Visual treatment

Changeling

2012-02-23T23:35:00.003+01:00

Two process photos from the painting that's on the easel at the moment.

First a life-size blocking of a head that is no more. Life changes, so does painting.

The drawings are studies and explorations for the painting, I ended up taking them out of the painting as well.

A try is one step closer to succeeding.

I've been thinking about a friend lately.

2012-02-09T01:43:00.006+01:00

He could quote Delacroix.

He was an expert on old pocket watches.

He had the most childish sense of humour.

He truly enjoyed hiking and the feeling of being free.

He always surprised with some new odd fact.

...and he had a kind heart and a beautiful face.

He was an orginal, one of those you don't meet any more. I will always remember his unique conversations.

In Sweden we have a character named Pettsson, to me it was him.

I don't know if I ever had as inspiring conversations about skulls with any one else. I hope some one dug up the swan he dug down on his backyard...

When we were working on this project, we had a lot of fun moments, please imagine him making the skull nod after he asked it a question. I was the observer, the conversation was all between the two of them.

And when we took a coffee break, and god knows this man loved his coffee.He politely asked if he could remove the cup, because the coffee tasted so much better in this cup. After every break he placed the cup back in the painting in the same position as before. And did he love that mug, it was a gröna Emma, you could always see him walk around the studio with that cup slightly tasting his coffee to see if it still was hot.

Most people would have been concerned with the likeness in his face, but not him. He was more concerned with the cup.

The clock in the hand of the time maker was his, it was a beautiful watch. Thank you for the time Thomas.

The nature of studies

2012-01-22T00:54:00.005+01:00

Here are two more studies, these are just like the studies of the figures in the earlier post. Getting into the mindset of how things look like, how they feel, for example what is the difference in painting mountains with snow on them or drawing an old tree. How does the hand feel like moving, what kind of rhythms occur, what are the personalities of the shapes you use? Questions to ask yourself. You cannot just treat things the same, it is just like as treating every person you meet the same. When you begin talking to them and you tell the same thing to every single one of them instead of listening in and then reacting and telling them what you believe will make you connect with his or her experience. You'll be surprised how much you'll get back in return by doing so.

For me it's the same experience that happens when you try to get into a subject and understanding how to use the strength of for example textures. Take the tree and the bark as a example, how much more dry and crisp would it look like if you put in a shiny object next to it? Quite a bit more dry and crisp I'd dare to say. Just because you're using two extremes of a contrast. Getting in and testing this, seeing how far the nature of an object can be pushed is good, it will keep you aware and honest in you vision.

The reason for drawing things for your projects beforehand, learning the nature of the subject by heart.

Know it by heart, tell it by heart.

And as a little side note, I must say, I could probably sit and draw trees and mountains all day, such nice things to work with, so chaotic but still full of logic, from the ground and up towards the sky.

Studies of the figure

2012-01-19T22:49:00.002+01:00

Here are some figure studies I've been doing lately, trying to go into depth with understanding and exploring the living form, what is constant and what is not, what can I trust and what is just lies.

Some of these were done for the enjoyment of it and some are studies for bigger paintings. When working big it can be hard to get a sense of what you want with the figure. These are my tries to figure out that, they have been quite handy having around the studio when repainting flesh and the models are not around, it limits your decisions and gives you the freedom of going for what's in your mind without having to guess and lose what you already found.

And also just having the freedom to think with pencil and paper as your only tools, it get's unnecessary things out of the picture, you can just enjoy the ride of travelling the form. And to me this is something important when it comes down to putting down brush strokes, how can I think about this as a sculptor, how can I explain this through mass and planes, having a good sense of form is something that carries a painting or any work of art a long way, it is even more important than light and colour I'd dare to say, even though those parts add a lot to the magic.

It is what convince us that there is a space inside the canvas, what invites us into the painting or drawing.

It's is a large part of the foundation of a of a good representation of nature.

Some days I am the form which is being hit by the light and some days I am the light hitting the form. And what I am the last day of the painting, that is what the language of the work is going to be speak.

I do still have hopes that I'll be able to speak the two languages simultaneously one day.

