Up Close: Some Sargent Brushwork

John Singer Sargent's reputation continues to rise.

For example, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art now has a room with several fine examples of his portraiture, as the above photo I took in September shows.

One of his paintings on display is the dual-portrait of Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes and Edith Minturn Stokes. The museum has this to say about it.

And this is what they actually looked like around 1897 when Sargent painted them. Both were age 30 and married when they were 28.

Here is the establishment photo I took. For once its colors aren't grossly far from those in the photo the museum took of it, shown above. However, my photo is slightly skewed towards the red. Getting accurate results when photographing in museums is a matter of luck, I've found. The source of trouble is the artificial lighting.

My close-up of Edith. Sargent slightly exaggerated the height of his two subjects in the same manner fashion illustrators ply their trade.  He does capture the uneven setting of her mouth, but the eyes seem a bit odd and the light and shading of her nose also seem a little off. Viewed from a normal distance, these quirks matter little. You can see that Sargent touched up the background in places close to her head.  Also, her collar does not wrap around her neck, but he apparently didn't think it worth the trouble to tidy up that defect.

I took this photo to show how museum lighting can reveal some of the surface texture of a painting.  The facial close-up also has some reflections of museum lighting off edges of Sargent's brushwork. He seems to have used oil-rich paints, but as the image above suggests, he didn't paint thickly. It's possible that some of the effects seen here are due to varnishing brushwork, rather than the basic painting. The canvas patch on the right shows up strongly here, though it is evident in the museum photo if you look closely.

Eric Fischl and Photoshop

Eric Fischl (1948 - ) is for me an important post-modernist artist because he broke from abstraction and moved to realist paintings of people in psychologically ambiguous situations. Plus, his work was commercially successful while being generally accepted by the New York art world.

Fischl's Wikipedia entry is here, and here is his web site that contains many examples of his work.

Due to his need to portray people in those psychologically ambiguous situations I referred to, he needed capture-the-moment body poses and gestures difficult or impossible to obtain from live models. Beyond that was the need to get correct effects of light and shade on his subjects. So Fischl necessarily was drawn to the use of photography for reference material. This is what classical illustrators usually were doing by the 1940s.

Another consideration was composing scenes. Again he borrowed from illustration by creating overlays, one to a subject, and moving them around to establish the ensemble best fitted for artistic and story-telling purposes. Early in his career he made use of glassine to create finished works on that support material.

In recent years Fischl has been relying on digital photography, using Photoshop to manipulate the positions of subjects to achieve what he feels is a satisfactory compositions. He credits his wife, landscape artist April Gornik, for getting him using that software.

A 2012 exhibit at the San Jose (California) Museum of Art dealt with his use of photography. The museum's website page dealing with the exhibit is here.

Here are a few examples of Fischl's use of photography for his painting.

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This is an example of a Photoshopped image.  I don't have an image of a completed painting for comparison.

Years before using Photoshop, Fischl began using conventional photography.  This is a key photo taken at a beach near Saint-Tropez, France about 1984.  The pose of women in the center was later used by him in several works.

Above are a digital image and a completed painting from his 2002 Krefeld Project. This seems to be pre-Photoshop.

Phototshoped composition and final painting, "The Gang," 2006. The woman in the foreground is April Gornik.

Glen Orbik's Drawings

I was shocked to learn that Glen Orbik (1963-2015) died. He didn't die as young as Toulouse-Lautrec and others who never saw their 40th birthdays. But getting snuffed out by cancer at 51 or 52 makes for a relatively short lifespan nowadays. I enjoyed viewing most of his illustration work and regret that no further "noir" paperback book covers will be forthcoming.

There is surprisingly little in the way of biographical regarding Orbik. A brief Wikipedia entry is here, and here is a snippet on his Web site.

Orbik was a student of illustrator Fred Fixler and eventually took over Fixler's teaching duties while pursuing commercial work. He cites as influences "Robert McGinnis, Gil Elvgren, Dean Cornwell, Mead Schaeffer, Andrew Loomis, John Buscema... and a healthy dose of Norman Rockwell." That is a fine set of inspirations.

I will deal with Orbik's painted work in another post. For now, I'd like to show some of this drawings, many of which were "timed" (by the clock). These usually combine sensitive lines with broad, bold strokes of graphite that might be described as "painterly."

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This might be a study for a book cover illustration.

A very quick timed drawing.

