Haruki Murakamai

I’m back in action today. The chess is still keeping me busy and it wasn’t until 7.30pm that I finished this one but I was determined to come up with something as it had been eight days since my last painting.

As well as playing chess and looking for the time to paint, I’m reading 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami and it struck me a couple of days ago that Murakami-San would make an interesting portrait subject. I found a source photo that worked well with four values, so this is a posterised painting using my favourite four value colour scheme, the Shire scheme. The methodology followed my usual process for such paintings. I just painted the values that the Notanizer app identified without thinking about the underlying structures that they represented: I trusted the process.

The likeness is OK, although I’m a little antsy about the midtone shape hanging down from the corner of his mouth on the lit side. The arms are interesting. They clearly exhibit my approach of painting values rather than shapes and hoping that the image comes through at the end. To put it another way, they’re immediately recognisable as my work. Just compare them to the hands in The New YouTube Six, And the watch on his wrist is amazing. On balance, I think this one’s a winner. It’s up for sale, with the price to be found here.