Small Portraits #4

2012-01-16T22:15:00.000+01:00

Small Portraits #3

2012-01-13T21:53:00.000+01:00

Small Portraits #2

2012-01-10T19:14:00.001+01:00

Small portraits

2012-01-08T11:12:00.001+01:00

Back in Florence

2012-01-07T23:50:00.003+01:00

Back in Florence after a few weeks in Sweden over the break. These three drawings were some of the first I did when I first moved down here. Jumped in and drew with Sean Forester on his projects ( he used to be the lecturer in art history here at FAA).

So here we go, new year and finally back in the studio after a long break.

New ground

2012-01-05T09:35:00.004+01:00

When I was studying at the Florence Academy of Art I told myself that when I was done there I would learn Watercolour. So time to bite the apple. These are some of the results from the experiments I've been doing in the studio.

I decided to just start out looking, using my eyes, keeping what I could from working with other projects. Using tools that are useful no matter what you set out to work with. Tools of nature, values, drawing, edges so on. As long as you keep to these it'll end up somewhat recognizable.

So the trickiest thing to me, and oh not just a small thing, was that the technique was the thing to struggle with. Water, hmm, nothing you control, very different from oil. Oil you can reason with, you and the medium can sit down, have a coffee, figure out how to solve the problem. Watercolour is more like the stubborn little kid who does exactly what he wants to, you say let's go this way and the water goes the other way. You do something, the water reacts to that.

Other than that it has not just a few fantastic sides to it, it gives you chaos for free which is big gift, it happens so easily, the water dries and it turns out beautiful or it's a little wet and the water from one shape slips into another and create amazing edges. And as long as it stays wet it keeps soft, so it beacomes somehing like bring solidity to mist. It slowly goes from hazy to something specific and with form.

I'm seeing the advantage the 19th-century painters like, Zorn, Sargent, Fortuny and Mancini had not seeing the borders we set up between mediums today, they worked over the borders and most of them tried they're hands on more than one thing. Today we section painters into groups, either your a draftsman, oilpainter, sculptor, digital painter or something else. What happened to just being good at working visually?
And we shouldn't even step into the area of being a classical painter, modern/fine/abstract artist, illustrator or so on. Some people are just to busy looking at differences.

Rodin

2012-01-04T11:29:00.006+01:00

Studies after Auguste Rodin,

I did the first few studies of Rodin Sculptures back in -08. Had somewhat of a breakthrough understanding the realtionship between shapes and planes, and to me, that's one of many things Rodin does so good. A shape is never just a shape, a flat abstract shape. To me it's a plane, form moving in different directions across the mass. And everytime it changes direction it creates a border, a plane. The distinction of where the form is turning, the borders of the planes create somewhat of perspective lines traveling in space.
One of the things that can be very tricky in painting, when you with a brush try to put down a plane, describing the plane with the two distinct borders of the brushstroke. Chosing which of these borders are relevant and which can be ignored, I can't chose all of them, if so the eye won't know where to look and what to read as important information. One of the reasons why it's so important to pick your edges. That's where the eye will stick while traveling through the picture. The soft edges or non distinct planes are something the eye agree to but don't spend to much time wondering over.
And this is the thing with Rodin, put aside the beauty and the amazing expression in his work, the freedom with which he works with the human body, just look at it as an amazing treatment of form. The bony areas, the soft tissue of the muscles and skin, the sharp tendons. The relaxation in the pose versus the stressed and tensed parts. He handles the the form as something living, something with so many varied extremes, just like what nature has to display. And he pushes all of them so far that the other side of the extreme can get it's full potential to move and play.

So there is some logic to it, but knowing that doesn't make it good or beautiful. Function and design. A shape have to be beautiful as well, this is where it gets challening, who can tell you when something is beautiful enough, what odd combination of edges or borders in the right relationship are the ones that will attract your eye. Is it the rythm it moves in, or the temperament it is applied with...
I think my judgement usually goes, if it excites me in my work as much as it does in real life, I'm onto something. If it keeps quite and doesn't speak to loud it might be in the perfect harmony with something bigger in the piece. But who knows, every new work is like beginning working at a new workplace, new collegues, new environement, it's completely new chaos. You just got to hope you learnt something from your earlier experiences and hope that you're ready to organise this new mix of information.

To the left, a recent study from a few weeks back at the National Museum in Stockholm.
And the three lower ones are from back in -08.

