We Portrait Artists

We Portrait Artists

Jackson, Oil on Canvas, 24w x 30h, by Pat Aube Gray

When young, we noticed a person with awesome beauty or features seemingly carved from stone, or a mature elder, a long life etched into his face, seeping from the outer corners of sentient eyes.  That face elicited a persistent gnawing, an ache too overwhelming to ignore.  We took crayon in hand, then, later, a pencil, and naively drew that face on paper, any paper, even a napkin.  We placed cockeyed features on out-of-shape heads and produced quasi-likenesses.  To become better, we turned to those who were - in books, on videos, at schools, at workshops - for drawing skills, technical knowledge, color and temperature comprehension, composition and edge sensitivity.  We sought enlightenment - to learn to “see,” which is to feel, an attitude suggested by a pose or tilt of a head, and the often elusive emotion emanating from the eyes.

We worked in graphite and charcoal, smearing ebony dust into shadows with tortillons or our fingers.  We used pastels, sticks of chalk-like color; we needed hundreds of them, one in every hue, in multiple values, because they could not be mixed.  We employed aqueous media, managing to control with a brush the unbridled flow of tinted water on specially treated paper.  We painted in oil, which, in the days of the Old Masters – Rembrandt, DaVinci, Caravaggio, Vermeer - was finely ground pigment, found in nature, mixed into linseed oil.   More recently, brilliant, audacious oil colors contained chemical additives.

We prepared our surfaces, wood panel or canvas, brushing on layers of rabbit skin glue or gesso, sanding between coats until they had the preferred texture.  We placed one on our easel, its center at our eye level.  We wore old clothes or an apron dappled with dried paint that had been dripped or wiped from hands or a brush.  We twisted caps off tubes of paint, squeezed a mound of white near the edge of a palette of varnished wood.  To its right, along the edge, we placed a smaller squirt of each warm color, from light to dark (yellows, oranges, reds, siennas); to the left, the same for cool colors (blues and greens), followed by earth tones (ochres, umbers, greys.)  We left the center empty, space for mixing colors.  On our taboret stood an old can of our best brushes, bristles up, a jar of turpentine, a small cup of damar varnish, palette knives, and lint-free rags or paper towels.    We placed our model before us, usually on a platform, at our eye level, and shone a light on him for the best pattern of light and shadow.  We took a deep breath, tried to calm our nerves.  It was time to paint.

With a brush loaded with a thinned, middle-dark neutral, we loosely drew the head and shoulders and blocked in shadow areas.  On our palette we mixed four or five values, from light to dark, of our subject’s skin tone.  With brushes, we carefully laid them in, leaving the shadow areas as they were, squinting at the model to distinguish the lights, middles, darks, and then warming or cooling the color as necessary.  We roughed in the ears, the eyes, the contours of the face, the nose and mouth. We added a little more red here, a little blue there.  We mixed and loosely scrubbed paint into the hair and clothing.  We stepped back so, with just a slight shift of our eyes, we could view the model and compare it to the painting.  We assessed proportions; was the bottom of the nose the right distance from the eyes, were the lips the right distance from the bottom of the nose, was the chin too long, was the forehead too short, were the eyes too far apart?  We moved back to the easel, rubbed out paint with a rag and made corrections, constantly measuring with our eyes.  Once we saw our subject on the easel, we reveled in the joy of it, felt the flutter of euphoria in our very being.  We lovingly touched the surface with careful, deliberate strokes, “combed” the hair, softened edges, moderated transitions in value, sharpened edges.  We perfected the eyes, the color of the irises, captured the magical translucence, dotted in the highlights.  When, finally, the portrait looked back at us as the model did, that thing we were meant to do was done.  A wisp of air escaped our lips, a sigh of relief, a soft whisper of fulfillment.  We smiled.  Then we wondered who would be next.