exhibition text:
I made this self portrait to connect with my comparative study. I have always found impressionism to be fascinating, and researching it was interesting. Researching Renoir, his focus was commonly on pleasure and the female body, and it was a good exercise in painting myself, and really knowing what I look like. I did appropriate Renoir’s background, but it was a part of my purpose in artmaking. The title of Renoir’s painting is “In Summer.”
Inspiration:
I chose this painting by Renoir because I am doing it for my comparative study, but also because I feel the themes presented in the work are similar to how I want to represent myself. The girl in the painting is no older than 20, and is therefore close enough to my age. She seems innocent and not yet fully mature. The similarities between us are not terribly apparent, she is from the 19th century, and I am from the 21st. When thinking about which Renoir painting from my comparative study I should do, this was the obvious choice, because the other is a partially nude painting. I also really like the aesthetic of the painting, it is full of beautiful foliage. Renoir's paintings of this period are not fully impressionistic, so I did not use techniques commonly associated with impressionism. The painting is without texture in a lot of parts, and so I used smooth painting techniques.
The artist's intent for making the art is to appreciate the beauty of women, and finding pleasure in form. In the artwork there is one woman posed looking off to the side of the viewer. The painting is simple in its composition, but has a lot of details. My first reaction was an appreciation of the forms expressed, and the aesthetics of the paintings. The woman is emphasized by the background being dull and muted compared to her coloring. The eye goes immediately to the woman, with little movement elsewhere, with some of the light in the background pointing to her. This artwork was made for contemplation: art for arts sake.
Planning:
The very first step in all of this was making a canvas. I had learned how to do this from my art teacher. All I had to do was join these posts and staple the canvas fabric onto it. This was the first time I had done this, and I liked the process it seemed intimidating, but once I did it, I found it to be satisfying to have this tangible thing I made. I made the canvas in late December, and went onto work on it occasionally over the next couple of months, until late March when I started the rest of the process. I know that I am going to go on to make more canvases, because I trust that I can make them correctly, and the way I made this one turned out to be excellent, and once I gessoed it, it was perfect.
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The next step of my canvas making once I had the fabric on the frame was to gesso. I had gessoed before but I underestimated how much gesso I would need for the canvas to be stable. I had one layer done and it immediately warped, I corrected this by leaving it to dry with all the edges of the frame lined up against a flat surface. I felt like the canvas was 1. too bouncy still, even with one layer and it warping I knew I needed more gesso. and 2. I could still see so much of the original canvas color. I wanted the canvas to be completely white, to give myself a good starting point. After these images were taken, I added a thick layer of gesso and was done after approximately three layers of gesso.
After the gesso was dried. I drew on a grid of 32 by 32 inch squares. I did this to focus my drawing, I knew I was going to project my image but I still did this incase, so I wasn't going in blind to the projection. Looking back I didn't need so many squares, I had so many and I definitely could have skimmed down on a few. I wanted to be prepared, but going forward I will try to do a smaller grid. I also don't think I will ever do a painting this large again.
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After I had everything with my canvas settled I started on taking my reference images that I would put onto the background. With the first one I took I was just trying things out, I thought it wasn't quite accurate. I was going for accuracy in these images, too copy the woman in the paintings pose. I took many more images than these, but I think they demonstrate how I was breaking down the woman's pose. In the first one my head was tilted to far to the right when it should have been to the left. My posture was also to slouched, I knew the woman in the painting was slightly slouched but I didn't want it to be as pronounced as it was. I overcorrected this issue in the next one, I was too far from the camera, and I looked too pouty where I should have looked uninterested. The second one wasn't bad but I still wanted it to be closer to the reference. That is what I got with the third image, this one was perfect, close to the painting but not too close. I added a towel to my curtain rod to avoid being backlit, I had three lights on me from the front, but I felt like the window was giving too much light. The towel sort of helped but not as much as I wanted too. I moved on from this issue and used it anyway.
My next step was to put my face onto the background of my painting. First I cropped the painting to be a square. Then I took the reference photo and copied and pasted my face into instagram with the painting. And pasted my face on top. It worked perfectly and I didn't have to work with any software like photopea or photoshop. I played around with the placement of the image at first, I had to make my face a little bigger than hers was to totally cover her. Then I had my image and I added a matching grid onto the top, although the grids did not line up from my painting to this image, so I didn't look at it, and mostly went off of the projection I would do.
