Then Came The Lawyers, Then Came The Rules

Someone in the village laid down a challenge. He asked if I could paint a portrait of his husband David in the style of Amedeo Modigliani. After thinking involved for a day or so, I decided to give it a go and was actually quite excited. I found a couple of useful photos of David online, looked at lots of Modigliani paintings and watched a YouTube video on painting Modiglini-style portraits.

Modigliani used oils, so I went for oil pastels to get as close as possible to the master. I put down a pencil outline with a long thin face, simple eyes and ears, the classic long Modigliani nose, a realistic looking mouth and the sloped shoulders. I then filled out the colours, face first, followed by the neck, the body and finally the background.

For the face and neck, I started with lots of spots of colour: mainly fleshy colours but also some browns, yellows, reds, blues, greens and oranges, looking for colours that I could see in David’s face while also following James Gurney’s facial colour zone advice. I blended the colours the first time with the white oil pastel but in later tinkering I used a colour shaper.

The shirt and tie were pretty straightforward, with the tie colours smoothed out with the colour shaper and a craft knife used to create white stripes within a grey layer. The jacket and background were nice big shapes, so I scribbled rather than dotted on colours and I blended them with polystyrene chips rather than with the colour shaper. When the colours didn’t come out as I wanted, I identified the tints that were missing (purple and blue in the background, dark colours in the jacket) added these on top and blended them in.

At this point, I stopped for the day. I wan’t especially happy with the likeness and wanted to give myself some time to think. And after a night’s sleep and a long walk, I’d come up with an idea. David was smiling in both my source photos, and I’d been trying to reproduce this with his mouth upturned at the corners and his top teeth showing. And this mouth hadn’t been working. So why not try something else? I decided to go for a look of disgust, with downturned corners and the bottom teeth showing. I practiced this on some scrap paper, decided it would work and made a change to the portrait. At the same time, I changed the eyes, introducing a side eye look that complemented the mouth. I thought I’d ended up with a look that I could imagine on David’s face. It’s hard to capture a perfect likeness in a Modigliani portrait but I’m happy that I’ve caught part of David’s personality.

And after some tidying up, including the addition of black outlines, that was me done. It was an interesting experience, and something that I might repeat again at some point. Although next time I might go with 25% my style and only 75% Modigliani rather than 100% Modigliani. With both David and his husband being retired legal professionals, I’m taking the opportunity to tick off another line of Telegraph Road.

And the painting was sold and gifted to David for Christmas. Let’s hope he likes it.