Lumumba & The Nose
By Luc Tuymans
Now that I am done with Twenty Three Portraits I’ve been able to look at the work somewhat retrospectively. However absurd sounding that is(It opening only three weeks ago). I made the 23 very quickly, very mechanically, 26 portraits in about 44 days. I just saw shades of gray and grid on canvas, while in the midst of the project. The speed and efficiency of this series was new for me. Much of that can be attributed to my visit in October to the MCA in Chicago where I saw the Luc Tuymans retrospective. Being largely, almost too obviously, influenced by Richter, I’ve always put any ideas of “painterly freedom” out of my mind. I suppose, me still being a naive young artist, I was under the impression that if I wanted to make a drawing of a video still, look like that video still, it couldn’t, at the same time, look like a painting or drawing. This changed after seeing Tuymans. My favorite parts of the show were being able to see the pencil lines under the thinly applied paint, how amazingly loose the works were and how most of them were done in one sitting. With all that, its was still obvious the source images for these works came from magazines, newspapers and google searches.
Four of Twenty Three: Lila Bromwell Benton,Beverly Greene, Sybil Mobley & Helen Johnson
Charcoal & pastel on raw canvas under polymer glaze & varnish. 2010-11
Because of the Tuymans exhibit, when making the 23 I shortened the list of things to worry about while rendering each portrait. I didn’t really worry about the grid being visible. I did my best to make the charcoal and pastel cake and look heavy or painterly, especially with the portraits with saturated white backgrounds. But in some, I thinned the layers, keeping some transparency. This project was one of the first charcoal-pastel-on-canvas projects where I really used the original gray pastel ground in the finished piece. Several of the portraits’ pastel underpainting(underdrawing?) was used as the mid tone. Something I almost never do.
While writing this short post it has not escaped me that I’m talking about drawing like its painting. If anything thats telling me I’m on the right track. If it makes any sense, I’d like the work I do with pastel to look objectively not just at the images they’re showing, but also look objectively at painting itself.
Progress image of Abraham Zapruder piece. Apart of next months group show.
Pastel & charcoal on raw canvas.
jason@jasonpattersonart.com
Filed under: Other Artists & Influences, Portraits
