I did some more work on Pan American Branch Library this morning. I focused on the reflections in the front doors. The front of the building has a glass wall with a double door entrance. I wanted to capture the reflections in the glass without taking away from the rest of the image. Many of the libraries I’ve painted so far have double glass entries and with each one I’ve realized how important the reflections are to the overall image. The trick has been getting the right value. Too bright and it draws the eye to it, too dark it looks like a black hole when you look at it. These are some of the things I’ve been learning on this journey.
Yesterday I had an exciting experience drawing. I’m reading Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and the exercise I did yesterday was a profile portrait. Since I was home alone I took a photo of my own profile and drew it. I have to admit that through all these years I’ve done very little portrait painting because I felt it was just too difficult. I was embarrassed and unsure if that was something I could actually learn. When I would attempt it I wound up getting upset because I wanted to capture a likeness and never felt that I could.
But through these exercises I feel like I’ve turned a corner. I can’t say my drawing was perfect, but it was pretty darn close. Close enough that it finally made me inspired to draw more portraits. She explained that there are ways to measure the head and scull so that the features are life-like. The distance from eye to chin is relatively the same as from the eye to the top of the head. And on a profile, the distance from the eye to the chin is relatively the same from eye to ear. Just these little nuggets of information made a huge difference. I’ve taken so many life drawing and painting class and never learned that.
I’ve never been that interested in the human figure, or portraits for that matter, but knowing that I was avoiding them because I couldn’t do them has been affecting me deeply. It’s been a strain on my self-esteem and I never realized it until yesterday. I have made a concerted effort to work on my drawing skills ever since I started working as an artist full-time, but now I’m getting really inspired by it. I don’t know that I want to be a graphite or charcoal artist, but I feel the need to incorporate them into my work day because they are part of being a painter. They’re right-brain exercises that make a big difference.
My goal is to be a good realist painter. I want to be able to capture images that look almost life-like. My goal isn’t photo-realism, but Alston-realism. I want to be like Edward Hopper or Andrew Wyeth where a viewer would know it’s my work from across the room. I know I’ve missed a lot of years where I could have been learning all the things I’m learning now. I know that I’m not going to be Edward Hopper or Andrew Wyeth, they are great American artists, but I want to be great in my own way. I want to continue pushing myself and feeling uplifted by my own progress.