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Lon,
Working from life or from a photographs, you need to interpret what you are seeing. Your eye is not the most correct arbiter of what is in front of you.
Let's see if I can remember the progression:
In the beginning you paint what you think you see.
Then you paint what you see.
Then you look for what to see.
Then you paint what you know you see.
Then you manipulate what you see to make art.
When I was commissioned to paint my first horse, I know nothing about horses. The first thing I did was go to a horse breeder. She let me borrow a horse skull (....you can see the skull under the horse in the painting....), and taught me about dressage, (...like how to hold the reins, how to present...), about how a horse holds his ears when he is alert, how when the whites of the eyes are showing, the horse is alarmed. I felt the horse to see the soft spots, the bony parts, how he moved his head and the texture of his hair. There is a horsiness to my painting, a horse knowledge I would not have had I not researched the subject before I painted it. Believe me, had I not done my homework, it would have been very visible to a horse person.
(I remember a painting of a skier by an artist who obviously knew nothing about skiing. The arms were akimbo, the ski tips were crossed -- this skier was one-second from becoming a snow plow. It was an embarrassment to the artist as well as to the subject. I'm sure that, as well as the face was drawn, the portrait spent the bulk of it's life under the bed.)
When I am painting a seated figure, I paint the clothed figure, I paint the body under the clothes,I paint the skeleton under the body, and I paint the chair under the whole thing.(Cedric ...thank you, you taught me well.... ) Richard Whitney says the painting has to be self explanatory. You must know everything that is happening. What is the hand doing? Where is the knee? Where is the other leg under the dress? It is a small step to thinking, what will the figure be doing next?
The great artists have been studying anatomy and the figure since the Renaissance. I figure they knew what they were doing.
Peggy
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