Once I had the image and the canvas ready I projected my image onto the canvas. I had the materials already in the art room so I was able to copy fairly easily. I ran into some challenges with working with graphite, I kept putting my hand on the canvas when it was full of graphite and it would smudge onto my skin and the canvas. I tried to avoid this issue by not putting my hand on the canvas at all, but it made it really tricky to get a straight line with that. The background that I drew from the projection is not totally accurate to how it should look, but all the colors blended together made it confusing for me to look at. If I were to go back I would have studied the reference image before hand to make sure I knew where things were supposed to go. My knowledge of this now only comes from my looking at it so much while painting.
Coming out of the projection I felt really good about the image I drew. It looked very close to how the reference looked, and most importantly it looked like me, which was a big fear of mine coming out of some other paintings. Some of the dots around my skin are just meant to be places where my skin is blemished or red, and it felt wrong to not include them when they were clear in the reference photo.
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Process:
First of all, I was cleaning my brushes with turpenoid at first, when I was painting at school. Later on I painted with a brush cleaner I had at home. Both worked fine, but made my brushes oily. I got advice from a friend saying that I should just use dish soap, I had some old dish soap in the basement that I began using, this did not quite get the oil out of the brushes as easily as a brush cleaner, but it got the pigment out faster and easier. Overall all of the cleaners I used were adequate and without having a proper brush cleaner for oil paints I did pretty well with finding a solution. When working with oils in the future, I will find a better cleaner.
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I used many different colors on this painting. I had purchased a "oil portrait set" from Blick and used that as a source of all my oil paints. The first picture is of a mixture I used for the small chair that is visible in the left hand bottom corner of the painting. I didn't really know what that was when I was painting it, but after further inspection of the original work I realized what it was. This mixture took a lot of work to get exactly right and as the painting progressed I got lazier and mixed less accurate colors because I felt pressured by myself to just get the painting done. The second picture is of paints I was using for my skin tone. I would take the darker shade and mix white and yellow into it. Making skin tone was much easier because I knew how to do it already and I felt pretty confident about how accurate my mixtures would be. The skin tones do have some disparities throughout, the shoulder is darker that the rest of the body, this is due to the fact that I did the skin tones at different times. Most of my mixtures are from the background, everything else was pretty straightforward; the shirt color is just white and a tiny bit of yellow mixed in, with black occasionally blended on the canvas for shadows.
These were most of the colors used on the background, I say most because I varied the colors sometimes to get shades that were close but not exactly the same. This was not necessary but made me feel better about the colors being too similar. I had the vibrant orange color in there because I would occasionally mix it into pigments just as an experiment. I used a varied mix of light to dark shades in the background, the first picture is of those darker shades. The second and third are of the lighter shades. I would have liked to have a brighter green to use as a base because my biggest challenge was making the green feel varied. I think I will end up getting cheaper oil paints to work with in the future, so that I am able to make those varied colors I want. However, the dullness of the colors ensures that all the colors on the canvas feel like they match.
The first step I took when painting was to start with something small and work my way up. I started with the chair in the left hand bottom corner. I tried to add texture and make these values as accurate as possible. I slowly added more to complete this section with greens and other things. I took more time on this section than I would with others, and added little details from the painting, as I would learn these things were not necessary nor did I have time to add things like texture to the leaves, and I left them out in favor of completing the painting in time. Although this section is complete and shows a high degree of accuracy I needed to devote more time to other things and overall balance my time better.
I started on this ledge thing because it was small and mostly one color. It was a part of the original painting and I feel I matched the colors well. When doing this I wanted a break from thinking about skin tones and hair colors so I could just paint what I saw, the colors were pretty much straight out of the tube. I feel this went successfully and it was the first aspect that I used enough paint on, I was using linseed oil and finally felt successful with it. Although it did mean I had to wait for it to dry for longer. I think that this looks good but it's still not an essential part of the composition, I would argue, I should have been spending time on other things.
