‘Observing’, Oil on Canvas 12”X16”

This was the first time I saw a certain principle of light in action very clearly on the human form.

Please observe this link in a separate window: LINK. It is taken out of a tutorial of Georgetown Atelier where I study.

That picture and this painting of her face share the exact same principle, which was really fun to discover.

The key is that the darkest dark is in the cast shadow. In the sphere it is the shadow right under the sphere. The core shadow is second in degree of darkness and lastly is the dark side filled with reflected light. The light on the model’s face was exactly the same. If you examine the picture bellow, look in the groove of the chin, under the top lip, right under the nose, and right under her eye in the dark side: Those are all the darkest dark. Second in degree is the core shadow, which is slightly less dark (like on her cheek), and the reflected light, which is significantly lighter here than the other shadow areas.
Seeing this principle clearly allowed me to paint with greater clarity, and better yet, I will be looking for the same principle next time I paint and every time I paint.

Here is the preliminary drawing for this painting and some stages it went through:

Mid Stage

-Ifat

I think to myself: It is just like those dancers who have perfected the moves of the dance so much that they seem to be a caricature of expressing feelings instead of expressing them through dance. Or in the second case, the artist is trying to make it about themselves rather than the music by trying to play it in a fancy way. Arrrggg.
Finally I came across a version that seemed sincere. It’s funny one should use such a word about performing music, but that’s the best suited word I can think of, and, somehow, it feels even more important that music be sincere than regular sentences. I think it irritates me even more in music. I tell the artist (in my head) something like: “Either you devote yourself to the music, connect with it and adore it, or don’t play at all. But don’t try to make something that would seem impressive to the world and abandon the truth of the melody”.

It’s also a lesson about my own art. To keep it sincere means… to keep it inspiring for ME.
I have a lot going on right now. I’m about to finish a painting and start 2 new huge ones: One working from a live model and the other from photo references, and the concept is entirely my own.

I noticed that the evolution of a painting, for me, takes on a strange form, which I suspect requires some psychotherapy to unravel… First I think of an idea, I love it, I get excited about it. Then, I spend a lot of time working on other things, slowly collecting references, sketches and ideas to build up that idea and then after a while, when I’m about to start working on it, I suddenly don’t feel as inspired any more. It is the darnest thing…
Then as I get into it, I rediscover that inspiration here and there.
I have this untested feeling of certainty that had I just started working on the painting for which I had the idea right away, the inspiration would accompany it throughout.
It is almost like a relationship that starts long distance for a while and then becomes close vs. one that starts without the inhibition of being apart and is allowed to develop at a natural pace.

Of course in real life, preparation is always required. The mere matter of the size of the canvas is extremely important and also must be carefully thought out before the painting starts. It’s not something the artist can just jump into. The reason for that is that the last thing you want is to work and create all these magnificent and essential parts of your painting only to discover at the end that you’re missing a foot long canvas to get the feeling you were after. Ouchie. Big Ouchi.

Different artists approached their work differently. Two artists I admire greatly are William Adolf Bouguereau and Frank Frazetta. I find it fascinating that the different work methods they employed seem to be a clear reflection of their personalities, which are also reflected in the difference in their themes.

Frazetta shows human beings, particularly women as very wild, with sexuality being an intuitive and normal part of their nature, while Bouguereau sees and presents them as very gentle and child-like.
Frazetta’s painting style, while very skilled, is much more whimsical, while Bouguereau’s is very very disciplined, patient, sensitive and precise.
Frazetta used to develop his art right on the canvas or paper, working and reworking it until he was happy with it. Bouguereau did many studies and preparations before getting started on the actual piece.
Here are samples of their work. I chose them to show the contrast I was talking about as much as possible (in terms of theme I like other paintings by Bouguereau much  better).

Left: Bouguereau, Right: Frazetta.

One important thing to say, though, is that every artist must go through a time of studying visual reality carefully and attentively. No one can start happily inventing without first studying what they see.

When I ask myself, who am I? which style is more “me”, I sadly answer to myself that I am more of a Frazetta person at heart (though I don’t act on it). For whatever reasons from my childhood or not, discipline and patience against an emotional blockade are not primary virtues for me. But when I can invent something – my motivation is abundant.
On one hand I admire the careful construction in Bouguereau’s work. On the other, I enjoy the whimsical attention in Frazetta’s work. I know I am jumping the gun by asking myself these questions, as what is actually required is just to get some work done and discover what I’m like over time. But I couldn’t help introspecting this question.