Back!

2012-01-02T13:04:00.004+01:00

Update time!
Finally got some new things to share here. More will come within the days.

Study from a rodin sculpture to show how it has felt not updating the blog in such a long while.
Been a a few busy months moving to Florence and getting all settled in and starting up everything from scratch. By now I have some intesting projects up on the easels. More to come about these once they get off the ground and ready to be shown.

A Happy New Year to all of you out there!

Still lifes

2011-09-13T15:30:00.002+02:00

Here are two still lifes, painted some time ago. Stumbled over them on the computer.

Vejby baby!

2011-09-07T13:55:00.003+02:00

Paintings from this summer, this time from Vejby, close to Ängelholm down south of Sweden. Participated in a show close by and stayed with my friend and fellow painter Nathan Sowa. Had a blast painting landscapes with him, Gustav Sundin and Timothy Atkins.

Fun to get a change of scenery, began down there and then went up above the polar circle to Lairevaggie to paint. Intresting to see how much the light changes just by traveling Sweden from South to North.

Power of Creation

2011-09-06T12:30:00.003+02:00

A selfportrait I did some time ago, did it when my life took a new direction. Leaving old energy behind and creating my own.

The Old Pottery

2011-09-04T23:45:00.003+02:00

Two interiors from my home village. It's an old farmhouse, the first one is the room where the people who lived there used to make metal pots which they sold in town. The roof and the floor fell in a long time ago. It's a beautiful environment to work in. Sat there under the side where there's still roof. Thunder outside and rain pounding the metal... Had I stayed longer at home I would have made it my new studio.
The second is the far end of the farmhouse, in the noon when the sun struck through the roof the branches hanging in reflected all this wonderful green light everywhere making the damp environment live up a bit.

Sizes 50x40 and 52x42 cm

Modelpaintings

2011-08-27T12:09:00.002+02:00

2011-08-27T12:04:00.001+02:00

Paintings from my mountain trip earlier this summer, wonderful experience, first painting is painted around 3am. being able to paint all day long was truely an experience.

The Budapest Timemaker

2011-08-05T18:14:00.003+02:00

The Budapest Timemaker 170x100cm

Street scenes Florence

2011-06-23T23:23:00.005+02:00

Questions

2011-05-21T10:56:00.003+02:00

Answer to a comment by Ariel, thought it could be intresting for other artists as well, realised that this might not at all be that obvious to everyone.

"Beautiful work Per!
Can I ask a question, if doesn't bother you?
After the draqwing, how do you usually proceed with the painting stage?

Big planes? (ie: an HVC for lights, an HVC for shadows, then modelling transitions, big formas and then smaller forms)

A single tone? (a single HVC -a local color- then shadows, then lights, then modelling)

Or modelling from the very beginign form by form?

Just curious!"

Happy you asked Ariel,

I don't mind at all.

Well first of all the drawing is to learn to know the most important things, which is what carries the painting, in this case model painting, gesture, bodytype, proportions. So you want the right shapes in the right place essentially, and moving a few lines is less of a mess than moving twenty or so brushstrokes.
So you want you limits in heights and widths to where you'll work.

Then I start working with the light, being the light that hits the form, and sometimes we change the mindset to being the the form that is beign hit by light. Depends on which roll you prefer to play.

It's hard to hit the right colour note if you don't have the right value on the scale first.

Wish I could help you with your thoughts on HVC, I assume it means Hue/Value/Chroma.
Don't think I'm just that systematic about it, and eventually when you put in colour and you've been working on it for quite some time, the colours take on a life of their own. As long as they are in harmony it doesn't matter what you put down.

The way I first attack the painting is in a very ala prima way, one plane, one brushstroke, one value, one colour. And then you fit these pieces in by adjusting edges.

What I want in the first few days is to cover the canvas and get some chaos down, something that I can work with, structure it up and bringing order about.
Otherwise it would be like cleaning up a already clean house, not very successful in my mind.

And then when the whole is starting to work, been constantly drawing with my paint, the light flows, the colours are in there and it works when I take my eye out off focus. First then I start to work in a more piece meal manner, I start locking in on areas and really work them through. Discovering the subtleties of anatomy and the changes of temperature that makes the light vibrate. But first one always need to break through the boundry of the whole. Look for example at Zorn in his later work there wasn't much locking in, his paintings are carried by the sense of the whole, and a very strong sense of whole at that.

