Richard Feynman

I had another read of my Charles Reid book last night (Painting By Design) and saw a couple of his videos  on YouTube this morning, so thought it was time for my annual reminder that I can’t paint portraits.

Today’s subject is the late Richard Feynman, a famous physicist whose main lasting legacy is the Feynman  Diagram, a number of which appear on the left hand side of the background here.  They look like the sort of diagrams you might normally draw at the start of a mathematical physics problem but are actually devilish mathematical terms in pictorial form.  Like me, Feynman saw maths in terms of pictures.  The source photo that I used suggests that he also likes to explain things with his hands, just like me.  I feel a great kinship with Professor Feynman.

In fact, the original idea was to make the hands the focal point of the painting with sharp edges and with the face being a bit more washed out and soft edged.  I think I’ve achieved this in part but not completely.  Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself.  Let’s go back to the beginning.

I started by drawing a rough pencil outline, attempting in vain to get some sort of likeness.  Then I added some masking fluid in three ways:

– writing mathematical formulae on the board using masking fluid and a mapping pen.  The Feynman diagrams I found online; everything else was in the photo

– putting a spattering of spots on the background.  At this stage I wasn’t clear whether the background would be a blackboard or a spacey background.

– protecting Feynman’s edges.  In particular the hands and front of the face but pretty well everywhere apart from the hair, which I was keen to blend into the background.

Then I painted the background in Indian yellow, Winsor red and Prussian blue, so in the key of orange cool.  I chose these three colours because my swatching exercises suggested these made a good black.  But because I struggled to get a decent black on the day (let alone enough of it to cover the whole background) I settled for something with a bit of variegation, with red dominating at the top, blue at the bottom and yellow around the hands.  The idea was that the yellow around the hands suggested magic and the red at the top was heat coming from his brain.  I think it worked.

Then, after it had dried, I removed the masking fluid and got to work on the rest of the painting.  I worked on the flesh, hair and shirt at the same time, switching between them when I needed to wait for paint to dry.

For flesh tones, I used mainly Winsor red, raw sienna and cerulean blue, so this is in the key of green warm.  Charles Reid uses cadmium red, cadmium yellow (or raw sienna) and cerulean but my combination suits me.  I also used a little bit of viridian in places.  Within the first coat, I made the top of the head more yellow, the middle more red and the bottom more blue or green.  And I added a bit of red to the end of the nose.  I used the same colours for the hands.  I added some shadowy bits to the hands in blue and green.  And then I mixed up some darker colour from the three primaries and added shadowy areas.

The hair is made from the same three colours as the background as I wanted to blend it in rather than having a definite edge.  I wanted some variety in the hair, so after a neutral first coat, subsequent coats consisted of lots of spots of each of the prime colours separately.  Using spots like this meant I got a good soft edge between the hair and the face and the front of the hair and the background.  At the back of the head, I used water to let the hair bleed into the background.  In places I needed to sweep the water all the way to the edge of the painting to avoid hard edges.

And then there’s the shirt.  It used the same three primaries as the flesh, but with relatively more emphasis on the blue.  I used a bit more red in the forearms in an attempt to bring them forwards – something that I don’t think worked.  And I added lots of shadowy marks in an attempt to make it all look more three dimensional.

Oh, and I added some spatters onto the background in cadmium red and cadmium yellow at the end.

No salt was used in the production of this painting.

In the end I don’t think this is too bad.  The likeness isn’t perfect but is better than I was expecting.  The head is maybe a bit big relative to the hands and the left upper arm isn’t right.  But I like the right shoulder and the shades in the face (especially the shadowy eyes and anywhere that the blue shows up).  But the best bit about it is the interaction between the figure and the background (yellow magic around the hands, red around the brain heat, the soft edge at the top of the head suggesting his brain is drifting off somewhere else and the way the figure links the Feynman diagrams on the left to the traditional mathematical formulation on the right).  In fact Feynman’s brain, rather than his hands, is probably the star of the show.

I wasn’t sure before but I think I’ve talked myself into putting this one up for sale.