Looking at Artists: Constance Bosworth

I stumbled across an interesting artist tonight.  I spotted an article about an artist, Constance Bosworth, who does paintings about weddings.  This is a subject that is in my ballpark now.  However, she doesn't do live paintings of the ceremony or reception, like I do.  She paints portraits (which I do, too), but also the wedding cake, bouquets, the bride's dress, and other items related to the event.  That's pretty cool.  Most of that stuff means a lot to somebody for a very short period of time but is then forgotten.  Even when it's immortalized by the photographer, those photos usually wind up in a box, or in a folder on your computer, and rarely if ever seen.  A painting, though, is a different matter.  Paintings tend to get framed and hung on a wall.  Yes, they may become background noise after a while, but they're still being seen on a daily basis, and every once in a while, you stop and look.

Constance had some interesting things to say about what she does and why she does it.  Rather than repeat her comments, here's the link to the article.  Go read it for yourself.

The small images in the article were interesting, so I found her website and took a look.  And I was quite impressed.  Constance knows what she's doing.  She has some very sensitively-done portraits, some beautiful still lifes (and I don't typically care for still lifes), some paintings done as medieval icons, and some companion animal portraits.  That last category got me.  Normally, you say "pet portraits" and I gag.  These, though, are different.  The animals have character, personality, thoughtfulness, and individuality.  They're not just blown-up versions of somebody's snapshots, which is normally the case.  No, they're very carefully considered portraits of some very caring individuals that you would want to know.  They just happen to be hairy and have four legs.

While she's at it, she does some amazing things with little kids.  Now, young kids are hard, at least for me.  Their faces and body proportions are very different from adults.  You can't just shrink an adult and say it's a child because your eyeballs would tell you you're lying.  Constance not only gets them to be children, they're individual children, with their own personalities and identities.  Quite impressive.

Usually, when I do a "Looking at Artists" post, I'll grab an image from their website and post it here so you get an idea of what I'm talking about.  I'm not doing that this time.  Go look at her website, www.constancebosworth.com.  And let me know what you think.

Results from a Limited Palette

I have an open life drawing and painting session in my studio every Wednesday evening.  In the most recent session a couple of days ago, we had a lovely young lady as a portrait model.  I decided to try two things: one, use a very limited oil palette, and two, to try to approach the painting as much like my charcoal and pastel works as possible.  Long-time readers (all three of you) will know that I've been struggling with this second issue.  My charcoal and pastel works have been, I think, very successful, but I haven't been able to carry that feeling over into paint.  At least not yet.

So here was the result:

I think this was pretty much a success as a painting.  For one, it's a good likeness, and for another, there's a lot of fresh brushwork.  It doesn't have the same feel as the charcoal and pastel works, but as I was working on it, there was much more of the same kind of thought process than there has been in previous attempts.

One of the reasons was the limited palette.  I used:
   Terra Rosa (a muted, slightly cool red)
   Yellow Ochre (a muted yellow)
   Chromatic Black (a new Gamblin product)
   Burnt Umber (a dark brown)
   Flake White Replacement (a slightly warm white)

This choice of colors is similar to the famous Zorn palette of one red, one yellow, one blue, and white.  To this, I added a dark brown.  Where's the blue, you say?  It's the Chromatic Black.  Yes, if you add white, you'll see that it really is a muted dark blue.  And to make things really odd, Chromatic Black is actually made up of Quinacridone Red plus Phthlao Emerald, two colors that are on opposite sides of the color wheel.  And when you mix this red and that green, and add white, you'll see you have a blue.  Go figure.

So work on a figure is what I did.  I started by choosing a 16x12 panel with a slightly warm tone.  Then I blocked in the figure with a mixture of the black and burnt umber.  The umber knocked down the blueness, so it was even more neutral.  Then I refined it into a pretty-well-developed 2-value rendering.  Actually, it wasn't strictly two values; there were slight variations in the very lights and very darks, just enough to add some volume.  When I was satisfied with the black and white, I started applying color.  The skin tones were the terra rosa, yellow ochre, and white, all with a little variation in the mixtures to lean toward one color or another.  Her shirt was just the chromatic black, a bit of white, and a touch of the terra rosa.

And that was it.  The result, I think, came out pretty well.  The more I use limited palettes, the more I like them.

New Works

I've continued to work on figurative works using charcoal and pastel over the past few weeks.  My spousal unit wanted a portrait done in that style.  That was a surprise to me.  She has refused to sit for me for quite a few years now because she says I make her look "old", and she gets bored after sitting still for more than 33 seconds.  So I had her come to the studio and we spent an hour shooting a bunch of photographs that I could then use for a portrait.

Doing the first portrait took quite a while.  There was a little pressure there ... okay, a LOT of pressure, knowing that if anything didn't quite measure up to her satisfaction, I'd hear about it for as long as the artwork existed.  And I wanted to get it right, anyway.  I started one, got pretty far along, and wiped it all out.  Then I started another on the same paper, got pretty far along, and wiped it out, too.  Then a third time.  Finally, on the fourth try, things started coming together.  Oddly enough, it owed a lot of its success to the three failures that had left their mark on the paper.  Here's how it turned out:

This one is definitely Janis.  I think I got her strength along with a really good likeness.  Yeah, I'm happy with it.

The three failures contributed to this by leaving something of their marks on the paper.  You can see that on the left and right sides, where there are dark areas with lighter streaks.  They hinted that I should leave those areas soft and roughly done.  I focused the color on her face and hair, with the highest value contrasts and sharpest edges right around her eyes and nose.  That kept the viewer's attention, while further away, the blacks transitioned to grays, sharp lines went soft, and those areas played a supporting role to the face.

Most importantly, she likes it and it's at the frame shop as I write.

I did another portrait of her after that.  This time, I based it on a very different photo, one of her laughing.  It was also difficult, but for different reasons. than the first  Laughing is something that is very hard to capture in an artwork.  Faces deform: the eyes scrunch up, mouths stretch, folds appear where normally there are no folds, muscles in the neck pop out, and the whole face basically goes out of whack.  It's hard enough to get a good likeness when they're normal - getting a good likeness when it's a dynamic situation and everything has changed is harder, and then making the figure look alive on top of that is really tough.  But I think it came out well.  I really like this portrait of her.

She hates it.

Oh, well.  One out of two isn't bad at all.  But for the sake of harmony at home, that image will not be shown.  Sorry!