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I started on the background dark shades at this point so that I didn't get bored of what I was doing in the corner. Turns out that I didn't need to do this cause I didn't use enough linseed oil and I could see the canvas beneath it. I had to go and redo it later on. I don't really know why I did this right then because I did not need it for what I was doing, I realized I needed to be more organized with my painting and I started to do things in more complete sections.
I continued my work with the background just experimentation with how much of the background I could do. I started completing things in sections of colors as opposed to areas. I liked this approach more than the others because it went faster than all the other things I had tried. This was pretty successful because I went fast and I was using linseed oil to make things runnier, some people prefer acrylics because of how they dry, but I really prefer oils and I think the drying time benefits me because I can change things. I liked being able to fix things after I brought the painting in and it got smudged, that was super easy to fix.
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I was continuing to do things randomly, which looking back is really hard to watch me continue to do things out of order when it would have benefitted me to just do things in sections close to each other until they were complete. I started doing this later. The eyebrows look good and I like how they turned out. It was good for them to be done and dry before I painted the face so that the color of the eyebrows wouldn't blend with the skin tone.
After messing around with random sections I settled down to just work on the arms. I made skin tone for this using brown, white, yellow, red, and blue. This was an actually fairly simple recipe once I got used to what I had to use. I was feeling really good about my arms, I added some shadows but I was scared to add a lot of contrast, so that is something I want to experiment with in the future. With the arms I added some skin tone in between the strands of hair, where I meant to have more skin tones. I started with this and I was worried about painting over some area that I needed for the hair, but oil paints are pretty easy to cover once they're dry so if this did happen I know now that I wouldn't have any trouble with it.
After I did the arms and the strap of the tank top, I started on my chest area. I knew I wanted to just have this match the other skin tones so it wasn't a big deal with mixing anything. As for my throat I feel especially proud of the shadows and the layering there because I think it looks very realistic. Having this significant chunk of painting done felt good. I was feeling less stressed about what I had to do still, and I just felt overall confident about the skin tones. I think working on the background (later on) messed up my sense of time with this painting, but it was really good that I got all this done in such little time. I think my skin tone is slightly darker than the inspirations but it makes sense as we come from different places, and being really pale was the beauty standard back then.
After the skin tone I started on the tank top. I love this shirt so I was really excited to paint it. I used white and a little bit of yellow to make the pigment and it's one of the most accurate matches I got for the entire painting. There are little embroidered details and I just made those fully green without stitching details cause I was too lazy to find a way to get my brushes that detailed. I really like how the top turned out, I feel like even though my ruffling detail was really simplistic it turned out to look really nice. I also love the little plants, I think they tie me to the background.
I moved on to this other section of the painting. Just beginning the long process of working on the background. At this point I knew it would take me a long time, so I was just doing what I could. In the second photo I was experimenting with blending, I ended up blocking the background so I'm not sure why I did this. At this point I was still looking at the reference too much as well. I stopped doing this as often and instead just did what I thought was right cause I already had a lot of the major light and dark areas. I think the blending of this section looks good but out of place with the other sections. I think I will go back and fix this area at a later date.
Looking at this image now I see that I was going for the edges first, which was a good idea even if it was unintentional because it meant the edges would be dry for me to hold by the time I needed to bring it to school. I covered the background in all different shades of green. I rarely repeated a color for a section more than three times. Although I got extremely tired of working on the background I did not give up! I continued to try my hardest even if I was bogged down by my inner monologue telling me to stop working on it cause I wouldn't get it done. This wasn't true, of course, because I did get it done. Making the decision to stop trying to make the background the exact same as my inspiration was hard but I don't think I would have gotten it done in time otherwise.
This is a wide simplification of my process for the background from the first to the last picture of these three took me around 2 hours. I was just going around and painting anything that looked right. I learned a lot with these shapes though, I learned that I needed a shorter haired brush to have control over the bristles in these sharp and winding edges. I think the shapes I drew in the projection I followed to a tee, I did not necessarily need to do this but I do need something to follow along too, without the sketches I would be lost.