I currently have a lot of projects going, with one painting at its finishing stages and other 2 starting up. Pictures soon.

-Ifat

After the painting was done, I felt restless about the background, which I did not like at all.

I realized what this model and pose really remind me of are a solitary moment of an Arabian princess, as she’s getting dressed in private, standing in a tent, catching a glimpse of the desert sunset through a crack in the tent opening.
From the moment I thought of that idea, I was sold on it.

I searched online for reference material to be able to paint a tent around this lady but it didn’t work out, because tents are not usually lit with the same light that was used on this model, nor was the perspective or location of the items right.

Under advice of my instructor at Georgetown Atelier I drew out a thumbnail with the general value and composition I had in mind for the background. I then tried to use the photos I had to photoshop my way into a good reference but that did not work out at all, so I decided to just build the whole thing.

I spent hours shopping around at an arts and crafts store and thinking how to build a tent as I was looking around getting ideas from the materials I saw in the store.

How do you tell a story without talking so long? I feel like I’m stretching it on and on… so without further ado here is the setup:

I sculpted a little figure and scaled every other item around her.
When building it I often glanced at the figurine from the point of view I viewed the real model when I painted her and moved objects around to determine their right location as well as their size before building them.

This project has been going on since, oh, I don’t know – long time for sure! The beginning of February at least, with lots of new problems to learn to solve and deal with, such as getting the perspective of the room right, determining where to place the eye level, making the reference look like my thumbnail as well as working out a desired composition by shifting the location of objects around.

This has been very time consuming. It reminds me of someone who once inquired about buying one of my artworks and then began inquiring how many hours I put into the artwork to determine a price.

You know, I don’t think he realized the severity of just how bad a path he chose for getting a bargain price. In most cases, and when the artist is very passionate about their art, it involves a whole lot of hours.

Some of those hours are spent acquiring general skills, some in working out a composition, which is a problem that can sometimes accompany an artist for years until it comes to a resolution, as well as the hours working and reworking the painting itself.

Granted, some paintings are all fluff, they come out nice and spontaneous over s short period of time, but the more involved projects are definitely, definitely not like that.

I’m happy to say the painting is finally coming along to my liking. I solved all the major problems I had with it and now it’s just a matter of painting everything and mending the already existing figure with the background.

I hope to finish it in the next week or two, no more. Yey! I must treat myself to extra nice ice cream when this project is done.

Stay tuned for an update when this baby gets shipped!

On another topic or topics… My education is coming close to its end. I will be graduating at June 21st from a 3 year full time program at Georgetown Atelier. Indeed!
My education really opened up the world of art to me in a way it never was before. I still have a few major projects ahead of me in the next 3 months.
I am always learning, and surprisingly, without realizing it, doing a lot of thinking and coming to conclusions about art as I go along.

For instance, one of the things I realized lately is just how important is to be able to unify elements in a painting and I’ve been doing some thinking of all the different ways this can be done. It had never occurred to me when I started, just important it can be to make a concise statement in painting, or in other words, how important it is NOT to over-describe certain things.
It can be surprisingly difficult to do just that much more than to render something to its finest detail. Starting out (much like many art students, I imagine), you think that the greatest achievement is in every small detail. But, I think it really takes years of practice to come to the realization that (Paraphrasing Andrew Loomis) “no part is as important as the whole”.

Lastly, if you like my work and would like to support me, please take a few moments to view my work for sale page and see if there’s something from the wide price range you might be interested in purchasing. This will definitely help tremendously.

-Ifat

On the left is a 5 day painting. It’s 16”X18”, oil on Linen.

On the right: A 2 weeks painting, 16”X20”, oil on Board, named ‘A Question’.

-Ifat

I’ve prepared several studies for it trying to decide what exactly I want to paint and how to crop it. I spent several hours cropping, re-cropping, painting and repainting this small figure until I made up my mind.

Today I’ve transferred and fixed it onto a canvas, did an underpainting (which is a single-color, transparent painting which helps guide the placement of the main layer of paint). Tomorrow and next week I’ll do the painting itself.

-Ifat

Here is the finished painting, with a photo of the earlier stages on the right.
The process of creating it started with a drawing, which I then printed on a small canvas and did a color study on, and finally, transferring the drawing to a canvas and painting.

I chose the name after the painting was done, by looking at it and thinking what it is that it suggests to me.
-Ifat

‘Looking Forward’, 17”X24.5” oil on Board

Here is the study I did for this painting (minus the last few brush strokes to finish it):

The model I was painting was a beautiful woman in her 50′s. I decided it would be a good challenge to paint her younger because it would force me to understand how the light interacts with her flesh. It wasn’t easy and if anything, it was a good reminder of the need to further study the anatomy of the head. As usual, trying to draw from imagination is the best way to realize how well you have the form conceptualized (or not!).

It was interesting, and I appreciate how the model brought this mood and attitude with her to her sitting sessions (most notably at first! before it started being boring and uncomfortable I’m sure).

This painting got me thinking of just how much of myself I bring into a painting vs. how much it is about capturing the model.

I think nowadays (or maybe always!) it is considered graceful to focus on capturing the essence of the model who is sitting for the artist. Paintings are usually named after the sitter, as well. But for me, I always make it about myself and how I feel  - even when it is a male model. It is a human being, and that is enough for me to relate to their experience.

I feel like when I re-create them on my canvas that figure exists in a different universe. And I capture how they feel while in that world. It’s almost like writing a story in the third person… Often this form of writing makes the writer relate to the characters more personally than if they wrote it in first person form.

A painting involves so many things to keep in mind to create it: the colors, value, brushwork, edges, colors, thickness of paint, drawing aspect and so on – that something must be used to allow the artist to maintain the cohesiveness of the work while creating its different parts.

The only way to do it, in my opinion, is to let all the artist’s skills, experience and knowledge work from the background and work primarily from their emotions and inspiration in terms of the artist’s state of mind.

When I’m immersed in the work such that I feel as if it is a real world and I am inside it – I do things right. When I find myself thinking of other, technical things and try to work that way the result is always inferior.

To illustrate: suppose you’re working on the background of a painting, the environment in which your figure would go; you can paint it while thinking things like: “A background needs to be unified, it needs to be subtle, so I’ll work my brush thinly and do this and that technical details”, OR you can think something along the lines of how the figure would feel about the background, as if it were a real place. Something like: “The sky seem distant such that the figure feels that they are inside a huge space. Nothing is pressing on them and the sky surrounds the figure as if it belongs there”.

Surprisingly, the sky would come out looking like all the technical things you wanted it to be if you think of the later, but will likely not be as nice if you try to think of it in technical terms as you’re creating it.

Now this long train of thought it actually just the introduction to a different topic which really bothers me. That is; the difficulty of getting into that state of mind.

I think that this is the most difficult challenge I am facing as an artist. I find the mood inspired upon me by my day to day life is a huge obstacle to “getting in the right mood” to make my art.
My art demands the best of me, the best part of my soul, and I feel as if, either the circumstances of my life or something in me that does not allow me to delve into that.
If I start working on a painting and I am at the easel every day (like when I’m at my school), I might eventually get into the right mood, if I feel it spiritually “safe”.
Years ago, when I was done with my army service (at age 19), I lived alone, in a nice, isolated studio apartment with no TV or computer and a phone I barely used (by choice). I painted all day and night, every day and every night and in the rest of the time worked or took walks in the area by myself.
I have never been more productive in my art in my life. It was the right environment for it. I was very happy, but also lonely (and not financially stable).

I need to find a different way to get into the mood that doesn’t involve the extreme of removing every trace of human contact from my life.
I wonder what it is, and why, that having no one around has such a powerful effect on letting me allow that inside world to come out, to make it real and to immerse myself in it.

Not being able to get into the “mood”, I usually just do something else. Days and weeks go by and no painting gets done. True, I could discipline myself into being at my easel, but the clash of motivations is very strong, and unless I manage to really immerse myself in the mood of the painting, I won’t paint it well anyway.

I bet this is a big problem for a lot of artists who create work based on inspiration.

Tomorrow starts my second term of my last year at Georgetown atelier. I wonder how the routine of getting back to the easel every day and painting will affect me. I hope it will affect me for the better.

-Ifat

The more complexity the artist can retain at any given time, the better off the painting will be, because the more factors would be calculated into each brush stroke. However, in reality, doing all of it at once is too daunting a task. It gets easier with experience, since more and more knowledge becomes automatized, but still, a lot of complexity remains anyway.

