Last Painting of the Year

Abdul Mahmood

Oil on linen panel, 16"x12"

Here's my last painting of 2014.  Obviously, it's not done from life - I based it on one of my "Faces of Afghanistan" drawings fleshed out with stuff pulled from a raggedy photo.  It captures the feeling of a real farmer that I knew in Afghanistan.

I did this as an experiment.  A few days ago, I saw some really powerful portraits from another artist.  I noticed some techniques he used that made the paintings so effective and wanted to try them out.  That artist was also a caricaturist.  As I've said before, doing caricatures is a great way to learn how to do portraits, because you zero in on the things that make each individual unique.  Caricatures greatly exaggerate those features, of course, but if the features are only slightly exaggerated, the result could be a really good portrait.

This farmer has a very narrow face in real life.  I played up the narrowness a little bit, and lengthened it just a smidge, and the result turned out pretty well.  I also paid a lot of attention to the colors, planes, and folds of his face.  These details seem to obscure the fact that the structure of the face is slightly exaggerated.

There were some other techniques that the other artist used that I tried to do, but couldn't.  They worked very well for him, but just felt wrong to me.  I've had that experience many times.  Copying another artist's work, or imitating his style, is a great way to add new tools to your painting toolkit.  But if the tool doesn't work for you, don't use it.

I hope you have a great New Year's!

Landscapes

As mentioned in one of my previous posts, I've been doing a lot of small landscape paintings lately.  They're quite different from my usual narrative figurative paintings.  Those are usually developed over a period of several weeks, with lots of thought given to what's depicted, how it's depicted, and what's left out.  Things may get repainted several times.  I've been known to repaint everything in order to change the direction of the light.  Little or nothing is spontaneous.  I probably over-think them.

These small landscapes, though, are very different.  I started doing them because they were something that worked well with my schedule.  I could jump in, do a painting in the time available, and drop it when my time wasn't available any more.  I've found that this approach has its own demands, charms, and rewards, and I'm getting a kick out of it for its own sake.

These small landscapes are much more about the activity of painting.  When you don't have much time, you go for the important things and try to get them as right as possible as fast as possible.  They're kinda like gesture drawings: you're going for the essence, not the details.  The result is generally a liveliness that isn't in my larger paintings.

Late Afternoon Rest

Oil on paper, 7.5"x10.5"

This one shows something of what I'm talking about.  I did a quick pencil sketch to understand the values and composition, then went to work on gessoed paper that had been toned with a slightly warm brownish-gray tone.  You can see it along the bottom of the image.  There were actually two cows in the field, but in the spirit of keeping things simple, I just painted one.  The head and neck were blocked in first with burnt umber, then the shadow of the body.  Then I slammed in the green hill behind the cow, keeping it light to make the cow stand out, and throwing in a lot of cad yellow to show the late afternoon light hitting the field.  The tree line is largely just vigorous strokes of different dark greens and umbers.

Autumn Blossom

Oil on panel, 12"x9"

Here's another example.  This pink weed caught my eye.  It was the only spot of strong color in a bunch of dead weeds.  Basically, I laid in a bunch of vertical, light yellow ochre to provide a background for the dark stem, and laid in a dark muted green to provide a background for the pink blossom.  I wasn't sure how to do that blossom, but in playing around with it, I did a quick stroke and it worked.  So I did a bunch more, touched it up with a few darker reds around the center and bottom, and there it was.

So what's the point of these landscapes?  Well, what's the point of figure sketches?  It's all about seeing, and about getting the hand and eye to work together, and at the same time trying to get the essence of the thing captured in paint.  I've learned a lot about paint handling and decision-making from these little works.  And had a helluva lot of fun.