The face was the last thing I painted, and ironically I painted it on my birthday. I started with the forehead, then the jaw and nose. I did things that would be mostly the same color first. There was a highlight on the right side of my face, so I matched that to be just skin tone with a little white mixed in. Although maybe it's too white. Then I did the cheeks, I added some of that bright orange before I added the skin tone, and I loved how it looked so bright, the red I had was way too deep, and I didn't think it looked realistic. I did the lips and added some shading over the top of my lip, it sort of looks like a mustache, but that's okay because there is hair up there. I did the eyes last cause it required a steady hand and I was too scared for most of the time to do it. I started with shading outside of it, like the lower lid and upper lid, eye bags. Then I worked on the whites of the eyes. Then I added some more shading cause I thought it didn't look dark enough. I did the pupils, using some brown and some green. Then I did the eyelashes which required a tiny brush, I actually should have used a smaller brush but I didn't have one that small. I don't love the way the lashes turned out but I think they're good enough.
Experimentation:
Using bright orange in some of the green shades: overall I don't think the addition of this color did anything but make things duller, but it made me feel better. It made me feel like the greens would be different from each other. I think trying things like this is good, but maybe I need to put a little more thought into what I do before I do it. When thinking logically of course the bright orange would do nothing to brighten up a contrasting shade. I did not really experiment with any other colors but this one, I tried to stay as true as possible to the inspiration, even if I was not looking at it during the background stage, I still knew what it looked like.
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Blending: as the painting went on I realized that blending took too much time out of which I could be focusing on just completing the painting. As things went on I was solely focused on getting it done. I was late to turning it in and I wanted it off of my to do list. So blending on a painting of this scale was out of the cards. I did it on the face and stuff like that but to me that is necessary, and not an artistic choice. I think I'll go back and fix this one example of how I tried to blend on the background cause it looks out of place. Of course at the time I was not thinking about the long run, so I moved on from this immediately, although I shouldn't have.
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Shading around the eyes: the shading in this image is incredibly visible, I added some brown to the under eyes for the bags. I added darker shades to the waterline and the eyelids cause I knew those were more prominent than the eye bags. I really didn't have a plan for the eyes going into painting them, so with that in mind I am extremely proud of how they turned out. I added some highlights to just below the eyebrow, cause that is what I had seen done in makeup videos. I think my eye shape is accurate as well, although this is a projection so it was so easy to see the small details. I think I will follow my example from this painting in terms of eyes for future paintings. Cause I like them!
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White parts in the background: I was looking at the reference and trying to be super accurate to that in this image, I think that I tried too hard here and it did not turn out well, or match the rest of the composition for that matter. I like the colors here but they aren't close to any other colors on the canvas so I think they look out of place, I don't know why I did this when I hadn't paid this level of attention to the background. I like my idea with this but I wish I added some lighter greens around this to make it fit in better. I would maybe paint over this looking at it now, and I hope that it is not too noticeable and that other things in the composition stand out to people first.
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Arms: much like the eyes I had no plan for the arms. Unlike the eyes I had done skin tone like this in detail before. My method for this was to do the whole thing as skin tone and adding highlights and shadows to that. I simply looked at the reference photo and painted the contrast points. I am really proud of how these turned out. If you look closely my shoulder is tanner than the rest of the skin tones --since I did them in bits and pieces-- but otherwise I think it all matches.
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Critique:
Similarities may include:
- The overall composition: my pose and her pose are almost the same, our backgrounds are the same. Overall my painting looks like a copy of his painting.
- The hair, I was not willing to change my appearance to look more similar to the woman, I had dyed my hair after I took my reference, and so I chose to paint my hair as it was as I was painting it, and not as it was in the reference photo, just to make it more similar to me long term, I know that my hair now will stay the same for a long time.
- Overall, our hair looks similar as it's the same color, just not the same texture.
- Who we are: both this girl and I are women, being posed and primped for a painting.
- Use of space: in the painting we are both the subject of the paintings and roughly take up the same amount of space.
- Texture: there is some more texture in her painting than mine. This comes from how Renoir likely layered paints, he also likely used a different composition of oil paints, making mine thinner and his thicker or vice versa.
- The environment that we were painted in: the woman was painted in the background, it is clear that the woman was sitting posed for this in the environment of the background, whereas I was photographed in my bedroom, and photoshopped onto the background of the painting.
