Copying a Painting

Sometimes, when things aren't going quite right, for whatever reason, I'll stop what I'm doing and copy somebody else's painting.  It's proven to be a good way to re-set my inner painting mojo.  Recently, I spent three weeks out of the studio due to everything surrounding the coronavirus lockdown.  Three weeks is enough time to get rusty.  When I got back to the studio, my first project was to finish up a painting from several weeks earlier.  I think it turned out pretty awful.  Then I tried to finish up another painting and wound up scrubbing everything new off of it.  Then I tried working on yet a third painting and didn't get anywhere.  Okay, time to re-set.

As I've noted on here several times before, I've been looking at the Swedish artist Nick Alm.  I don't really care for the subject matter of his paintings, which tend to be a bunch of young Swedes getting drunk in cafes.  I'm not young or Swedish, and I haven't been drunk in a cafe in quite a few decades.  What I'm fascinated by is Alm's technical capability.  There are two parts to this: his compositions, and his skill with putting paint on canvas.

I've talked about his compositions in another post.  My "third painting" mentioned above is actually an attempt to use insights from studying his compositions in a painting of my own.  It's been underway for, oh, six months, and is nowhere near done.  But this time, I'm not looking at composition, I'm looking specifically at how he puts paint on canvas.  And, for that, I copy.

I was looking at paint application because I just couldn't get into the groove of mixing paint, using the brush effectively, and getting the effect I wanted.  Everything seemed to be over-saturated, too contrasty, and too hard-edged.  Alm's paintings, by contrast, have muted colors that are still rich, much softer contrasts, and more subtle gradations between colors, shapes, and objects.  I dug through Mr. Google to find some information about his technical approach and eventually found some good info that I could use to get started.

So here's the image that I chose to copy.  It's actually a detail of a much larger painting.

What drew me to this?  The muted skin tones, transitions between one area and the next, soft edges, blending, accuracy of drawing, lots of stuff.  Look at how his shirt and her top are really just one large white shape, look at how his arm blends into her chest, how her throat blends into the shadow and then into his jaw, and how the light is depicted around her eye and down her cheek, for example.

For this exercise, I used a very limited palette, which is based on the colors he uses.  It consisted of Venetian red (an earthy but strong color), Transparent Gold Ochre (a slightly clearer version of Yellow Ochre), Mars Black (really a very very dark blue), and Flake White (a lead-based white).  That's it.  And here's how it turned out:

Maybe I shouldn't have shown you the image I was copying ...

I can whine that the colors from my iPhone photo aren't accurate and a few other things, but hey, it's just an exercise and I don't have Alm's painting skills.  It was really worthwhile to look at each area carefully to see what the colors are, how they're blended or not, where the strong edges are, how he did the shadows, and so on.  So while my copy is kinda ugly, it was still a very valuable learning experience.

So what's next?  Well, my ambition is bigger than my capabilities.   I'm looking at taking the painting that's been in progress for six months and starting over on a much larger scale.  I'll use the lessons learned from the first version, and from this exercise, in building the bigger one.  I'm probably in over my head, but as an artist friends says, "it's just a painting". 

Scanning Old Family Photos

As I mentioned in my last post, one of the things I've been doing lately is scanning old family photos.  This is an outgrowth of my interest in genealogy.  I've been working on my family history for many decades now.  I wound up with my parents' photos, yearbooks, and other memorabilia, and my cousins have sent me some stuff that they had, and pretty soon there was a huge collection scattered in various places around the house.  With the coronavirus lockdown, this is the perfect time to sort through all the stuff, scan some photos, save some, and trash a lot.

So what do I look for in keeping and/or scanning old photos?  There's gotta be some sort of catch.  Some of these photos go back to maybe 1850, and when you have one photo of an ancestor, there's your built-in catch.  One side of my family began taking photos more and more frequently starting in the early 1900's.  This was about the time that Kodak began producing the Brownie cameras and photography became available to regular people.  My grandparents, and then my parents, were just like every other set of parents since then: their kids are the cutest things to ever walk the face of the earth, and their every action must be recorded for posterity.  That's an attitude that results in lots and lots and LOTS of variations of the same picture.  Not only that, but people in the 1920's and 30's liked to ham it up for the camera just like people today do.  They didn't do selfies, but they did the same kind of silly poses you see today on Instagram.  People don't really change that much.  Another favorite photographic activity is "photographing the family vacation".  A picture of Yosemite from 1950 looks just like a picture of Yosemite from 2019: somebody smiling at the camera with Half Dome in the background.  And, as every person who has tried to capture an amazing landscape on film has learned the hard way, big landscape experiences are rarely impressive when compressed onto slides or 5x7 prints.

Most of us take photos as mementos of our own experiences.  We can flip back through them and remember what we were doing, who we were doing it with, and laugh or cry, all based on our own memories.  But those memories don't translate to other people.  I don't have my parents' memories, so a photo they may have taken, laughing it up with a group of friends, doesn't mean anything to me.  Not unless it shows me something special about my parents.  So what I'm doing, really, is combing through the photos with the idea that future generations of our families (both on my mom's and my dad's sides) can have an idea of who these people were.  They don't need to see ALL the photos to do that.

