Homage to Stan Cross….

Posted on 14 December 2011 by sgolding

A theme of this blog has been the way my paintings develop from drawings.  Look in the portfolio for the finished work:

and the final work in place:

 

and another view on the diagonal showing the shaping of the canvas:

Posted in art, drawing, oil painting, shaped canvas | Tagged , , , |

Meow…

Posted on 2 November 2011 by sgolding
A few years ago I drew our cat Eclair, asleep on a cane chair, as a form used to frame the sleeping cat:

pencil, ink and wash on paper

I have been working on a painting in oils recently based on this drawing.  The drawing uses the white space as a negative form around the image.  This is characteristic of drawing but not of painting, which has its own vocabulary,  At this stage here is where the painting is and since taking this image I have added a tinted glaze to the yellow space.

oil on linen- not in final state

 

Posted in art, art process, cat, drawing, oil painting | Tagged , , , |

more stages in a portrait ……..

Posted on 29 September 2011 by sgolding

to continue- the final preliminary painting is:

oil on linen

The painting was developed from a series of drawings of the quartet, made in concert:

 

in a range of mediums:

 

and formats:

to finish the images in this post with a compositional sketch:

all of which goes to show the amount of thought and work that goes into a painting.  The concept that “talent” as a quality allows an artist to pluck an idea and image from the back of the retina and lay it down on a canvas immediately and without effort is foreign to my experience and practice- the painting is built from the drawings  and ideas are developed into the finished work.  The conceit of John Donne of dashing off a finished sonnet in his spare time is a falsehood to me.  No author makes a draft do they?

 

Posted in art, art process, drawing, musicians, oil painting | Tagged , , , , , , , |

a portrait in stages

Posted on 9 September 2011 by sgolding

This is a series of images of a preparatory painting I did for my 2011 archibald entry, of the Flinders Quartet.  It is a smaller oil, only about 50 cm by 90cm worked up from drawings to test ideas.  I want to show the layering and effect of glazing with translucent colour on the image as it is built up so:

underpainting:

which I then worked over with another opaque colour, building surface texture and the feel of negative space from the drawings:

and then a couple of layers of overglazing were applied:

In some ways the fragmentation of the figures into the colour field below makes you fill in the images from your interpretation of the image as a quartet, resulting in implied motion of the players.

Posted in art, art process, drawing, musicians, oil painting | Tagged , , , , , , |