful portrait the artist must connect with the universal essence that is common to us all. So in essence we are always painting ourselves since we are all connected. Unfortunately not being keenly aware of this can leave the finished portrait as a merely superficial record. This is a sensibility that must be cultivated.

Mike, having painted both from life and photo reference I find that life sitting offers a greater opportunity to experience what I eluded to above connecting with the sitters soul.

Marvin,

I cannot deny the experience that you have connecting with your sitter. For me, at it's best, I think I too make a connection with my sitter. It just so happens that my connection takes place the day before I start painting.

I would not presume to denigrate painting from life. I just think each should be celebrated for the good they offer. I do get slightly agitated when only the worst of photography is held up as the only comparative. And, I'm not suggesting that the ladies above were doing that. For something that offers so much there are precious few who will defend it.

Lovely, Holly.

And a lot of them are in my studio!

Mike, I don't think anybody is arguing that you get a necessarily better result with painting from life than you do with using good photos. I know many successful portrait painters that work only from photos and my work is not as accomplished as theirs. I work from life or from photos, and all I can say is that each process feels different to me. Each one is a struggle but they are different struggles.

A client doesn't really care either way, so long as you get a likeness and they look good.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that the best way to paint is to put as much of yourself into the process as you can, and I can see how taking your own terrific photos of your subject can get you to that place.

I think you are exactly right.

And at the end of the day we get no points for process. Either we met our objective or we didn't.

Sorry Holly.

Mike, I would never deny that a photo presents the opportunity for the taker to capture and connect with the sitter, and in the best case scenario quite profoundly. However, (there had to be a however of there wouldn't be a reason to post, would there?) as portrait artists we have already taken quite a beating from the likes of photography. Now photographers are making "virtual paintings", digital retouched images on canvases, which they claim to be as good as real portraits!

We have become easy prey to the argument "why spend my money on a painted portrait when a photo is just as good?" This I feel lies in part because we, as artists, rely far too much on just copying the photo for reference and therefore far far too many portraits, be they loose or tight, lack the depth of character of a portrait painted from life. Even on the forum we are superimposing photos over our paintings to arrive at the correct "drawing"!

I recently completed a portrait, done mostly from photos and two all too brief life sittings. I told my client her portrait was as finished as I could get it, save one last sitting from life. We arranged a three hour interlude in which she would view the painting and I would then paint the real her. She was quite taken with the portrait and couldn't understand why I would want to, or could hope to, take it any further. After the sitting and upon viewing the completed portrait, she was taken aback. The painting had, in that short period, come to life, although nothing looked tangibly different. Marvin the alchemist strikes again?

I want people to see my paintings in the real and be taken aback by how lifelike they are. I want people to say that my work lives and breathes and goes far beyond what a photo can do. I don't want to be as good as a photo. I don't want to play second fiddle to a mechanical or electronic device. I want my paintings to be remarkably better.

On that recent day I won my battle, at least in the eyes of my client. I think without this kind of attitude and goal, portraiture can never be reinstated to the lofty stature it once held.

I truly believe the more we work from life the more we can realize this. I don't want to be someone who is just as good as a camera. I am a portrait artist!

Holly, you wrote: I think working from life is the best way to get better and faster at painting well from life. Just go find an open studio session somewhere or round up a friend as a model and jump right in!

Sorry Holly! These photograph/life debates come up every couple of months on the Forum. I personally like to see them run for a while because I think they are very important discussions and in fact go to the heart of why we should bother painting the portrait or the figure in an age when incredibly beautiful photographs are available (and are much less expensive than hiring a painter, need I add!).

I've asked Ilaria to start another thread with her new life portrait.

I agree with Michele; the way to learn to work from life is just to do it. Even putting a pile of fabric on a table to work from is hugely beneficial toward training your eye to see.

My original complaint was this:

Marvin,
Once again you have described the best of the life painting experience while alluding to the worst photo experience.

You pick up at this point and describe how the benefit of those final hours helped make the painting come alive. I would just like to give a little respect to all that went before. It was your good judgment that brought the painting to that point. Your good judgment that took advantage of photography. I think that any reasonable person would conclude that your judgment was correct. Maybe your painting would have been better if painted totally from life. Maybe, maybe not, but for all the good and practical reasons, you chose not to.

Rarely a day goes by that someone on these boards doesn't slam the use of photographs.

I have a great deal of difficulty with the anger and fear of photographic reference. I really don't care if others choose not to use it but find the world of digital info as a great aide to my portrait work. On rare occasions I have asked a subject to sit for some final touch up but otherwise shoot, compose, change heads, add backgrounds and show options to the client before the painting begins. Sitting is boring and it is sometimes difficult to not let it show.

