Jacob de Witte (1591-1631)

A recent take on a portrait by Anthony  Van Dyck. The original is a fairly dark open portrait -at least in reproduction. I cropped in considerably  and merged the collar with the ink like underpainting I had prepared. The colors appear a bit more vibrant than Van Dyck’s original, and I left it that way. I t was an interesting piece to pull from the murkiness of the reproduction and scale up. This work is 40″ x 60″ oil on metal.

Portrait of Jacqueline van Caestre, 1617

This work is finished and is about to be varnished. The portrait is originally by Peter Paul Rubens and presumably a wedding portrait of a young woman married into a wealthy family in Antwerp circa 1617. Her elaborate dress is of French style and a product of court culture. Clothing of this extravagance was not typically chosen by women at this time, thus revealing the status of the bride and her betrothed ancestry.  (Information from Rubens, a Genius at Work, Royal Museum of Fine Arts Belgium)

The bright magentas /purples which appear on this work, are some of the initial priming layers which were masked off in the early stages of the work. Typically I will start on the face, but in this work -the lace which envelopes her features actually came first. Lace is problematic for me to paint – more so when it is enlarged to this scale. I go in and paint the negative spaces, the darker areas first then go back and begin layering on top and around these initial shapes. Once this is at a reasonable state of recognition, I then begin painting her facial features which are layered in pretty much the same manner.

19th Century Download

This painting is derived from the famous Valpincon Bather by Jean – Auguste Dominique Ingres. One of the early large format works I did, and probably one of the most difficult. The original captures the back of a seated woman in a Turkish bath. This was one of the paintings Ingres sent back to Paris during his stay at the French Academy in Rome. A study abroad that was to be important in the artist’s career. The title Valpincon Bather, as it is currently known, is the namesake of a 19th century owner of the work.

For my rendering of the image, the back was difficult and took quite awhile to do, mainly due to the subtlety of Ingres’s image and his smooth, porcelain -like surface. Working from large printouts, I kept some of the cropping, repetitions and distortions of the replicated images. The figure as I show it is cropped, whereas Ingres’s original image shows the entire length of the seated figure’s leg.

Soldier and Laughing Girl

This painting is based off an original by Jan Vermeer, a 17th century Dutch painter from the town of Delft. In this work, as a reference to a faulty download, I decided to fracture a portions of the original image along the lines of the back of the chair, the right arm of the soldier, the window, and the map on the far wall. Though the woman is facing us, I was drawn to the image of the soldier, shown prominently  in the foreground. I was also intrigued with the map which dominates the background of the scene. In Vermeer’s works, the paintings or maps often portrayed in the background  often give supporting /additional  meanings or associations to the overall piece. In this situation, maps were highly valued items for the Dutch, a country that was in the midst of becoming a major European economic power, due in large part to its shipping /trading industry. Vermeer’s accuracy of portrayal enabled historians to identify the map of the Dutch Republic and its maker as Balthasar Folrisz van Berckenrode, published by Willem Jansz Blaeu in 1620.

David Johnston, 1808

This painting is based off of  a portrait of French industrialist David Johnston, by Pierre Paul Prud’hon from 1808. Shown at the age of nineteen, he would eventually become mayor of Bordeux. Prud’hon was dismissed by  France’s imminent painter, Jacques Louis David and his supporters. Despite this, Prud’hon went on to recieve many notable commissions as a French classicist. He had been awarded time in Italy to study, and was influenced by the work of Leonardo da Vinci and Correggio. This image of David Johnston that I have referenced measures 42″ x 50″ and is done in oil on metal. David Johnston, 1808.

The reserved exterior of his paintings, the graceful lines and modeling of his classical drawings, gave no hint of the tragedies in Prud’hon’s personal life. He was to lose his parents early, lived in poverty during the Revolution, and later separated from his first wife who had succumbed to mental illness. Following this he was to find an new relationship with a woman named Constance Mayer. Despite France’s political upheaval during his lifetime, Prud’hon’s career continued. However, tragedy was to return, and by 1821 Constance was suffering from bouts of depression and committed suicide in his apartment at the Sorbonne. He was to survive her death by little more than a year. Excerpts from the artist’s biography, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Martin Johnston Heade -Butterflies and Hummingbirds….

