‘Michael Sheen’ – acrylic on canvas 2011

I have known Michael for a little while, and recently went to see his Hamlet, directed by Ian Rickson and currently running at the New Vic. It’s phenomenal. Afterwards we had dinner and Michael spoke at length about what he and Ian had done with the play and why. A couple of weeks later we met again, I cooked an appalling piece of chicken and we asked him about his Passion, a mammoth modern unfurling of the Christ story spread across the streets and beaches of Port Talbot (an industrial port and market town where he grew up, and which has also produced Rob Brydon, Anthony Hopkins and Richard Burton). Michael is deeply energised about his work, and if the formula for success is TALENT + ENERGY (as noted by my manager, who added wisely that the formal for stardom is SUCCESS + ATTITUDE) then Michael radiates them powerfully. He’s surely one of the most extraordinary actors of our generation, and possesses a phenomenal creative drive without any of the exhausting ego that normally accompanies mere dull ambition.

So, as I tend to paint people that I know and find extraordinary, I asked if he would mind awfully. A bit over a week later, interrupted by Christmas of course, and tweeted in its various stages, the large (it’s five foot high) portrait above was completed. For those who do not tweet, or for those who do but who might like to see the sequence together, and above all for those who give a jot because they paint and are interested in the process, I shall set it out as best as I can. Here then, is how it came together:

I prefer to work from photographs, so wherever possible I take my own. I can create a makeshift photographic studio in my painting room, so I took a bunch of Michael to work from. Ultimately I decide on one, tweak it in Lightroom to look its best, and print it out large (I have an A2 printer which does the job very well). He’s looking rather shaggy at the moment because of the role which he undertakes every night (a far cry from his shiny Tony Blair), which I knew would make the picture more interesting.

I then began the portrait by sketching directly onto the canvas:

Next, I block in some colour to set a unifying tone for the picture. Orange is a good one for flesh, but it can be anything, depending on the palette that the photograph suggests. The idea is then to let this blocked colour peep through as the layers of colour are built up. You want to make sure that every inch of the picture is interesting. With a good painting, you can generally make a little tube with your hand and look through it at tiny, isolated areas of canvas and they will all be of interest. There’ll always be stuff going on. The way to do this is by building up layers of colour. So we begin with orange:

And just enough of the sketch is left showing through to work with as a guide. Black paint does the job better than pencil, but I’ve kind of gotten used to using pencil. But use black paint to sketch of you’re using this method (and obviously white to erase).

Then next I get the shape of the features in, and the areas of light and dark. This is about sculpting the face and also getting down some basic colour – all things which will keep showing through as I add layers. For this reason I paint thinly, or rather with a fairly dry brush. I don’t want to lose what’s behind the colour I’m adding. Later on I’ll use glazes (a small dash of colour with a larger amount of a transparent glazing medium) to the same effect – but for now, thin layers that keep the orange showing:

And I’ve started to get some colour into the background too. The orange will provide some unity – you want to make sure that the colours you’re using for the subject are also in the background, so the two relate to each other. Otherwise you can sometimes have a figure that fights uncomfortably with what’s behind it. The left side of the face (our left as we look at it) has a purply tone, whereas the right side is warmer, so I’ve started to get those colours in too.

The process is now largely one of alternating between detail and sculpting (and using fairly strong colours and contrasts to do so) and then pulling everything back by going over it all with some fleshy tones (pulled out from what I’m already using) that soften and unify. I also get some colour on the shirt, as I want to include the same colours in all areas. Again, because I’m working with fairly thin paint, it’s easy to do this: it’s best to use as few colours as possible on your palette and create others from mixing them: that way you keep a sense of overall unity, which is one of the qualities that will make it feel ‘real’. The purple, for example, that is appearing in his forehead will come to be used on the face, the shirt and the background.

Next I added some detail around the eyes and threw in a bloody background. I often add the premature detail at this point to trick the eye into thinking it’s more complete than it is, and to give me more of a sense of where it is headed. The background was an idea I wanted to try, but I would eventually lose it. At the moment it works OK:

but I realised that I wanted to create some depth with the image, so the background would have to be less sharp and more muted. So with some glaze and a bit of white I brought the background back a bit and worked on the hair detail to put some distance between the two. I’m also continuing to add detail, and areas of colour, and then bring it all back with some unifying colour brushed over the top. That means that I can have, say, the purple in the right side of the nose, but still make it sit with the yellowy creaminess of that side by then brushing or glazing over with a flesh tone. The hair is quite fun to do.

It now has some definition.