And as I mostly work under natural light (north light) the colours and values changes constantly. This at first is very confusing, how to paint something as it looks when it changes all the time. But as my eyes got more sensetive I started seeing the benefit of this. The possibilities of design. Where to create form and where to let it go and bring atmosphere into the piece. And how to use relationships, even though the light changes from being warm to cool the relationship inbetween the temperature stays constant. So the use of changes to design the light to how it presented the work in the best light. Moving the shadowline back and forth to describe the form in a constructive way.
And now were back to drawing again. Which in my mind is the struggle throiugh out the project.

I hope it was helpful with me throwing out what came to mind.

Best regards/
PENR

Model paintings

2011-05-12T19:26:00.000+02:00

New post, some long poses from last trimester.
Thought I'd show different stages. First one is nine hours, three days, on a 55 x 90 cm canvas.
The model quit on us after that, but I thought it was a good idea to document and show how a rough blockin of the model can look like. Some people don't see the difference between the rough blockin and a more finished five week pose. Mostly it's only the artist himself who sees the subtle changes made during the last weeks of the project.
The second on is a three week pose, three hours a days on a canvas 70x40 cm.
And the last one is a five week pose, three hours a day on a canvas 55x90 cm.

2011-04-10T19:33:00.000+02:00

Selfportrait in profile

2011-03-28T23:13:00.002+02:00

Selfportrait done in profile. It's one thing painting a selfportrait in a front view or some other view which you are used to seeing in the mirror. Seeing yourself in profile is something most people aren't to used to. Atleast I wasn't. It was very strange observing my face in profile, it could have been anyone. Nothing was easily recognised or painted on the influence of the memory. Which usually is the challenge with a selfportrait, do do things on a habbit of how you presume it to look. Painting yourself is a good thing to see how naive you can be in your observation.

Portraits

2011-03-28T22:01:00.000+02:00

Drawings

2011-03-13T22:54:00.003+01:00

A sketch of an interior I began but never finished, the light coming in through the curtains were magical. To bad this was in the middle of december, I had about an hour of light, then the room which I was painting in got to dark to even see what

paint I was mixing.

And the bobcat was kind enough to pose for me at the Natural Historical Museum, very good model who held the pose and didn't talk to much.

Drawings

2011-03-13T22:30:00.016+01:00

A kabuki dancer who were kind to let me draw her when a friend of mine where doing a painting of her.

This was a danish woman who were knitting from Malmö to Göteborg. She was very inspiring to watch along the journey.

Hands woking a knitting is amazing to watch, the way they repeat their movement, very hypnotizing.

2011-03-13T22:27:00.001+01:00

Portraits of two of my friends.

Enthusiasm

2011-02-24T21:27:00.003+01:00

Modelstudies, sometimes it can such a releving feeling to just take a small area and go into it, just get into the zone and drift around, trying to solve whatever problem you chose to pay attention to, gesture, form, values or colours, pick your challenge of the day. Breaking down the visual information into touchable areas can sometimes be what will carrie you piece, the little focus you have divided over all the challenges will most certainly create a very flat image, flat in a sense that the viewer won't see what caught your enthusiasm. And isn't that what it's so much about, getting excited over something, something that makes you want to capture and share that moment of vision.

It's interesting to hear how we as artist sometimes complain over that no one is intrested in what we do, it's all the audience fault, not enough visitors at the show and so goes the complaints.
But is it really the audiences fault, if we as artists spent more time on our ideas, refining what we wanted to say (I guess there is a reason why people like watching movies that actually has a story to tell).
A painting that you would like to sit and look at for a longer amount of time and ponder over, a piece that conveys someone elses thoughts and energy.
Atleast that's the images I like looking at, not to say in any way that it's easy to create those images.
But I think enthusiasm and a joy for our work will take it a long way, so make sure you have a smile on you face when you do something, it'll show through in your work.