I like Martin Johnston Heade! I like the eccentric humid quietness of them. In person, the paintings are  dense, rich and atmospheric, and a focal point is made of tiny jewel colored hummingbirds or exotic tropical butterflies. His landscapes are small and luminous, and the climax of a scene could be a haystack in a marsh, or an ominous cloudbank of an approaching storm. In my reference to his work, I have moved in the opposite direction of the lush vibrancy of Head’s work, to one that looks degraded from repeated scanning and duplication. Some of this quality is inherent in how I prime these works in the first place. Secondly, I put the paint on very thin, literally wiping it on -no impasto. This thin application allows for transparency, and adds to the association that the image has been processed and transmitted. As much as Heade was influenced by the 19th century naturalists, I felt doing this work really spoke not to that past, but to our current digital information age.

The Cavalier

This was one of the first color portraits from this body of  work. This was a bit scary for me -working from this Frans Hals because it was quite intimidating. This was also one of the first larger scale works I attempted.  Most works up to this point were about 40″ square -this one approached 6 feet tall. I had room to work, but this also presented problems -there’s more space to paint. I think a huge learning curve was on this work. But as difficult as it was, it made me realize that I really enjoy learning from doing these. Naturally, my respect an admiration for Frans Hals was deepened as well. This was also one of those works that takes a while to come into focus. I think because there was less underpainting on this in the initial stages -I had to wait till everything developed over the course of the painting. The small bands of color and black and white that intersect the piece are taken from printing errors that occur when I print out versions to paint from.

The original is a famous image, The Laughing Cavalier by Frans Hals. A striking portrait that shows the flair and swagger of the 17th century Dutch. The identity of the young man is unknown, but inscriptions on the original indicate the subject would have been around the age of twenty-six when Hals painted him in 1624. Hals was a very prominent and sought after artist, but by the end of his life his possessions had been seized by creditors and he was living off an annual municipal pension.

Half way through a fictional Venice

Here’s a work at about the half-way stage. Typically I work background to foreground on these and landscapes. There’s still work to be done on the architecture, but for the most part the basic colors are blocked in. Canaletto’s work usually features crowds of people scattered throughout the compositions -painstakingly slow and difficult for me to render. Here they appear as ghost like, with only the initial underpainting visible. Also, on some areas of this work you can see shadows going in divergent directions, a clue that something is amiss here…

A re-mix of Canaletto

Here’s the finished work. The variation in the sky was kept that way because this was a pieced together image of two entirely different views of Venice. Canaletto was known for these works and they are spectacular and fastidiously detailed and descriptive. I liked working with the computer on these to splice together what appears to be a somewhat believable view of Venice, but in fact does not exist – and then on to translate the digital image back into oil paint.

“The past is still under construction.”

Here’s what kicked this whole body of work off in the first place. I was at the National Gallery in Washington DC, looking at some Hudson River landscapes and as beautiful as they are, the thought struck me of how there was almost no way to paint these landscapes today. In the 100 years since these works were done America’s landscape would come to reflect what we see today -good and bad -from national parks to strip malls and waste dumps. Even the way we perceive the land around has changed with technology we use -cameras, digital imaging, satellite, etc. So with these thoughts in mind, I asked myself -what would these images have to look like today. I pictured an image of history that was incomplete, that was constantly manipulated, re-transmitted and altered like mere data. The ideas solidified when I came across this quote -”The past is still under construction”

The image above is referencing a work by Albert Bierstadt, which pictures Yosemite Valley. As I post this blog PBS is running a Ken Burns documentary: National Parks -America’s Best Idea

http://www.pbs.org/nationalparks/