So I look for photos that tell us something.  On my great-grandparents' 50th anniversary, three generations got together and took a whole bunch of photos.  I scanned two of them, tossed some that were poorly exposed or taken at a wrong time, and kept a very few others that might be of some interest further down the line.  The ones I scanned show the great-grandparents just a few years before they died, my grandparents and a couple of their brothers and sisters as mature adults, and my dad and his sisters just entering adulthood and full of life and energy.  So those are important.  Another set of photos came from a day when my mom and her friends, all aged maybe 15, got hold of a camera and had a field day with it.  Of those pictures, only one is worth scanning for historical purposes.  I kept several more because, in flipping through them, you get a sense of a bunch of teenage girls at play.  And there are two from that day that I would like to use to make a painting.  The exposure and compositions were terrible, which in this case made them wonderfully mysterious.

But enough words.  You came here because you wanted to see old family photos, right?  Here are five to kinda show what I was getting at.

This picture of one of my great-great grandfathers was taken in about 1870.  I have a couple of other family photos that are even earlier, but can't quite determine the year.  It's always good to get a visual on one of your ancestors.  All photos back then were stiff and posed, so you can't tell much about his personality, but at least we have an idea of what he looked like.

 Great time at the beach, circa 1918!  My grandparents are in this picture.  Change the outfits and this could be on any beach today.

 My mom was a real live wire.  Her brother was more reserved, but she could get him to open up and goof around.

 My dad was a Navy pilot in World War II, flying the B-24 (the Navy called it a PB4Y-1).  This was on their base shortly after the end of the war.

This group of cousins was all dressed up for Easter church.  Let's just say we dress a little differently these days.

Keeping Busy in Lockdown

The coronavirus is just getting worse all over the world.  North Carolina has been under a shelter-in-place order for a couple of weeks now.  I'd say compliance is spotty.  Lots of people around here have been listening to too much of Trump and Fox News.  I've heard them saying that it's a Democratic hoax, that it's just a version of the flu, and other bullshit.
- A friend of mine, wearing gloves and a mask, stopped at a small local place to pick up some supplies.  It's owned/run by an elderly guy who wasn't wearing a mask or gloves, nor taking any other precautions.  He laughed off the threat and said he was just following Trump's recommendations.
- There's a fundamentalist church next to my neighborhood.  Last week, they had shifted to drive-in services.  The congregation stayed in their cars while the preacher set up a PA system under the portico.  That was pretty good, although it meant that everybody in the neighborhood had to hear the sermon whether we wanted to or not.  This week?  Back into the sanctuary for Palm Sunday.  Wrong answer, dude.

There still aren't many confirmed cases in this area.  I live in Madison County and there are none reported here.  Buncombe County, where Asheville is, has 31, and one death.  Henderson County, south of Asheville, has 50 cases, about half of which are in an assisted-living home.  However, the lack of confirmed cases doesn't mean much since there aren't enough test kits to go around.  People are only getting tested when doctors need to confirm it, meaning when they're already in the hospital.  So the virus is circulating here.

And we're really limiting activities that involve going somewhere.  The grocery store is maybe once a week now and we'd like to extend that.  We've been doing the post office almost every day, since we don't have home delivery, but I'm going to cut back on that.  I do go to the dump every day it's open because (a) we don't have trash pickup here and (b) taking trash to the dump doesn't involve getting in close contact with anybody.  And that's about it.

I have not been to the studio for about 10 days now and don't know when I'll get to go again.  Even though nobody else is in the studio with me, I would still have to go in and out of public spaces in order to get to the studio.  So, for now, I'm staying home.

And what are we doing here to keep busy?  Glad you asked!

Seems like the primary project is yard work.  Spring has sprung.  The weeds have already started to grow and the grass is just getting started.  We've already mowed the front yard twice.  I'm trying to get rid of all the damn moles that have overtaken the yard.  One of my coronacardio workouts is to go around stomping their tunnels flat.  Then I come back a day or two later and see where they're sprouting up again, and stomp those harder and flatter.  We've been cleaning up sticks, digging up bushes, spreading fertilizer, and all sorts of other (NOT) fun things.  At least we're out in the fresh air and sun!

J has been doing even more house cleanup.  I mean, when is she not doing it?  I guess it's the spring-clean thing.  We need to do a major overhaul on the garage sometime soon.  Not looking forward to that.

I've been working on three projects of my own.  One is getting the Alfa ready to rock.  I've been making new door panels because the old ones were really sad.  Haven't quite got them to where they should be, but they look better than what was in there.  Gotta change the oil and top up the transmission since it leaks too much, and there are several more projects waiting in line after that.

Another project is family history.  This is a never-ending jigsaw puzzle.  At the moment, I'm writing up storylines for different family branches, taking all the data collected over the years and turning it into stories.  Of course, in doing that, it raises more questions that we need data to answer, but it gives a much clearer idea of who these ancestors of mine were.

And one more project is scanning old family photos.  I've got some that go back to around 1850, with a LOT after about 1940.  No, I don't scan them all, there are way too many.  I scan the ones that I think have some sort of merit - a good look at an individual, a shot of a house that someone lived in, maybe a photo of a wedding or other key event.  I'm keeping some of the photos after scanning, but a lot are going in the trash.  I dumped all the slides, for example.  Slides tend to discolor with age, so while I could color-correct some with Photoshop, many are just way too far gone.

So that's what we're doing in lockdown.  We're busy doing all the things we said we'd do when we got time.