July 4, 2005 archives
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July 4, 2005
Portrait of Shield Albright
by sven at 8:05 pm
Today's my brother's birthday. ...Happy birthday!
Going with my 2005 gift-giving theme, I decided a few months back to paint him a portrait. As with the portraits of Michael and Alison, I started from a source photo.
It's a graduation picture, and bro is doing one of his traditional Boris Karloff mugs for the camera. I'm really quite fond of this shot, actually. Both my bro and I are a little... odd. This shot captures his... uniqueness ...rather nicely.
I was going to do a 5"x5" posterized painting. But after hours of fiddling, this was the best image I could put together. It's not so bad -- rather reminds me of a "Misfits" album cover. But it's just too complex for the scale I was after.
So, throwing up my hands, I started fooling around in new directions. When I came up with this next image, I fell in love. Notice, compositionally, how the frame of his eyeglasses creates a circle at the very center of the image. I thought that was neat; very powerful. It also gave me this Rembrandt / Francis Bacon vibe that I really wanted to capture.
I imagine giving this picture a title like "anxiety"... Yeah, it's macabre for a birthday gift -- but like I said, we're both kinda unique.
Now here's the painting I did. It's 2'x2' on gessoed masonite, charcoal and acrylics, covered with clear tar gel medium. Those rich blacks -- they're all charcoal. I had intended to do the whole thing only in charcoal, but I couldn't get the whites I wanted with just erasing. I wound up going in with white acrylic to work the highlights.
It's a bit distorted, but I'm OK with that aesthetic. It's free-hand afterall. The forehead isn't quite what I intended -- but I'm pleased with the hands. And the completed results look very painterly.
It seems like a very raw piece, so I didn't want to frame the portrait. Instead, I hot-glued wooden rails to the back, and used them to attach a wire for hanging. The intent is to avoid putting anything between the viewer and this presence in the room.
This was a good project: it didn't go in the direction I expected -- but it helped me transition to working on a larger canvas, and more expressively. It took forever to complete, and how I got it packaged for mailing is a whole story in itself. But hey -- here's a gift like nothing else you'll ever receive, something with some magic that will live with you (or haunt you, as the case may be) for years to come.