On Second Thought....

OK, by popular demand (namely, one person), I will present here matters related to my painting struggles after all.  My failures will not be hidden from public view. You will see stages of my paintings as they are, whether in a disastrous state, or a state where a layman would describe as "going well." The purpose of this blog is not to boost my public profile as a painter, or to show how awesome I am, which I am not. Consider it a failblog of painting, if you will.

Without further ado...

I present to you this following image.  It is of the latest stage of a torso in a 5 x 3 ft painting that  I am working on:

What happened was this: I thought I was freakin' amazing.  I thought, well if Caravaggio could bust out a masterpiece in two weeks, without even doing an underdrawing...

THEN I CAN DO IT TOO!!

 

And then I was quite quickly disabused of that notion.  I went through a dry brush stage, an ébauche stage, a solid paint stage, then a paint-thinned-with-medium stage.  You know, the standard modus operandi.

I worked away for weeks, 

I stepped back, 

And I saw, 

With the liberating clarity of certitide, that 

It was all wrong. 

The thing is, I have no life model.  The torso is based on a crappy photo of my less-than-muscular potbellied self, a whole bunch of reproductions of student work from the École des Beaux Arts (Thank you, Mr. Gluck), and Richer's Artistic Anatomy (translated by Robert Beverly Hale), which I studied pretty much concurrent with the making of the painting.  I figured there was so little time in the world, who had time for being well-prepared?  In short, a monster was created.  I painted the six-pack all right, but none of the cans was in the right place.  It was only at this point that I learned about the obliquus externus, the serratus interior, the epigastric depression, etc etc.

I now realized, given the size of this painting, that I really should have done a complete scaled down version (at least up to the first painting stage) before even thinking of beginning the larger version.  Oh well, next time.  Anyway, here's one for the history books: I did a study of the torso after having carried the painting to the second-painting stage.

Hell, I like the design of this study, done freehand, more than what I have on the big canvas, done with measurement and blown up with a grid.

I had no choice but to cover up the disaster zone.  Titanium white, which I normally avoid, came in handy.  Being a cheap ass, I also used mineral spirit to thinned down this covering, correction layer.  In effect, it's like doing a thick ébauche on top of a second painted layer.  Some of the mineral spirit dissolved some of the previous layer, which wasn't completely dry.  Yeeeeeeessshhhh.  Anyway, right now, it is still a little off, but it is at least closer to being convincing than what it was before.  Guess what, to save time, I think I am just going to paint over this with medium-thinned paint and carried it to the finish (some people never learn...).  If you bang your head against a wall enough times, eventually it's going to punch through, right?  ... right?

Whew, that was cathartic.  And now for something entirely different: