faces

Some people really like paintings and drawings done from life and some people really like paintings and drawings that are totally made up. It's fun for me to do both and so I do do both, even though I used to worry a little that I should just be doing the one or the other.

At the last open house people were asking me where I got the people from, which is something when I’m painting I don’t really think about too much so I looked at all of them on the wall and pointed to each and said “that one from a drawing, that one totally made up, that one from a drawing, that one totally made up” I think it was divided between half totally made up and half from drawings.

I said to a couple of people that I’ve drawn so many faces that even when I totally make them up they look like they weren't made up but I’m not sure that’s necessarily so.

I think more to the point is that when I do make up faces what I usually work on is making them have some life, to make them more than just a cariacature and when I work from sketches I do the same thing, so maybe they end up looking the same.

What I always think about is how much life Rembrandt’s paintings have in them, and I try to add that kind of thing to mine although of course mine are NOT REMBRANDTS…one of the best compliments I ever got was on this painting where a guy said something like the person looks real and not real at the same time.

That was exactly what I was trying to do, and to have somebody see it was absolutely amazing.

I don’t want to the faces to paint to look realistic in the normal sort of way, but I do want people to be able to relate to them somehow. I go to great lengths to make them not look realistic yet retain something and it’s a fine line that I don’t always manage to walk.

Whenever a face gets too specific, I don’t like it.

I don’t know, this is just one person’s opinion and you got to find your own way, that’s for sure. I think working figuratively is WAY HARD, partly because so many people have ideas about it (after all they all look at figures every day) and aren't afraid to voice them.

I have trouble in that I get influenced one way or the other depending on what painting is making a hit and what isn’t.

What’s happened to me a few times is I’ve had a great success with a painting and I’ll think, well I should do more like that and I try it and the new painting is nothing like the old one, and it suffers in comparison. Or at least it seems to.

What I think I’ve learned about that is during the course of an artist’s career there will be certain successes and they are hard to duplicate because you can’t duplicate the time you did the first one, your state of mind, the way you used the materials and all the things that CLICKED to make the first one so good.

I think the best thing to do is continue to work like you worked in the first place, working in a way that allowed you to do what you did and if you do that, you’ll end up doing something great again but probably it will look entirely different.

I think the time to do more of what you were doing is at the time you are doing them, and the thing is, I DO that and maybe not all of them are good, too. So when people like something I did back then, there really isn’t any going back to it, I just gotta smile and say “thanks.”

The thing is, there are so many people who like different things, it's not like everybody likes everything so that even if I go back and try to duplicate a success and fail, there's probably going to be SOMEBODY gumming up the works by really liking the failure. Not the people who liked the original success mind you, but different people!

It's really a freeforall out there I'm telling ya!