I’ve Seen Desparation Explode Into Flames

I thought I deserved a treat today, so I’ve been working on my favourite subject with a self portrait. It’s only my left eye, painted in oil pastels. My two objectives for this exercise were to create something close to realistic through careful observation of shapes and structures and to make things interesting with some impressionistic colours.

Yes, impressionistic colours, because looking at a photo of my eye a couple of days ago I could see lots of blues, purples, oranges, yellows and greens everywhere. But when ai sat down this afternoon, the sun was blazing through my studio windows and making the colours on my iPad screen difficult to see. So I took the desperate step of editing my photo, racking up the brightness and increasing saturation to maximum. That worked. And it’s something as might try another time if I can’t see any interesting colours.

Today I worked from the pupil outwards except that I did the forehead before the eyebrow. I blended colours throughout the process with colour shapers and polystyrene chips, trying to sculpt the face in three dimensions as well as blending colours. I used all the wacky colours I could see in my source photo along with white and sensible flesh tones in the skin and some dark browns in the shadows. I scratched out some of my white hairs in the eyebrow with a scalpel.

I then evaluated the painting. And I saw a problem. The pencil gridlines that I used at the beginning and never rubbed out were still visible under the oil pastels. A disaster. So I went over all the flesh areas with another layer of colour and managed to hide the lines. But it was in adding this extra layer that I gave the skin the cold, blue colours that you can see here. Not perfect but no longer a disaster. Still, it adds a certain something. And, with the paper starting to feel full, that was me done.

And I have to say I really like the result. When I look at it at first, I can’t see the likeness. But then I remember this is my left eye and not my right, and then the likeness jumps out, especially when I look deeply into the eye. So it looks vaguely realistic, but I didn’t achieve my first objective because I was carefully observing two dimensional shapes rather than three dimensional objects. Probably because of all the sunlight in the studio. The second objective, though, the impressionistic colours, that was nailed. So this was a big success. I’m not putting it up for sale though because (i) it’s a self portrait and (ii) I might decide at some point to to incorporate this eye, like all my other eye portraits to date, into a painting on a transparent surface, leaving my eye to peek through a gap from the other side. Although it’s also possible that I might create four more closeup selfies to get another five senses collection.