Attempt at the Tonal Painting

This is my first attempt at the tonal painting. I really don't like the suality of this painting at all, I think it looks really messy. The colour was also wrong as I didn't have any burnt umber and so I had to use burnt sienna.
A3

Drawings and Sketches

These are the drawings and sketches I did in class before starting any of the painting, they drawn in different ways using line, tone, texture, shape, size, etc.

Chaim Soutine

Side of Beef and Calf's Head, Chaim Soutine. Oil on canvas, 92x73cm, 1923
I wasn't sure what to think when we were presented with this painting and being told that this is what we were going to have to attempt to paint.
At first I didn't like the painting because its no something I would usually be interested in, however, once I started to look properly i really like the painting, I thought that it was a very strong and bold painting. The image of a dead animals body and head hung up is very disturbing. This is waht I think makes it bold. The colours of the blood are what stand out most to me and to some people may be quite sickening. I think it has the shock quality.
How I think it relates to my own ideas about painting and the kinds of qualities I would like to achieve in my own work is that I think it is painted very honestly, nothing is being hidden or made to look better. I think Soutine painted it how he saw the meat in the flesh. This is the kind of work I really like, things that have been honestly painted and not been made to look nicer than in the flesh.
I also like the textured look of the way that the paint has been layed down, you can almost feel the paint without even touching it. I think that I paint in a very textured way, I think that when you can see the texture of the paint and the marks of the brushstrokes it brings a painting to life, you are able to see the movement of the paint and how it has been used.
I guessed in class that the painting wasn't very huge and it turned out that it was around the size of A1. The reason I thought it wasn't very large is that if it was larger I think the way it was painted may have looked different, the texture of the paint may not have worked.
At first it was difficult to explain what the difference between making a copy of a painting and responding to a painting. To me, I think that responding to a painting isn't about making a rreplica of the whole of the painting, it's about painting the whole of the painting or a section of it in a way the you think represents the painting and how you feel about it. For instance, I think that my final piece will be of the calfs head with a bit of the carcass showing, to me the piece will be bold, textured and colourful so that it represents the gore and flesh of the dead animal.

Figure Painters

I really like Lucien Freud's Work, I think that at this present time he is my favourite figure painter. I love the textured quality in his work and how built up his work looks.
The main thing I really like about his paintings is that they are very honest and natural looking, every line and wrinkle is painted.

Life Drawing 13th March

Graphite, ink and linseed oil.


I really enjoyed this life drawing class, we did a lot of fast drawings using a variety of materials. I liked using all the materials especially the techniques of using two different coloured chalks to highlight the light and dark areas.
Coloured chalk and ink.
Coloured chalk , ink, charcoal and linseed oil.

Finished Painting

This is my painting yet again after another revisit. I haven't tried to attempt to change the background so that the object doesn't lokk like it is floating, however the background has turned out darker than I wanted and the object still looks like it is floating. Just when is a painting finished?

Update of Painting

I revisited the painting a couple of days later with a fresh approach so the I could see what needed to be done. To begin with I had ignored the background because I was unsure of what to do about it, all I knew was that I didn't want to paint what I saw in the room at the time as I thought this might distract from the object itself. I decided to make the background quite tonal, but it ended up being very midtone.

Painting of the Sculpture

This is my painting after working on it in the first day. I just about managed to fit the whole object onto the canvas. Starting off with a blank unprimed canvas was very tough to work on, the oil paint just seemed to soak straight into the canvas and wouldn't move very much which meant that I had to use quite a bit of turps to thin out the paint. I struggled to start off with, just getting my head around the task, especially with it being quite a large canvas to work on, but once I got into the flow of things I really enjoyed painting it.

Sculpture 6th March

This is the sculpture that we had to paint. When I found out that this was what we were going to have to paint I was really worried about how to approach it. At first I thought that the fact that we were restricted into using only oils colours of burnt umber, cobalt blue and white was going to be impossible. The other thing that worried me was that the painting was supposed to be complete at the end of the day, this was scary for me as I consider myself to be quite slow at painting.