Kitchen Table Portraits

One of the first people I met in Bourcoiran was Diego, a neighbor who helps to fix things around the house for our host Eliane. When he came in and sat at the kitchen table, I was so struck by his interesting sun-weathered face, that I asked his permission draw his portrait.

I knew I only had about 15 minutes to work with, and I asked him just to keep talking, not to pose. In a situation like this you don’t want to haul out a lot of oil paints or watercolor equipment, so it’s convenient to have a set of watercolor pencils and a water brush. I used the Caran d’Ache Supracolor II pencils because they work nicely both with and without water.

The four colors you need for portraits are umber, russet, black and brown. I use two water brushes, one with plain water and one with a pre-mixed sepia color.

The paper is a Derwent sketchbook, like a Moleskine drawing book, with thick, smooth paper. It’s not really made for water, but it holds up OK.

Here’s another portrait, drawn the next day from a gentleman named Bluc Fouchaud, while he and his wife prepared supper for us.

You have to practice a lot with these pencils first to get used to what happens when you run water over your pencil work. Normally you’ll want to get the portrait half finished first to establish some tone before starting in with the water.

If you brush water over a full-toned drawing, it will get too dark right away. In the portrait of Mr Fouchaud, I established the light skin tone across the face quite early, and saved small details and accents for last.

Boucoiran, France

Of course, real life is always more fantastic than what we imagine. We started our trip in a small town called Boucoiran in southern France. We're staying with a descendant of one of its former mayors, Ulysse Laporte. Here is a portrait of him, made from old photos.

One of his books showed diagrams of spinning and weaving machines, as well as illustrations of art objects from the Louvre. At one time, art and industry were really seen as brother pursuits.

This watercolor shows the view from the third floor balcony of his stone house near the center of the village, with the grape arbor in the foreground, and the train station in the distance.

Swiss Air

We boarded Flight 23 through gate SB30, the one you get to by riding down the luggage conveyors.

Not many people know about the subterranean hangars. The steam dirigible took us into the clouds. It was a strange crowd on board—many unintelligible languages.

The coffee on board was dark and chocolaty, with a wood-fire taste, served by flight attendants who were mountain trolls, a bit grumpy.

In Geneva our dwarf guide took us down the back alleys, where you can still see the occasional “granchat.” They block traffic until they wake up.

A goat man brought us firewood on this brouette, which was parked at the base of the stairs of our stone house.

Called Away

It’s tough to be called away in the middle of a plein air sketch.

Sometimes a rainstorm does it. The raindrops at the top of this watercolor study by William Trost Richards testify to what happened. A storm moved in, and he had to stop working.

Here’s another Trost Richards seascape. Why is the bluff on the left only just laid in? Maybe someone called him to dinner, or his ride was leaving. We make art at the mercy of the stomach and the weather.

Thanks to William Vareika Fine Arts, link.

Jules Verne et Dinotopia 4 Octobre

(Scroll down for English Translation)

Inauguration de l'Espace Jules Verne, le 4 octobre 2008
Maison d'Ailleurs, Yverdon-les-Bains, Suisse

Pour son inauguration, l'Espace Jules Verne à Yverdon-les-Bains sera accessible gratuitement de 10h30 à 22h30 pour douze heures de rencontres, de visite et de découvertes. Cette salle historique en plein centre ville présentera ses nouveaux atours au public et ses collections exceptionnelles autour de Jules Verne: documents rares, livres précieux, modèles des véhicules extraordinaires, audio-visuels originaux, borne interactive sur les voyages littéraires, affiches dans un incroyable présentoir automatiqueŠ

10h30 Partie officielle en présence des autorités d'Yverdon-les-Bains, du collectionneur Jean-Michel Margot et de l'artiste américain James Gurney (place Pestalozzi). Dans Retour à Dinotopia, plus de cinquante nouveaux tableaux donnent vie à un lieu hors du temps où dinosaures et mammifères préhistoriques sont représentés avec une rigueur toute scientifique.


Toute la journée, animations sur la place Pestalozzi avec les Orbylis et les envoyés du Yuocland... Ainsi que le superbe Gramoulinophone, un spectacle rétrofuturiste et décalé (représentations à 13h, 14h30, 16h30, 18h - entrée libre).

L'ouvrage Dinotopia: un voyage à Chandara (Editions Fleurus) paraît pour l'ouverture de l'exposition à la Maison d'Ailleurs.

Paris mercredi 8 octobre 2008 à 16h: Dédicace de James Gurney pour son ouvrage "Dinotopia, un voyage à Chandara" (Fleurus). FNAC Paris - Forum (Châtelet les Halles)

ENGLISH
The new extension of Maison d'Ailleurs (Museum of Utopias and Science Fiction), in Yverdon, Switzerland, is devoted to Jules Verne, the father of Extraordinary Journeys and his time. The new museum building will open on October 4th, from 10:30 to 22:30 for 12 hours of discoveries and amazement. This historical room in the old center of Yverdon-les-Bains will house rare documents, extraordinary models, precious books, films and interactive works, an incredible poster-matic machine and much more. The entry is free for the whole day.

