Country Home Guitar Solo

The coloured pencils have taken a back seat for a while now, so time to give them an opportunity to do their stuff. I was watching a YouTube video of Neil Young performing Country Home (a track whose lyrics, like those of Telegraph Road, may at some point become a source of painting names) and thought there were some potential paintings in there. In particular I was struck by the energy that Neil put into a guitar solo and was lucky enough to freeze the video on a frame in which his right leg and left shoulder were both thrust forward and in which his clothing exhibited loads of shadows and creases. They say that before you start a landscape painting you should think about what attracted you to the scene and try to replicate that feature. Does it work with portraits too? Because I was looking to replicate the energy of this performance.

I put down an outline outline using a grid with very little use of the ruler in detailed areas and scratched in some hairs and guitar strings. And then, rather than working in one area at a time, I developed everything in parallel, switching backwards and forwards between the figure and the background.

The background has two layers of each of the two blues, a red and a green that I normally use for dark backgrounds but also a layer of black at the end, when I tried darkening all the darks on the painting, something that ChatGPT keeps advising me to do with other media. There are some drums in the bottom left that I was originally intending to be visible but that I later covered with one layer of each of my four background colours, leaving so the impression that something’s there but not telling us what it is, which I like.

For the figure, I started with darks in the shadows and then alternated between darks there and red light on the clothes. Later on, I got more impressionistic, dropping in blues, greens, oranges and yellows, jamming along with my pencils to the Grateful Dead in the background. A lot of the guitar was in shadow or blurry on my source photo and I found I was replicating this so well that the guitar in my painting was looking too small, so I messed around a bit with brown pencils in what were previously dark areas. The rescue was successful.

I finished off by blending everything with a paper stump. It’s my most reliable blending technique but even if I’d had brilliant results with burnishing or blending medium, or whatever, I’d have used paper stumps as I wanted to replicate the blurriness of my source photo. And remember, this painting was all about conveying energy.

This was the first time I’d used Seawhite hotpressed watercolour paper and I was impressed with its capacity, the amount of pigment it could take on without complaining about its tooth being full. Once all the other papers I use with coloured pencils is finished with, I’ll probably be sticking with this. It’s a revelation.

Final verdict? The energy is definitely there in the pose and in the pencil marks. I also like the lights and drums in the background and the impressionistic colours in Neil’s hair and clothes. The likeness isn’t perfect and nor’s the guitar but I don’t care. This isn’t a portrait of Neil’s face: it’s a portrait of his energy. And it works. This one’s up for sale, with the price to be found here.

I’m thankful for my country home. It gives me peace of mind. Somewhere I can walk alone and leave myself behind.