Visual language

2011-02-13T21:09:00.009+01:00

Painting is an intresting journey, this winter I visited the Louvre. You walk around there, this immense monster of museum. You hurry to that corner to see that painting then you hurry to the next wing to see that sculptures and then up to the third floor to see the dutch paintings before they close for the day.
Overwhelming experience. But oh did it feel nice... after 3 weeks when you melted the impressions, glad I had a break from the studio at that time.

When you see so many paintings in one go, all with different launguges, each artist has interpret their vision in their own way, different brush handling, different levels of focus and light effects. They are so different but still they look real and belong to our world. Put them next to each other and you'll see that they are made by two different individuals with voices of their own. Might not even look like they belong to the same world when carfully being examined side by side.

And when you try to paint something on your own and you want to do a finished painting you realise just by looking at painters and seeing how they make a finish on a visual impression is so different, but there is no question about it, you belive that that's how they saw the world.

So looking at paintings is great, you know where you want to go and how it can look to get a good visual impression in a painting. But don't look at to many at a time, then you'll lose the goal where you want to take your own piece and you'll start speaking in toungues, to many languages at a time. It is essential to look at paintings, only then you know how to bend the impressions of the world and simplify it to your taste, learn from their decisions, the good decisions they made from the million the nature offers to us, you want to go to a place where you've never been before and see solutions you've never seen before.

Being a painter who is trying to learn and getting better at translating the visual impression from nature onto a two dimensional surface you need to keep your eyes far infront of you to make progress and making sure you don't get stuck dead in your tracks. When you walk you don't keep your eyes on your feet, then you'll never get where you want to go. It's possible if you've walked the same way time after time and is fully satisfied with it. But we don't want that, we want to be curious and meet challenges so that we have a reason to use the time that we have to make pieces worth looking at, that makes people enjoy seeing what we as painters saw in our vision when we made it... oh that's the start of a totally different story. Saving that one for another time.

Here are some small studies, me trying to understand the choices of nature realised into brushstrokes.

Thinker

2011-02-10T21:33:00.006+01:00

Model set up in the pose as the thinker. Trying out poses of masters and seeing and solving problems as they did.

Studies of Rembrant paintings a 19th century portrait and a Bonnat.

Dreaded portraits

2011-02-08T22:04:00.001+01:00

2011-02-06T17:35:00.000+01:00

Workshop interior and figure painting

2011-02-03T21:01:00.003+01:00

New photo of the interior. And a long pose from last trimester.

2011-01-30T22:11:00.003+01:00

Some pencil drawings.
Focusing on what drawing is all about, simplicity, going back to the foundation. Pen and paper, how much simpler could it be.

This also means that one doesn't have any excuses, no flashy effects can save you, but still you can work on the things that matter the most, drawing (right sized shape in the right place), the visual impression (focus, how things work in relationship to eachother), edges, light, form etc. So you really get the time to dig into these things, making sure that they are working, redrawing them over and over again, finding better solutions. And it is impressive when a draftman does this well, you don't really miss anything. To qoute Rodin, "Powerful yet so simple in shape".

2011-01-27T21:14:00.007+01:00

Thought I'd update the blog with some of my older charcoal drawings.
Since I started this blog I haven't done any full lit drawings.

So some work seen in the rearwindow.

2010-12-12T16:26:00.004+01:00

Another update,
a few more small paintings. These ones are quite fun to do, seeing new shapes and colours. And you get more of a chance to make more delibrate decisions. No need to save your energy, the brushstrokes need to happen there and then, not in a week or so. Sprint running compared to a marathon.

Keeps your eye and mind fresh and ever curious.

And some colour studies of the model. Fun stuff.

Old people have very nice possibilitys for shape designs, and the decisiveness for the planes come more fluently when the for of the underlying skeleton becomes prominent.

Studio interior, good example of pratice work, didn't have to possibility to continue on another painting that day, so i quickly just set up and started painting whatever I had. My Studio space. Or the corner of it rather, and the thing that suffers in these cases are the compositions, when you don't spend that much time planing the eye movement, the basics runs you over.

2010-12-12T00:20:00.003+01:00

Lets get some more portraits in here aswell.

2010-12-12T00:10:00.006+01:00

More landscapes, mix from this fall.

Painted on the stairs outside school. You don't have to go far for nice views in Kvarnbyn.