So, the artist must come up with a method of reducing that complexity into manageable steps. Traditionally, this is usually achieved by doing a block-in (a simplified drawing of the major lines and value shapes), then painting a light, transparent, monochromatic version of the subject, to figure out the value scale of everything and then finally adding the color.

This way, every aspect of the complexity is dealt with one at a time. In what’s called Ala-Prima painting, everything has to be done at the same time more or less. The accuracy of the drawing, the values, colors and the integration of every part of the painting around its theme or focal point.
However, even in doing this there are ways to reduce the complexity and dealing with it one thing at a time. Different people would prioritize what to “solve” first differently. This realization struck me clearly as I saw a picture of the following painting by Morgan Weistling in mid-stage of making it:

Look at the girl’s left hand, the one not fully painted yet. This, for me, was the giveaway. The interesting thing here is what the artist prioritized – what complexity he chose to target first. In this case, it wasn’t the structure; it was the color and value relationship. As you can see, the hand is still lacking its structure – there are no knuckles, the fingers are not yet separated and the exact outline formed by each finger is not yet accurately described. From this general paint blob, he will later carve out, or add, the structure.
Another thing that was being solved there was the proportion and the general shape. The artist was able to do that because, after years of drawing experience, those things come easily and are well automatized.

With most artists, I believe, the drawing aspect is the one issue that needs to be solved first, because it holds the most complexity, and everything else is then built on top and in relation to that initial stage. (That is the case with me with most paintings, with some exceptions).

I think that there can be two approaches here: One is to first put down the easiest thing to solve, what one already has automatized, and then build the complexity and other aspects on top of that. Or the other approach is to first start with the most complex part, get it out the way and then build the other things on top.
It is much easier, in my opinion, to use the second method, because without it, an artist can get a sense of being overwhelmed with the complexity, which isn’t made a lot better simply because something like the value or colors have been figured out. However, I think it makes for a better painting or drawing when the value is prioritized first, and the structure emerges from it rather than the other way around.

Velasquez is an excellent example of this. He has the structure well automatized that he is able to put it last, not first, and since his primary focus is value and color, he can imply the structure in a subtle yet accurate way, just enough to get the idea across, without describing everything in detail. It gives the viewer a sense of epistemological omnipotence; a sense of being able to mentally hold complexity in a simplified form; a sense of control over complexity.

Value, in a work of art, is the primary tool for unification and differentiation. It can be used to sharpen differences between objects of to unify them and send them to the background. Both are important in a work of art, because art described things in a selective way – it enhances the central aspects of a painting and de-emphasizes the ones that serve merely as context or setting for the main focus.

Incidentally, while I admire the painting style of the first artist I shared here by Morgan Weistling, I think he utilizes the same style all over the painting non-selectively. A lot of artists do that, with different styles (it can also be done with photo realism). Compare that to this painting by Ilya Repin, a Russian painter from the 1850′s – notice how the ships in the background are mushed together in value and lack detail to de-emphasize them and send them to the background, while the men are described much more and appear to emerge. I think this selectivity of rendering makes for a superior art work.
Therefore, I think it is wise to start a painting with the values figured out, and then have the structure emerge out of that, slowly and in a controlled way, creating the emphasis only where the artist needs it to be.
The problem here is that it is more difficult to describe (or what I call “solve” or “figure out”) the structure rather than the value, and so if all your canvas has is the general values, the entire complexity of the drawing needs to be solved as you go. Ouch!
I think a solution to that is the wipe-out process, which retains some information of the drawing while still unifying the values across the entire painting.

Anyhow, I don’t feel like I’ve reached a definite conclusion, but rather made some interesting observations about how an artist approaches a painting and deals with its complexity.

I think in most cases, the artist will first solve what is most difficult and what takes up most of their mental space. This changes over time once some aspects become more automatized compared to others (these are usually what the artist is most fascinated with).

I’ll have to continue this line of thinking some other time!

Merry Christmas to you!

-Ifat

I’ve finished the first semester at my school. I’m on a winter break, working and saving up for the next semester, resting and doing a lot of passive thinking.

First, I’d like to share the last two projects I’ve been working on before I went on a semester break.

(Click image to enlarge)

The second one is a 2 week figurative work, which I could not get a good picture of. So it will have to wait a bit more for me to share it.
More to be posted later this week.

I wish you a very Merry Christmas, or other holiday you may be celebrating.

-Ifat