Carlos, I don't mind at all you posting your works here. It adds a great deal to the thread. Very interesting that you rub your paint into the canvas with the bursh and your fingers. I do that a lot (mainly with the brush - the fingers sometimes), and I use the heel of the brush too. I do this especially when I am painting the sides of the figure or face - areas that recede and don't reflect but rather absorb the light.
I used a lot of terre verte (Winsor and Newton - terre vertes differ from brand to brand) with cadmium yellow and cadmium orange to get that absorbed light. I also used a flake white on the frontal areas that do reflect the light keeping the texture scumbled.
This is the influence of artists like Chardin, and also Courbet and Rembrandt who used very impasto, sticky, almost sculptural paint to paint fleshy things. I love that the best of artists from previous centuries. I don't have a feeling for the subject matter of the past that much, but definitely the paint application.
Carlos, thank-you very much for your very thoughtful comments. I am pleased you appreciate the simplification in my work. I feel that I work as consistently and as hard as if I were painting a traditionally finished painting, but scrape off and redo instead of building up. It is something instinctive, trying to get the paint itself to feel like flesh. I am, hopefully, going to work this theme this year for the solo show at the Hodnett Gallery next year.
Carlos, your painting details look good, and very passionate. I am looking forward to seeing the final work. Congratulations on this commission - well done! I was told in art school to keep the same intensity and freedom in the marks throughout the painting as you have in the start, when you have nothing to lose. You could try and focus on making the actual paint passionate - trust your instinct - keeping a focus on the feeling of the painting and working constantly on the relationship of the tones and colours whilst you are finishing off the painting. Try not to simply neaten and tighten but make each mark (perhaps using smaller brushes) an exploration of tonal relationships, and try and keep the paint in a flesh-like texture and weight. Courbet, as Marina mentioned, is a great example of this. Also, William Whitaker's excellent student, Emily, has just done a wonderful classical painting that does just this in the face - keeping the properties of the paint and the illustration of the features equally important. Here's the picture at the
conceptart forum.
Marina, thank-you for your kind comments, also. I am pleased you like the colours and textures, which is what my focus was on.
(I am currently redoing the mouth and torso on the left side. There's nothing like publicly displaying your work to bring the errors into sharp focus! I'll post the two versions in the works-in-progress thread, and the final version here.)