Woops, a summer painting snuck in here. Close to the school, Gunnebo Castle. Nice place for landscaping. This one ended as a half finished painting. Next day when I was gonna continue this one the rain was pouring, we'll see if it will get more work next summer.

Fingers went very numb on this one, the day after I painted this one the snow was falling.

This one was cold painting, hard to hold brushes when your fingers go numb...

2010-12-11T23:48:00.007+01:00

Landascapes from this summer.

Painted in Visby. Beautiful city to roam around with a paintbox in hand.

Early sketches from the beginning of the summer.

From the hardest landscape painting trip this summer, cold and with rain pouring down the panels. What do you chose, missing a beautiful subject or having a bad painting destroyed by rain. I chose the later.

Projects from fall 2010.

2010-12-08T21:28:00.008+01:00

Workshop interior.

Pre studies for the workshop painting.

Meditation

2010-08-12T18:41:00.007+02:00

Last week I went up north to paint and to do some hicking. So refreshing and inspiering in many ways.
I know about few things as meditative as landscape painting.
You're outside, observing nature which is hiting you with everything it got. And the only thing telling that time and space is the changing is how the light travels, the colours are changing and all living things around you are chaging their rythms. You're in the landscape in the motive, you feel the temperament changing around you and there's nothing you can do about it. Just feeling small in comparison with nature is amazing.

Here are some photos of the paintings, had some bad luck photographing this time around.

And a small interior from a workshop.

And here are some smaller landscapes from my cigarr size paintbox.

Worth

2010-07-21T18:18:00.005+02:00

Wish there was more energy to make projects that mean more personaly.

I guess it's part of academic studies to starv yourself creatively, doing studies, becoming better as a painter refining your technic and eye. Look forward to when I can put that aside in my mind and work with more energy and focus on my own ideas. I've done a lot of projects at the school which I have loved and laboard for, but it still doesn't feel like I'm filling all my personal demands for them.
I wonder how the students of the 19th ateliers kept their ideas fresh while doing 8 years in an academy. Maybe they didn't.

These are the things that you think about when you have some vacation, you get a breathing hole and the fresh air is filling your lungs making you think clearer.
I feel like try to do something that's bigger than my mind can grasp, maybe I'll fail, but then again I might know where to begin afterwards to be able to do it better the next time.

Right now I'm sculpting an ecorche for demonstration for our summer course. Doing something different like sculpting which I usually don't do, is good. Your way of seeing and thinking get's a new tool to express itself through. You convert your thoughts and try to apply them to a new way of creating. It has gotten my taste for drawing and constructing figures going again. Things that you might have had lost the taste for for a while, but in the end it surfaces again. You just just need to open the right doorway to see the inspiration standing down the hallway waving at you.

Observation and imagination needs a balanced attention. It's dangerous to let one suffer over the other.

I might try to get some photos from the course up here when it's ended.

Got the prize for best figure painting of the year for this painting.

Fun to have to models which both are good athletes in the same trimester, but oh do you feel like painting a woman. Even for me there is something like to much muscles.
Looking forward to get a female model again.

This is a stillife I painted some time ago, I quite like it.

Portrait

2010-07-19T19:05:00.003+02:00

My first long portrait project, here you can see the process from drawing to painting. I had about half the time on each of them. I wish i could have spent more on the painting and less on the drawing. How to divide the energy you have between the steps in a project. Learning by experience here.
One done, millions of faces to go.

More of these to come in the future.

2010-07-13T19:06:00.006+02:00

Small update on the blog with a few sketches, more stuff is coming.
Right now I'm co-teaching a summer-course in Écorché at the Florence Academy of Art, together with Alicia Ponzio, head of the anatomy department in Florence. Check out her website at www.aliciaponzio.com

This is what I'm teaching, the idea of ecorche sculpture is to learn the form of the human body, working through the shapes of anatomy from all angles, developing a understadning of how their volume works in space. By doing this you memorize the anatomy in a much better way then for example if you would be drawing. The image above is my sculpture I built last summer in Florence. also the idea of working from the inside out with the figure is something we don't usually experience, being visual as most of us are we work mostly from what we see or have seen, but by building this sculpture, working from drawings, photos and charts and the models gives us more knowledge about all the information that is infront of us visually. But we just don't know how the discover and harnesh it. So by doing a thing like an ecorche you get a new set of glasses to use when working with the figure, getting to new levels with what information that is important to prioritize to make the figure more belivable.