Next, I start the shirt. By this point the purple has become very useful (and I could have used that rather than the orange to cover the canvas), so I’m sure to include it in the shirt. I’ve been mixing the purple with a burnt umber to get the darkest/black shade (you don’t want to use flat black, it is lifeless and just looks like a hole in the painting) and some grey mixed in. The result is the basis of a grey shirt, but it still occupies the same tonal world as everything else. I also work more on the hair and am continuing to work on detail. I also soften the nose to make sure that it feels like it’s sticking out of the canvas: it would be slightly out of focus (the photo is all rather sharp so I’m exaggerating the depth a little as I paint) so by softening it, it will lift itself from the face.

At this point, something is bothering me. It’s looking like an illustration rather than a painting. There’s something ‘drawn’ about it. This may be the hair, as whatever frames the face will provide a context for it, and as the hair looks rather cartoony, it’s making the whole thing feel less like a proper portrait. There’s something else too – the background isn’t helping. It’s too… distracting, making it all seem like a comic-book graphic rather than a portrait. So I decide to lose the background. I first get some colour blocked onto it…

And then white thinly over to move towards a light background (but one that will incorporate and reflect the colours of the face for the sake of unity). I’ve also lost the edges of the hair, which will mean I can re-do them with a softness that will help lose the cartoonish quality I don’t want. So now we have this:

And with the hair added, I’m happier. I’m painting ‘background’ and ‘foreground’ hair to get depth. The hair at the back is soft and purply, which blends it into the background a little, and then I pick out some individual, light-catching strands in the front.

The remaining process is principally now one of softening the background. I use a big brush and a lot of glaze. Here’s me working on a bit of hair detail at this point so you can get a sense of the scale.

Finally, I put a bit more work into the shirt (it was tempting to leave it in an unfinished state to draw more attention to the face) and soften the focus a little where necessary (by losing edges and working the background a little into the parts I want to soften). And there we are. It took about a week, but that’s a few hours here and there and stopping for Christmas… difficult to qualify exactly how many hours of painting time were involved, and it’s invaluable to leave a painting standing around and come back to it.

I hope you like it. To answer a few questions about it which came up on Twitter: no, I haven’t had any training; I use Liquitex Professional Acrylics (Heavy Body); and no, this isn’t for Michael, although I’ll do him a nice print if he wants one. Yes, I exhibit: The Rebecca Hossack Gallery in Charlotte St, London, looks after my work. Any time I have an exhibition, I publicise it here on the blog and on Twitter. As I generally get fairly little time to paint, it’s normally only one small exhibition a year. But I’ll always let you know. A recent post shows a couple of other portraits, and there are some older ones on the main site. There is also a book available of the caricatures I used to paint.

Michael’s coming over soon to view it – I’ll post a picture of him with it when he does.

There you are. Hope you’re all having lovely ones.

db x

And here’s a better shot of the painting itself:

They’re acrylic on canvas. I’ve also been back and worked on the portrait of my father. Here it is, about the same size (5ft high) as the one of James:

and, for those who enjoy such things, a bit of detail:

Next up is actor friend Michael Sheen. I’ve taken a few shots and I’m about to get started. (I always take my own photographs and work quietly from them in my own time, as I only get a few hours here and there to paint). I’ll let you know when it’s done. What a great guy to paint. I can’t wait.

There are a few more pictures of portraits (including some of the older caricatures of Rufus Wainwright, Tom Waits, Clint Eastwood et al) on the artwork page of the main site. I’ll let you know here next time I have an exhibition: should be one next year somewhere.

Right, Merry Christmasses or just Happy Holidays, depending on whatnot. Ta-ta for now.

dx

“Street artist Banksy has installed a vandalised sculpture of a priest in a gallery in Liverpool.

Cardinal Sin is a bust with its face sawn off and replaced by blank tiles, designed as a response to the child abuse scandal in the Catholic church.

In a statement, Banksy said: “I’m never sure who deserves to be put on a pedestal or crushed under one.”

The sculpture was unveiled at the Walker Art Gallery, where it is sitting alongside 17th Century religious art.

The bathroom tiles have been put in place of the priest’s face to create a pixelated effect.

“I love everything about the Walker Gallery – the Old Masters, the contemporary art, the rude girl in the cafe. And when I found out Mr Walker built it with beer money it became my favourite gallery,” said Banksy.

“The statue? I guess you could call it a Christmas present. At this time of year it’s easy to forget the true meaning of Christianity – the lies, the corruption, the abuse.”"

Read more at BBC News (Thanks Annette)

Interactive Robotic Painting Machine (2011) from benjamin grosser on Vimeo.

“Artist and composer Ben Grosser, who is working on an MFA in New Media at the University of Illinois, has developed a robot that’s able to hear the world around it and use those sounds to create a painting.

The Interactive Robotic Painting Machine has a microphone that captures surrounding sound and a genetic algorithm designed to transform those sounds into computer code ultimately drives the robot’s paintbrush in three dimensions, controlling how much paint to put on the brush and how much pressure to apply to canvass.