- The background: when I was painting the background I wanted to go quickly because my time spent on that was increasing and I needed to do so many more details of the painting, so I stopped looking at the reference and painted by memory and by what I thought would match.
- Line: the lines that come from our different hair sort of messes up the overall composition, there is a lot of lines coming from her hair that points to her face, where my hair is messier and accomplishes the same goal, but in a different way.
Reflection:
I think that I successfully painted in oil paints for the first time, very similarly to the style used by Renoir. I feel that working with something so new to me as oil paints was very developing for me. I often work with new mediums, as projects require them, but with something this large it was unusual. My inspiration for this project was Renoir's "In Summer" I think it connects mostly because I copied the background of his painting onto my background, the only thing I changed was the woman, from the woman, to me. My biggest challenge was working with the size of the canvases, they were so much larger than anything I have worked with before, and painting the whole thing was a real struggle for me. This was a painting assignment, and I have painted before obviously, but only with acrylic paints, working with oils was totally new to me, and somewhat exciting, as I found that I really like them, they are smooth and accepting of change, unlike acrylic that get hard and crusty, and do not like to change forms. I used painting techniques that I always have in the past, like blending on the canvas instead of on a pallet. My favorite part was painting my skin tone, it was such a big part of the painting that I could easily move on from because I would do one layer and add highlights and shadows on top of that as needed. I also knew how to blend skin tones already. My least favorite was the background because it was so much green, and I got sick of painting so much of it, it was a drag to get through, it took the most time, so much so that when I painted my face in a couple of hours I was surprised that it took so little time, since the background took so long. I hope others view my work with the knowledge that it is hard to paint yourself, and look at yourself for such long amounts of time, it leads to scrutiny.
ACT QUEStions:
Clearly explain how you are able to identify the cause effect relationship between your inspiration and its effect on your artwork?
- I find that Renoir's work is very inspiring to me, and so I am able to create a painting that looks very similar to his work, and that has similar themes and reasons for creation as his work. My piece is a direct copy of his, from the background and the pose that the woman is in, that I mirrored in my reference image.
What is the overall approach the author has regarding the topic of your inspiration?
- The artist has an overall approach of encapsulating pleasure into his work, finding beauty in anything, as was his artmaking philosophy.
What kind of generalizations and conclusions have you discovered about people, ideas, culture, etc. while you researched your inspiration?
- I have found with Renoir that he can make a lot of simplifications about women. He has certain ideas that women exist within a space for him to find inspiration in, he does not include themes that relate to these women on a personal level, I suppose as is typical of men of his era, but it is so different from how these women probably presented themselves day to day.
What is the central idea or theme around your inspirational research?.
- I was researching Renoir and two of his paintings for my comparative study, and I found that this woman looked the most similar to me, and so I chose to do that one for a self portrait, and the other painting is a nude, which I was not comfortable with.
What kind of inferences did you make while reading your research?
- I found that Renoir was very inspired by women and mostly painted women and girls.
- I find that Renoir's work is very inspiring to me, and so I am able to create a painting that looks very similar to his work, and that has similar themes and reasons for creation as his work. My piece is a direct copy of his, from the background and the pose that the woman is in, that I mirrored in my reference image.
What is the overall approach the author has regarding the topic of your inspiration?
- The artist has an overall approach of encapsulating pleasure into his work, finding beauty in anything, as was his artmaking philosophy.
What kind of generalizations and conclusions have you discovered about people, ideas, culture, etc. while you researched your inspiration?
- I have found with Renoir that he can make a lot of simplifications about women. He has certain ideas that women exist within a space for him to find inspiration in, he does not include themes that relate to these women on a personal level, I suppose as is typical of men of his era, but it is so different from how these women probably presented themselves day to day.
What is the central idea or theme around your inspirational research?.
- I was researching Renoir and two of his paintings for my comparative study, and I found that this woman looked the most similar to me, and so I chose to do that one for a self portrait, and the other painting is a nude, which I was not comfortable with.
What kind of inferences did you make while reading your research?
- I found that Renoir was very inspired by women and mostly painted women and girls.
Bibliography:
Pierre-Auguste Renoir / "In Summer" / 1886 / Oil on Canvas 85 x 59 cm / Alte Nationalgalerie (Berlin).