Here are two sunsets I did a few months ago, just hadn't gotten around photographing them. These were funny little paintings, looking right into the light of the sun, just seeing the black silouett of your painting while painting, because the back light was so strong, was a hard challange, trying to judge the colours and value of the light while while being colour blind was a thing in itself. Worth a try atleast...

Always had a fascination for skulls, maybe that's where the intrest for anatomy grew. very intresting with different kinds on structures in a skull just because we're built for different kind of problems in nature, just looking at how the bones are built just to be able to have different muscle attachments.

Portraits

2010-06-12T13:07:00.003+02:00

Portraits, the hardest and most awarding work a painter can do. Working together with another person, getting the chance to look at them for a long time, getting inside the walls that people put up around themselves.
You're just looking at them observing, being objective and not judging the person. And in this way capturing what they offer to the painter.

The way of finishing a portrait is long and a lot of things happen during the process. I'm just starting to appreciate portraiture fully, recently finished my first long portrait project here at school. Very good experience that that makes you grow as a person.

More about this later.

Here are a few smaller portrait projects I've done.

Memory

2010-06-03T18:53:00.007+02:00

Ok, here are two pears, one is done from life and one from memory, 3 hours each.

Memory is probably one of the hardest things to train, takes a lot of hard work and dedication. Memorizing something takes a lot of focus and time. Sitting down, observing and trying to remember the value, colours, shapes, rythms and edge qualities can be tricky. And as soon as you get tired you stop memorizing and you mind starts to wander.
And when you've been looking at something for, as in the case with the pear, I did first a 5day studie, then a one day pear, and then one from memory one day. In the 5 day pear you really get to paint the pear, scraping it down, repainting it. A small subject like a fruit doesn't take long to paint. So you have time to repaint it a few times. And everytime you repaint it you have a clearer idea in you head how your brushstroke will look like before you put it down. Which will make the shape stronger and more well thought out in value, colour and shape.
There is theories that painters like Zorn and Sargent did it this way. Repainting it so many times that they knew how to put down strokes that looked like it was done in one sitting. And also when doing figures you get used to other things like how they move, expressions, but that's another story.

And as for pedagogical purpose, of course I don't have the 5 day pear in my possesion any more.

I think you can figure out which pear is which. There is information in nature that makes nature nature, those things you don't memorize so easily.

Colourstudies

2010-05-31T07:59:00.005+02:00

Update with some colourstudies of sunsets this winter, the colors are amazing with a setting sun, light reflecting on the snow, the complement colors playing.

And some colourstudies for stillifes. Breaking down the major colors into bigger shapes, making the information simpler for the brain to work with.
And also having a reference to mix colors for when the wheater is bad. For example a sunny and cloudy day is like spotlight going on and off, can be a huge difference in light from minute to minute.

Drawings

2010-05-27T19:39:00.004+02:00

Here are a few drawings of figures and and portraits.
Just to learn more about what I later might paint, exploring the subject, it's rythms, forms and light.
when I later begin the paintingI restart the drawing with the brush. But this time I have a plan, I recognise shapes, and I have a plan already on how to solve the problem. Which makes the painting process more planned out, and brushstrokes are placed more confidently.

The whole idea of working on something for a long time, learning to know the subject like an old friend, you learn to know the habbits of a model, their usual expressions for example. Building up the visual memory bank, making it possible to recall nature's habbits later when working on things like compositions or imaginative paintings.

So the more times you redraw somethings the more solutions of the subject you'll memorize.
And the reason to do this is drawing and not painting is that it's easier to move lines than brushstrokes, moving two lines and you've moved a mass, something representing mass in space.

Paintings from the show

2010-05-20T19:34:00.005+02:00

Here are a few of the paintings from the show. My last castpainting I did at the FAA and my first stillifes here at school and the longposes we work on daily.

2010-05-07T08:29:00.002+02:00

Exhibition and opening at the museum and art hall in my hometown.
Welcome to join in on the opening on the 15th of may.

Studies from FAA

2010-03-30T18:50:00.011+02:00

Studies from the Florence Academy of Art