I would not give up all the live training/study I have had and would not recommend learning to draw from photographs but find them very useful.

Everyone who has posted so far on this thread uses photos some/all/most of the time. The question (okay, my question) is whether it is "worth" the expense and incredibly time consuming "bother" of learning to paint from life. People who are teaching others how to do work from life (including me) have a strong interest in convincing others to answer "yes" to this question. But I'm open to hearing other sides to this issue.

Here's the side I want to hear speak: anyone who will say, "I can't work from life at all but I'm making a great living as a portrait artist and I think my work is excellent." Or how about some variation of: "I can't draw from life at all but my photographic references are so wonderful and I can use them so well that I feel it is not necessary for me to learn to work from life."

Hi,
I believe that a photo reference can easily "lift" a painting to a certain level, just by tracing the lines and fill in some colors. But to create a really convincing image you have to know how the eye perceive the three dimentionally world.

If you focus on a person you won

The work I have done from life informs the decisions I make when painting from photos. The additions I made during the last sitting were to bolster the areas that I knew would have had better information than my photos could provide. Painting from life is far more challenging and therefore offers far greater opportunity for growth.

I'm not saying photography isn't useful. I have cultivated my photographic skills to make my reference as viable as possible. I don't begrudge or belittle it. It just can not, in any way, compete with the vision of the human eye. Can anyone seriously dispute this?

If I didn't think that life painting was the best way to master the art of painting I'd have my students sitting in the studio copying photos. Been there! Done that! No contest!

I enjoy this discussion, however, I'm not particularly proud of the way it got started. Marvin, I think you walked around the corner and for no fault of your own got sucker punched. I know you are capable of defending yourself but fair is fair. I should have looked around the corner to see if someone was coming, sorry. With that said, cheers and play ball.

[QUOTE=Marvin Mattelson] It just can not, in any way, compete with the vision of the human eye.QUOTE]

As Cezanne said: "You paint as if you only got one eye"
So does the camera.

Most naturalistic painters paint that way, and that, of cause, is a personal choice based on personal taste. No problem with that.

If we look at the human vision, it is based on the two eyes, helping each other to define distance and volume of objects. I have often seen cats and birds take there heads from side to side to get a more three dimensional picture of the things they are focused on. You define distance and volume through the angles of the individual eyesight.

That meaning, if you want to focus on every detail in a painting ( as the one eyed camera can ) you must accept it as an unnatural way of perceiving. This is not the way we see things. It

This debate is very interesting: it also provides good arguments in leading the taste of my clients, whose eyes are often so contaminated by photographic vision that they expect a photographic approach.
I found the use of photos as difficult to master as the use of the brush.
Only recently I think I achieved a balance between the one eyed and the stereo vision Allan has so well explained.

I was delighted when I read David Bailey's A Secret Knowledge, were he explains how almost all the great portraitists of the past used any optical device available(camera lucida, lenses, mirrors, prisms).

As using the same palette of a great artist does not automatically make us as good as him, so using photos does not make a good painting, unless we have the skill to go beyond the photo; a skill which you can only aquire by painting life at any occasion.
I was distressed when my tutor at art school could spot all the paintings done from photos from the live ones and made the good proposition of incorporating live sittings in every commissions!

Quote from Byatt's Essay ' Why painted portrait?'


"What distinguishes painting (or drawing or etching)
From photography

Very interesting discussion, especially about the monocular vs binocular vision of the camera vs the artist.

I also strive to create something "better than a photograph" and I'm interested in how you, Ilaria, "lead the taste of your clients" in that direction.

How would you (and the other artists on this Forum) fill in this sentence:

"A painted portrait is more ________ than a photograph." Would you use words like "personal", "powerful", "sensitive"..... what?

The word is -Mine !
 

I think, as Byatt says and also Marvin, that the painting is the image plus my sensitivity, my aestethic sense, my favourite colours, size, scale.
And the more the reference photo is used, the more in the eyes of the client the painting will have to compete and be compared to that photo (I try never to show it), that's why it is clever adding some live sittings even if you then go back and repaint everything from the photo...

There must be a reason for a client to choose you instead of someone else. If they were charmed by some painting in your portfolio they want a little of that special charm to hang on their wall. The hand of the painter is unmistakably recognizeable, much more than the finger on the shutter button unless you are Avedon.
I once got away with saying that comparing a painting and a photo it 's like comparing live music to a record.

ilaria

Llaria,

It would be an interesting experiment to take a person from birth, give him the mission to paint people portraits. But, he can never ever paint from life, only from the photos he takes. It would be interesting to see how he would turn out.

