This still life shows paintbrushes in a mason jar and tubes of paint sitting on a chair. The chair is included to show atmospheric perspective. It demonstrates the size of the jar against a larger object. Also notice the reflections in the seat of the chair.
My son Jared is here from Macon, Georgia to visit for the holidays. He has his MFA in art and teaches at Bloomfield Middle School. We enjoy painting together, so there are two easels being used in my studio right now.
He asked if I’d do his portrait this afternoon. He handed me an 11″ x 14″ canvas. I had him sit on the couch for about forty-five minutes while I painted.
When I do a portrait I make a basic oblong shape for the head, draw a line across the middle where the eyes go, go halfway between the eyes and the chin and draw a line where the bottom of the nose goes, then the last line goes halfway between the bottom of the nose and the chin. This is where the bottom of the lip goes. I draw in the shapes of the darkest values, the middle values, and the light values. I mix a dark, medium and light value, usually using alizarin crimson, yellow ochre, and white. Then I paint in the shapes according to their shades. After that, I play a little with other colors if I need them.
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Being a professional artist can kill the enjoyment of doing art. It seems like with deadlines for art shows, commissions and teaching classes makes it work, not pleasure.
Tonight, though, I decided it was time for just me. I grabbed a fresh canvas, set up a quick still life and lit it with a lamp, then relaxed for an hour. I just wanted to enjoy myself.
This is what I came up with. My technique is to separate everything by shapes and values first, painting them separately. It’s like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. In this painting you’ll also see reflections of the apples in the pot, as well as highlights. The pot looks metal, but when I was painting it you would have thought I was just painting stripes. See, it works! And I even had fun!
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This is a value study from one of my earliest college art classes. We were to find a picture in a magazine then paint the same picture, but we were to use different colors but paint them in the same values they were originally in. For those who don’t know what that means, the value of a color is basically how light or dark the color is. The true test to see if we had done the painting correctly was when the instructor took a black and white photograph. If it looked right, we had done the values correctly. Mine succeeded.
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I’d spent the morning with my three daughters. We had fixed breakfast over a camp stove in Brown County State Park. After we ate, we threw the Frisbee around. Our next destination was Nashville. There were a lot of fun shops and galleries to check out. By this time we were starved. We stopped at a little restaurant for lunch.
I tried to create the mood by not being too photorealistic, but more impressionistic. Jennifer, on the left, is reflected in the mirror to the left of her. Sarah checks out the menu, while Nicole enjoys visiting. I painted the window a whitish yellow and matched the same color in Jennifer’s hair, showing reflection. It continues down to the table below it. To the right on that table can be seen the reflection of the chair below it. Sarah and Nicole are lit up on their left side by the window with a shadow on the right. The painting shows the cozy warmth of being sisters together.
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I had the great opportunity to study under the fantastic artist, Paul Davis, at the University of Utah. His classes were the hardest of all my college experience. I was so overwhelmed most of the time. Now, many years later, I am grateful for his strict teaching methods.
This was one of his assignments: we were to go home and draw our self-portrait for our class the next day. I sat in front of the dresser-mounted mirror in the bedroom. You can see from my eyes how intensely I worked. You can see the facial structure and planes of the face.
Yes, I was bald then. I had dark hair though. Now I’m still bald, but have almost white hair and a full white beard.
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I was with my son on Tybee Island just east of Savannah, Georgia. We had our fishing rods and were walking along the pier when I looked down at the beach below. I noticed a group of girls sunning themselves. They were all facing towards the center. I thought it really made an interesting sight. I knew I wanted to paint that scene.
The first thing I did when I drew the figures was to have some of them go off the edges of the canvas. I have found that this technique makes the scene more interesting than if they all were completely shown.
Another thing I did was to portray different skin tones. Some were pretty tan, others were lily white. The sunlit parts of their bodies had highlights, while the other sides were in shadow. If you look at the girl on the bottom right side, you will see color from the green towel reflected on her leg.
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