Woman in Red and Blue (final painting)

Woman in Red and Blue, 21cm x 29cm, 8" x 11.5", 2012, Moleskine folio Sketchbook, mixed media.


Posting again because I fiddled a bit with and cropped this portrait. The scanner, while enabling a high resolution/good colour image, misses texture. One day I'll get a decent camera to take these paintings - this one is scored with lines from toothpicks, dental tools, knitting needles, and different media - pens, inks, paints, rubbings and scratchings... I didn't like the initial sketch (self portrait drawn looking into a mirror) and was too impatient to work on it so I thought I'd see how the figure could emerge through washes of black paint, and then all the other media I used, inks, acrylics, oils, from fountain pen inks, dip pens, ball point pens and brushes and cloths. Often I spray fixatives between layers too, so there's a few of those. A figure does emerge, and there's a welter of emotion in that worked surface. I have a 30" x 40" Windsor and Newton canvas still unopened for a self portrait, and so am doing studies, not just for facial features (haven't hit home quite yet) but for painting techniques.

                              

Hans Silvester: Tribus del olmo

From Storyculture: Hans Silvester describes his mission, "what’s most important for me is saving, in some way, as much as possible of this truly living art, which is mobile, changing, subject to infinite variation, and whose constituent elements are simple and form a link between man and nature. It seems to me that our modern painting found the purpose of these elements, this simplicity, and used it as its foundation."

Learn more about Hans Silvester's time with the L'omo people at the Marlborough Gallery website.

HERE IS A SLIDE SHOW OF MORE THAN FIFTY OF SILVESTER'S IMAGES

Tribus del olmo

The Painted People of the Surma and Mursi Tribes in Southern Ethiopia - Photos by Hans Silvester.

These people, their rituals, what to us is face painting but to them a calling and embodiment of the spirits, are caught on camera in beautiful portrait shots. They are hesitant, you can see that, before the clicking black machine that the photographer holds. Yet they allow us to steal their images away to show in galleries and books, to post on the NET and spread around the world in ways they will never see or understand. Watching is a complex process of awe, wonderment, tenderness, voyeurism, and a wish to imitate. Yes, paint my face in white and ochre, pigments from ground rocks, shards, plants, and put garlands of flowers and vegetation around  my head and I'll dance shamanically calling and embodying whatever Modern spirits who are in the vicinity and happen to be attracted.

It would be a cacophony.

If it wasn't for copyright restrictions, I would put many of these images in my forthcoming 22 minute videopoem, Tangled Garden.

                              

Woman in Red and Blue

From my Moleskine Project today:

Woman in Red and Blue, 21cm x 29cm, 8" x 11.5", 2012, Moleskine folio Sketchbook, mixed media.


You might guess, I am working on studies for a self portrait painting. Still haven't achieved a good likeness (according to my beloved children), 'but,' they say, they 'like them anyhow.'

I layered this with different types of inks, pens, paints, scratchings, and so on. You might be able to see the detail if it opens in full screen and gives you an option to view at original size.

Let's hope so.

:)


While the darker image is from a scanner, this is closer to what the painting looks like in bright natural daylight (it's an earlier version, too).