The truth is this fiendish experiment continues to be carried out on me.

Mike, how exactly was I ambushed? I look at this thread as an opportunity to share my feelings about something I consider to be of tantamount importance.

Alan I would consider any guidance or philosophy that came from Cezanne to be 180 degrees off course. When I was in art school I had Cezanne literally shoved down my throat. The work I do now is as much a negative response to Cezanne as anything else. The idea that good artists use one eye is in my opinion misguided at best and more like patently wrong. Using one eye gives us a flattened view of the world with hard edges. This is how modern art is made. Flat work on a flat surface.

My approach to painting relies on the idea that in order to create the illusion of spacial reality one needs to understand and replicate the way the eye works and relays it to the brain. By using binocular vision we perceive variations in edges, since each eye views the same edge at a different angle. Edge variation is a must in recreating reality.

The most important aspect of using our own visual acuity is utilizing it's increased sensitivity to value and color variations. The camera cannot even come close in this respect.

The other important difference is being able to perceive the three dimensional solidity of the form. This is the essence of real drawing, as opposed to copying. This is easily observed in the works of those we call old masters. Photography compresses the form and we are left with an image that has been arrived at by virtue of a mechanical and not an intellectual process. Photographs are most often distorted in one way or another., as a result.

Mike you'd have to do your experiment as a controlled study, using a set of twins, allowing one to work from life and condemning the other to work from photos.

Marvin,

I think you discount what the brain can do, regardless of what it can presently see.

If I am given an image of a person to view (a quality photograph) I think it is possible to draw conclusions and make decisions based on previously processed information. And therefore interject information into the result that exists no where else but from your brain.

If I go to a museum (and I have the ability to discern what is quality, not a small thing) and I stare long and hard at quality, I believe that I can take that image and use it to inform my painting. My photograph then provides me the road map, my brain then formulates a response based on my brains composite of what it believes to be desirable.

This to me doesn't seem all that far fetched. You say that when you paint from a photograph your previous life paintings inform your decisions. Isn't this just a cousin to that?

I know there are quality paintings being produced by people that are each taking different paths.

It isn't my purpose to justify what I do. I'm just trying to educate whoever here is interested in profiting from my years of knowledge. I have spent my entire life training myself to be the artist I want to be. I've been teaching others for over thirty years.

During that time I've used a wide variety of approaches including working from imagination, from photos and from life. In my experience, training artists is most effectively achieved by working from live models, Not something I came up with by the way. This approach is rooted in the methodology of the XIX Century French Academy which had evolved over previous centuries.

If going to museums and looking at old master paintings was the way to do great paintings then everyone who visits the Met would be a great artist. To anyone who wants to reinvent this particular wheel, all I can say is, good luck.

Why does it have to be either/or?
 

I love photos, they sit so still and so patiently for you. But it took a painting of some peaches from 'life' for me to see the limitations of photography. I took a photo of the still-life setup in case the kids accidentally disturbed it, and was surprised by how flat it looked next to the real thing. All the lush color was flat in the photo. (try it, could be just my lack of camera sense!) That was a lightbulb moment for me. Now, I encourage my clients to give me a couple of hours and sit for a color study and use that together with the reference photo(s). Just that little bit is a big help.

Michele, I say: "A painted portrait has more presence than a photograph." 'Presence' in the sense of there being someone there. For me anyway, photos can seem so stagnant compared to a well-painted portrait.

I spent a week in a cabin in Vermont alone last summer. No plumbing, running water or electricity. There were no images at all except on my shrine and the nature surrounding me.

I think I came back with a fresher eye. I was astonished at how much of the portrait work looked alike, even though it was done by a myriad of artists, coming from multiple experiences.

Photography forces you to look at things the way it sees. You don't get to interpret what is in front of you until the camera does. It is like communicating using a translator.

When you have a photograph in front of you, there it is. Done. The next step is what I call rendering, yes rendering. Frozen possibilities. Is it close to the photograph or not? That is how we are forced to judge it.

There is the quality of danger when you paint from life. Will something happen to the subject or model before I finish. Will I have to change my original concept because something more interesting came up? Can I actually get this vibrating , moving subject on a canvas? It is truly frightening and therein lies the challenge.

Perhaps I have a more jaundiced eye and I agree there are a lot of very successful portrait artists, out there making a lot of money and employing photographs. Financial success in the arts, as so often has been the case does not mean greatness.