This painting starts my second week of figurative work. I have strongly experienced how much my subjective mind interferes my objective observation. In my painting workshops, I keep telling everybody: "Only believe your eyes. Do not believe your brain". During my figure painting, I have been fighting with my conceptual mind constantly. I do tons of measurements, and they demonstrate so dramatically how wrong my mind can be. With every figure painting I did so far, there always is a stage that my figure looks significantly wrong. In this stage, I thought I did everything correctly, but the figure looks ugly, unhealthy, unbalanced, and handicapped. I have to work very patiently, measuring in high precision, correct errors in proportions, angles, shapes, and value meticulously. This process takes about two hours in average. If you don't give up, and use your rational mind (put away your emotions), your figure will mutate in a positive way, healing, growing, and get more and more humanized. It is a very tiresome work, but I feel rewarded at the end.
3 comments:
Oh yes figures can be tough but there really fun when you get one down that says what you meant to portray. I like the hula series you have going especially the boy that looks cool.
~Kirby
Oh my, that's a GEM: "Only believe your eyes. Do not believe you brain" Very well put!!! Great post!!
I think you do extremely well with figures. You get them into proportion very nicely. And you capture the gesture of the model beautifully. A friend once told me it's hard for an artist to objectively evaluate his/her work. Don't let your brain "text" you while painting. :^)
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