It's my birthday and the front page headline on stash news is that I’m going…
Fame
I was feeling watercoloured out today and in the mood for a different medium, so went for the oil pastels. I wanted to draw a portrait and was short of ideas so looked through the box of CDs under my desk for inspiration and came up with the idea of painting Mick Fleetwood. I found a photo of Mick that would make a great watercolour subject and out that to one side for another day but no photos that were screaming to be painted in oil pastels. Except that I saw a photo of Mick with Stevie Nicks with a big headline talking about how Mick had more problems with cocaine than Stevie did. Anyway, Stevie in the photo had dark circles where her eyes should have been, making her look like a panda. It was those panda eyes and the opportunity to use sgraffito on the hair that made me choose Stevie as subject.
As usual, the pencil outline went down first, using a grid. One good thing about using oil pastels is that I don’t need to rub out any pencil lines – they just get buried underneath all the colour.
For the hair, I started by drawing in loads of impressionistic colours, using most of the colours available to me. I rubbed them all in with a finger and then felt the time was right to head out for my daily walk. When I got back, I put more colour over the top, following the hair contours, most of it white but also some yellows and maybe raw sienna. I smoothed out this second layer of colour a little bit, then scraped out lots of hair shapes with a scalpel, revealing the colours underneath – this is the technique of sgraffito. Later I went over the hair with more lines and added some rogue white hairs. If any hairs looked too sharp, I smoothed them out a little with a finger.
For the face, I followed my usual methodology of trying to mix at least three colours together everywhere. So I filled in areas with dabbed spots of colour (at least three colours everywhere) and then smoothed /mixed them with my fingers, trying to shape the face at the same time. I added several layers of colours this way, generally alternating between crazy impressionistic colours and local colours like white and the pinkish English red. I guess the lips were an exception – there are only reds, browns and white there. Rather than leave the eyes as black holes, I added the barest hint of irises somewhere in the darkest areas.
I’ve not much to say about the remaining three shapes. They’ve all ended up quite muddy, which is a shame but not a disaster. The thing worth mentioning here is that when I first decided to stop painting, the two areas at the top were quite saturated colours, mainly delft blue. They just didn’t look right and distracted from the rest of the painting, so I muddied them up in an attempt to match the dark shape at the bottom and things looked better after that.
I’ve finished up with an interesting painting. It doesn’t look much like Stevie. If anything, I can see more of Christine McVie in there, and maybe some Brian Connolly. But what I’ve ended up with is a big contrast between the brightly coloured hair and the tiredness in the face behind it. I’m going to call this one Fame because that’s what it’s about. But is it saying that fame is all about putting on a facade that is totally separate to the person behind it, or is it talking about the price of fame? Well, that’s up to the viewer to decide. Sometimes picking the name of a painting can turn it from a failed portrait into a deeply moving comment on 21st century society. Now that I’ve chosen the name, I’m very happy with this one. It’s up for sale.
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