Oil portrait

[Jim Riley]

Very good job Catherine.

I couldn't resist adding my comments since several things did jump out at me however.

The hair that forms a bun (?) shape could use some variation in shape (it becomes a geometric object) and an earlier suggestion to vary your edges along the silhouette on the back of the head will help a lot.

I should also say that it does not look as though you gave the shirt as much attention and interest as the wonderful face. It seems rather monochromatic and edges are uniformly rendered. Paint it with the same enthusisam as the head.

Good Luck!

[Timothy C. Tyler]

I have a little thing to say that is probably about my personal taste and manner of seeing...

I really think most "westerners" read paintings by and large from left to right. The gaze being towards the left (looking of the canvas) rather makes me want to look off with him. I might prefer it (the work) simply flipped, then we'd be looking in toward him. Is this clear or valid?

Aside from that I too think it's strong and like it still.

[Genway Gao]

I am too felt the right eye (left on the painting) needs some work, exactly the way described by Steven. But don't try to do it without the sitter re-pose for you, the color should not be the same as on the other eye, and can be any imaginary color due to the angle which light refract thru the lens and complicated by the reflection of iris.

The rest is fine to me, well balanced composition, forms and colors, show that painterly expression.

This will be your milestone painting, so move on do another one quick, don't stop.

[Jim Riley]

Catherine,

I don't know that I agree about changing the direction of sitter or light as was suggested earlier by Tim, but flipped the painting to see what it would look like (I have a mirror in my studio that permits me to look at a reverse of the painting while I am working on it and often see problems that don't occur to me otherwise) and then moved the figure further back in the painting to give the head/face more room.
I hope you don't mind my playing with your pianting and hope it helps.

[Timothy C. Tyler]

Jim it's great...I know all the big ones have done great works in the manner of the original I just really like what you just posted, even the light flows (more naturally for me from left to right) or from above downward... Tim

[Catherine Ingleby]

Dear all,
A million thanks for all the help and such in depth advice.

I'll have to admit that I can now clearly see the faults myself but through a constricted amount of time and partly due to the fact that it was an exercise rather than a commission I never did get round to correcting them!

I will definitely post the next more finished effort that I am working on at the moment.
Thanks especially to Tim, Stephen, and Jim for their contributions. The reversal of the image was incredibly effective, an aspect of the psychology of painting that had never even crossed my mind.

Many thanks again
Catherine

[Jim Riley]

Just to be clear.

I copied and pasted Catherine's portrait into Photoshop, flipped it, moved the image back in the frame, and cloned the background and shirt to fill the resulting space on the face side of the frame. I also added an indication of a shoulder.

The attached shows these changes to the original compared to the flipped version and I must say that I find it very difficult to find one direction better than the other.

[Chris Saper]

Dear Catherine et al,

I am in complete agreement that westerners will tend to "read" paintings from left to right; and that a person's first written language dictates their "default" reading direction. The notion of how a painting is "read" is one that I spent many hours researching when putting together text for "Painting Beautiful Skin Tones". (Includes interviews with a developmental pediatrician, a neuro-psychiatrist, two opthalmic surgeons and a speech therapist,as well as a lot of literature review.) Although there is a variety of opinion, there is some support in the literature for the idea that there is a "direction of language".

This idea of a learned visual direction, is, I think, the same mechanism that causes Americans to look the wrong way and step out into traffic in London. I believe it results in tendencies for the Israeli-born viewer to read from right to left and the Chinese-born viewer to read from top to bottom.

I also think it is very important in setting out the composition of a paintng to recognize this idea. To get the left-to-right reader to comfortably read your work from right to left, you can help immensely by giving them obvious visual clues about the eyepaths that you place in the work. Otherwise the painter can risk presenting the discomfort that comes with straddling a visual fence (like the vase-face thing, or the even-distribution of values/shapes/etc thing). One of the most basic things a painter can do is to place proportionately more negative space between the edge of the canvas and the front of the head than is placed between the edge and the back of the head, as Jim shows in the flipped/cropped version. (I mention this as a convention, although, like any convention, I have seen painters break them very successfully, but I am convinced, not accidentally)

I also think that this is the underlying reason that European painters so often placed subject with light coming from the upper left, rather than the upper right...it just felt more comfortable.

I'm interested in other opinions...? Perhaps this is more a Cafe Guerbois topic...

Catherine, I love this piece and find it fresh and painterly. There is little I can add to the very thoughtful critiques that have been posted..the only thing I would note is that the light and shadow temperatures are different in the face and the hair..that is, it seems that a warm light is falling on the hair, while a cool light is falling on the skin; the ear seems a little cool for the shadow tempertures.

Best regards, Chris