ONE SUBJECT - DIFFERENT WAYS
One Subject - Different Ways (A Blog by Mike Barr)
“After binge - watching several episodes of ‘Portrait Artist of the Year’, I was taken with how many ways there are to do a portrait and still adhere to the rule that it must at least resemble the sitter.
The format of the show has three painters per sitter and three sitters, which means there are nine artists at work at the same time.
The artists are given four hours to complete the work before a live audience and judges in attendance.
One artist started his final effort in the last hour after painting several roughs. Some took close-up photos of the sitter on their iPads with a grid app and painted from that - a remarkable concession in a life painting competition!
The different array of styles and ways of tackling portraits was impressive and in the end most of the portraits resembled the person being painted.
The artist who only started on his proper painting after several trial runs was minimal in his line work, but the likeness he obtained was striking.
Even though the program was focusing on the portrait, it was inspiring for all artists because it illustrates that there is more than one way to tackle a subject and not just different styles.
Faced with a landscape or anything else that is before us in real life or in a photographic reference, we have several choices. We may think we have no choice but to paint everything before us, but of course, there is nothing further from the truth.
The eye of an artist must perceive what is possible in any scene. Simple things like cropping the image and painting a small part of what we see can be very effective, whatever the subject is. We don’t have to paint the whole of that tree or any object for it to be interesting. How many paintings are there of parts of the Sydney Harbour Bridge compared to the whole bridge?
Painting things from different angles and heights also works, it works really well with landscapes and if you don’t have access to a drone, the imagination can suffice.
Colour is another aspect in which we can change things around and the possibilities are endless. There are tons of greens for landscapes, many colours of the sky apart from blue and a myriad of blues too. Flesh colour- there isn’t one and lots of colours can be added to a face and it still looks right.
Other variations of working with paint are endless and only limited by our imagination and it stands of one of the wonders of painting that is ready for us to explore and enjoy”.
Happy painting!