Paul Auster

I started this one last night and finished it this morning. It’s unusual for me to spread something over two days. It’s because I started late last night, having nothing better to do, not wanting to go into my birthday (today) in the middle of a novel.

Anyway, I thought a charcoal painting was overdue and picked as subject matter a moody portrait of the late Paul Auster, one of my favourite ever authors. His words just glued off the page so smoothly, there’s no effort involved in reading his books. Some authors achieve this by writing in a non challenging style (I’m not disparaging this: there are times when I need this and I’m a big fan of Keith Pearson) but Paul would achieve this while creating literature. And his books always seemed to be about quite mundane subjects but that wasn’t a problem: I’d have read the yellow pages if Paul had written them.

Anyway, on to the painting. I started with an outline with an orange coloured pencil, as is now normal for me. But when it came to putting on pigment, I only used charcoal pencils this time, not the XL charcoal blocks or vine charcoal. I used loads of different colours, most of them black with hints of other colours. And I used the pencils like I use coloured pencils, starting by putting down coloured really lightly, creating little or no dust. I filled out big areas with crosses rather than scribbling in circles. And once colours were down, I smoothed over them with a finger: this tended to leave more colour on the paper than smoothing with a chamois or a paper stump. And I tried to sculpt the face by smoothing over colour from the dark background areas. For the eyes, and, to a slightly lesser extent, the mouth, I looked really carefully at the source photo and tried to replicate everything I saw. Finally, I used a putty eraser to create some highlights and smoothed out their edges with a finger. And after spraying on some fixative, that was me done.

And this one was a success. I think it was the tension I gave to the eyes that did it for this one. Get them right and the rest of the painting doesn’t matter. And I could stare into those eyes for a long time. It’s as if his eyes work like his writing. Paul’s up for sale.