The sounds can come from people in the room or, when people aren’t around, can come from the machine itself. In a related project called HeadSwap, the robotic painter collaborated with violinist Benjamin Sung, who played music composed by Zack Browning. At the same time that Sung was watching the machine paint and using what he saw to inform his music, the machine was listening to Sung play and using that to inform its art.

On his website, Ben says, “It is important to understand that what the machine paints is not a direct mapping of what it hears. Instead, the system is making its own decisions about what it does while being influenced by others.”"

Via Discovery News (Thanks Annette)

“A new art form emerging out of China. Creating these leaf carvings is no easy process, taking the delicate precision from a skilled artisan. With a knife, the leaf is slowly scraped of its outer layers, eventually revealing a near transparent surface. Special care is given to keep the veins intact to preserve the stability of the leaf.

Artists prefer using the leaves of the Chinar tree, native to India, Pakistan, and China. Resembling maple leaves, the distribution of veins in the Chinar leaves are the best suited for sculpting–and they are considered ‘lucky’ in Chinese tradition.

The process of producing a single leaf carving is said to take months of careful work. When the artwork is finished, the leaves are then preserved and framed–ensuring that they will last for decades.”

(Thanks Claire)

If you’ve got a couple of minutes and you fancy having a little fun you could do a lot worse than clicking over to drawastickman.com and doing exactly that.

We won’t ruin the surprise for you but take our word for it that it’s delightfully imaginative and refreshingly easy on the old mind-grapes.

Thanks to Kerry for alerting us to this.

“She finished the books and wanted more. Before her mother could fetch some, Lonni Sue started making grids with words hidden in them. Thousands of puzzles poured out of her. Wearing thin the pages of a paperback dictionary, she created elaborate word lists, then puzzles from the lists and then images from the puzzles. A grid of words for things that hang in the closet took the shape of a coat hanger. Words related to trousers formed a pair of pants. Her vocabulary seemed to open a new door for her creativity.

Enter Barbara Landau. She had gone to high school with Lonni Sue in the Princeton, N.J., area. (“She was brilliant,” Landau remembers.) Today, Landau is an expert on cognitive science at Johns Hopkins University. She had followed Lonni Sue’s career as an artist for years and now, with Hopkins colleague Michael McCloskey, she explored Lonni Sue’s amnesia intensively. It was Landau who brought Lonni Sue’s art to the Walters.

Scientists often work with people who have lost the use of part of the brain to learn how the normal brain works.

After working with Lonni Sue, Landau concludes: “If we think that art and creativity have to be rooted in what we know about ourselves or what we remember about ourselves, that clearly is not the case.”

Lonni Sue has been full of surprises. She can remember how to fly an airplane — “It’s like dancing in the sky,” she said in an interview — but she can’t remember the death of her father.

She can’t recognize art she treasured before her illness — “Starry Night” by Vincent van Gogh, for example. Yet she can instantly recognize her own past work.

She can’t remember that she was married for 10 years, but she can remember how to play Bach suites on her viola. But if, as she’s putting her instrument away, her mother thanks her for playing, she’s likely to look astonished and say, “Oh, did I play?”

She cannot produce the kind of finished art she once drew, but her work shows flashes of her old skill as well as her characteristic whimsy and puns.

“When you draw a drawing, you can draw people in,” she says.”

The Washington Post (Thanks Annette)

The portrait was taken by Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian man, who took the opportunity to relieve the four iron wall-pegs of their famous charge and walk out with it under his painters smock.

The theft was not noticed until the following day and it consequently remained missing for two years before it’s new owner unwittingly came forward.

The theft made international headlines at the time but has become largely forgotten in modern society. However, a new documentary feature entitled “The Missing Piece – The Truth Behind The Man Who Stole the Mona Lisa” goes to great lengths, with the participation of Vincenzo’s now 84 year-old daughter Celestina, to uncover exactly what happened and why.

Screenings of the documentary are likely to be limited so if you manage to track it down make sure to share your views on it in the comments below.

Source: MonaLisaMissing.com

It was believed that The Procuress, at the The Courtauld Institute of Art in London, was a 17th century anonymous copy of a 1620s brothel scene by Dutch master Dirck van Baburen.

Chris Abbas made this fantastic little movie from shots of Saturn by the Cassini probe.

Chris says: I truly enjoy outer space. It’s absolutely amazing that we now have the ability to send instruments out into the void of the universe to observe all sorts of interesting things. Asteroids! Moons! Planets! Dark matter! This is the perfect opportunity for a Carl Sagan quote:

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”

The footage in this little film was captured by the hardworking men and women at NASA with the Cassini Imaging Science System. If you’re interested in learning more about Cassini and the on-going Cassini Solstice Mission, check it out at NASA’s website:

saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/​science/​index.cfm