Making colour marks with Daniel

Morning and afternoon portraits

We worked with Daniel Shadbolt on two portraits with the same set up, morning and afternoon, Adrian and Gudron.  In many ways the overall artistic objective was the same as in Melissa’s project, ie a representational approach fully balanced with a musical creation of colour.  The driver is the sense of colour, rhythm, energy and vibration.

However, Daniel and Melissa’s processes are almost diametrically opposed.  Unlike Melissa’s careful planning and drawing out to start, Daniel goes directly with impressionistic marks of colour and gradually building up with marks and detail as needed to move the overall picture forward, working the whole thing in one.  The result is an image that has more personal energy on the canvas and perhaps less clarity.  A combination makes sense to me.

As in other recent project, I worked on the overall picture construction of interlocking blocks of colour, then building up the picture with thicker paint marks.  In both pictures there are parts that I am happy with, Adrian’s leather jacket and Gurdon’s lead arm.  The flesh tones on the two faces were too cold and I need to go back and look at the palette that I am using, which is a very cool one (Yellow lake bright, Ultramarine and Magenta).