10h30: Official opening with the Yverdon-les-Bains authorities, collector Jean-Michel Margot and Dinotopia artist James Gurney, to accompany the exhibit “Return to Dinotopia,” with 50 paintings on exhibit from the new book, Dinotopia, Journey to Chandara, which will be released in its French edition the same day. (Pestalozzi plaza)

During the whole day, street performers, musicians, and actors will make the day unforgettable. Meet the strange Orbylis aliens, and the emissaries from distant Yuocland... And enjoy the weird Gramoulinophone, a retro-futuristic wonder (playing at 13h, 14h30, 16h30, 18h - free entry).
-------
Maison d’Ailleur, Oct. 4 agenda, link.
Dinotopia exhibition info, text in English or French
Street performers, link.
Yuocland, link.
Orbylis, link.
Gramoulinophone, link.
Previous GJ post on Maison d'Ailleurs, link.

Action Poses and Photography

For much of the nineteenth century, the mental image of the galloping horse was this pose, typified by this Currier and Ives print from 1890.

As blog reader R8R mentioned this in yesterday’s comments, Eadweard Muybridge began systematically photographing running horses as early as 1877.


This began as a way to settle a bet about whether a horse really had all four feet off the ground at a single time. The photos proved that it does, but not quite in the way artists had imagined. At the moment when all four feet are off the ground, they’re gathered under the horse’s belly, not kicked out front and back.

According to the photographic evidence, the Currier and Ives picture was inaccurate, even though it was done after Muybridge’s photos were available.

Muybridge’s evidence must have been hard for artists to digest at first. Modern painters like Marcel Duchamp, to their credit, were grappling with how to capture the dynamics of action in a single painting. There’s no easy or right way to do it, despite my promise at the end of yesterday’s post.

Yesterday we looked at three paintings of people walking. All of these paintings were based on poses that a model could hold in a static position. Although Wyeth and Rockwell certainly had access to fast-action photos of people in motion I suspect that candid action photographs didn’t “look right” to them.

A lot of you commented in praise of yesterday’s paintings, and I agree. Cormon’s image has gravitas; Rockwell’s has a stateliness, and Wyeth’s a desperate urgency. But I think they’re successful despite their posing of action. Not only are the poses all the same in each picture, they're not consistent with the realism of the rest of the treatment, and I think a painting that shows an action has to be convincing not only as a singular, static image, but also as a moment in a larger conception of movement and time.

Since Muybridge, the notion of what “looks right” has changed somewhat. Most of us wouldn’t accept the standard Currier and Ives pose for running horses anymore. We accept photographic action effects, like the blurring of a moving foot, for example.

Most illustrations by the mid twentieth century that show action poses—like this advertising illustration by Austin Briggs—tended to rely on candid action photography for paintings of action scenes. As a work of art, this one is a bit silly, but clearly he did his homework and really posed models in the action.

Tom Lovell also clearly studied action photography for this painting of Alexander for National Geographic. To my eye, this painting is successful in terms of movement because it conveys both the timeless epic and the snapshot incident.

Thanks to Leif Peng for the Austin Briggs image, link.
Muybridge on Wikipedia: Main article, and assorted animated gifs.

Walking Poses

When Fernand Cormon (1845-1924) painted the family of Cain walking through the desert, he gave each of the figures a heavy plodding step. Each person has their feet in the same position.

The foot in front is flat on the ground, with the knee bent. The rear heel is lifted off the ground, with the ball of the foot squarely on the ground.

Norman Rockwell, in his great painting “The Problem We All Live With,” uses a different pose to signify walking, but again it’s the same pose for all of his characters. Rockwell has a different theory of how people walk. All four men and the girl are perfectly vertical, and they're all walking with very short steps, with their heels and toes in the air at the same time. The men’s backswinging elbow is well behind the body, and the forward arm is in a loose fist in front of the stomach.

Rockwell arrived at these poses by propping the toes and heels of his models on stacks of books. He did not take candid photos of people actually walking.

Here he uses the same theory of walking poses, with heels and toes up. The strides are even shorter. If you try actually walking so that you end up with these poses, your style of walking does not match the intended feeling of the picture. Instead, it feels like a silly robot.

N.C. Wyeth has yet another conception of how people walk. He too applies a single pose equally to his whole crowd of pirates. They all have full meter-long strides with the body leaning far forward. Try walking in a way that matches these poses. I’ll bet you’ll feel less like a pirate and more like Groucho Marx.

Are these poses “expressive?” Perhaps so, but what the poses express is an unrealistic kind of action that doesn’t match the rest of the picture. In every other respect, these paintings are fine examples of realistic storytelling. But I would submit that they would have been even more successful—both more realistic and more expressive—if they had been based on a closer observation of authentic movement, and if the individual figures had been given some variety.

Tomorrow we’ll look at some ways to achieve that.
---------
Wikipedia on Cormon, link.
Art Renewal Center, 7 Cormon images, link.