This and some of the other images demonstrate how Orbik would set up his drawing. Here and elsewhere he had little time to refine details (note the treatment of hands and legs).

Jeremy Mann: Free and Tight on a Single Painting

Jeremy Mann (b. 1979) is a young (mid-30s) artist whose work disproves the modernist conceit of the 1950s that there was no point to realist or naturalist painting in the age of photography, and that abstraction was the viable Fine Arts alternative.

The link to a Fine Arts Connoisseur magazine piece featuring Mann is here, and a gallery web page regarding Mann is here. They contain snippets of biographical information.

Mann's style is a combination of sketchy, impressionistic backgrounds delivered using a variety of means for attacking a wood panel with paint along with tightly-painted details, especially in his depictions of beautiful women. He is also hugely prolific, as his own web site reveals. Click on the images below to enlarge.

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Bay Evening

Raised freeway

Hell's Kitchen

Rooftops in the Snow

Soho

The Muse

Undressing

Untitled (Grace)

The White Vanity

The Forgotten (Version Two - Neglect)

Walter Everett: Two Works in Progress

Walter H. Everett (1880-1946), a student of the great Howard Pyle, was an exceptionally good illustrator who had a couple of character flaws. One was an inability to meet deadlines, a trait that surely impeded his career. Another problem emerged late in life when he destroyed many of his works. Some assert that he got rid of what he considered lesser stuff, and there might be something to that idea because a number of fine paintings of his still exist.

I wrote about Everett here and here. The Kelly Collection holds an important Everett: a link is here. Armand Cabrera provides some biographical information here.

Cabrera's post is illustrated using examples mostly from an early phase of his career, before he developed his mature style. It is Everett's mature illustrations that astonish me. Fortunately, there are at least two examples of his work that seem to be unfinished because of their appearance and the lack of a signature. They therefore provide interesting clues as to how Everett went about building up his classic images.

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This is one of Everett's finest works to set the scene. Click on it and the others to enlarge.

For comparison, here is a finished (or nearly so) illustration with similar colors to the unfinished examples below. Some internet sites displaying this image state that the man is a soldier. From what I can tell, the setting is the American Southwest, most likely northern New Mexico. The man is dressed in riding or work clothes, not an army uniform.

Everett blocks in the image using lines and flatly painted areas laid over an undertone wash or scumble. He then works on background detail before tackling the foreground.

Faces and other key details are painted in the round, most of the rest being larger and smaller areas of flat paint.

* * * * *

UPDATE (9 January 2016):
I'm wondering if the three illustrations immediately above were all part of the same project that got canceled. The subjects and color schemes are related. The illustration that seems finished has not been signed (unless a signature got cropped). Does any reader know exactly what we have here?

Alfred Stevens: Combining Hard-Edge and Brushy Styles

Alfred Émile Léopold Stevens (1823-1906) was a Belgian whose family was heavily involved in the arts, as this Wikipedia entry explains. Paris being a far more important art center than Brussels, Stevens went there for training and spent most of his long and largely successful career there.

He was in his late 40s and 50s when Impressionism came on the scene, though freely-brushed paintings had appeared before then. In any case, Stevens, whose favorite subjects were elegant women, was a painter quite capable of working in both tight and free styles. I hadn't given this any though until I noticed the following painting on the Internet.

Looking Out To Sea - ca. 1890The women is painted in a tight, "finished" manner, whereas the seascape in the background is painted in a free, almost-Impressionist style with a late-Turner feel. The only date for it that I could find had it painted around 1890. I'll assume that is so, for now. The images below are of some paintings he did in various styles earlier in his career that, if the 1890 date is about right, indicate a path to its achievement.

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In the Country - c. 1867
Stevens was in his early 40s when he did this. The woodsy background is dark, but not painted very tightly, as is so for the foreground subject.

After the Ball (Confidence) - 1874
An interior scene painted when Stevens was about 50. Tightly done: notice the fabric detail on the dresses.

Sarah Bernhardt - 1882
The famed actress took painting lessons from Stevens when he was in his early 60s. In return, he painted her several times. Here most of it is painted in a rather feathery brush style, sharpened here and there. Interestingly, the more tightly-painted fan seems more the main subject rather than Bernhardt's face. (But yes, we are still drawn to her eyes.)

Elegant on the Boulevards - 1888
This is done in a free, almost sketchy manner. Something like the sea background in the first painting.

David Curtis, Contre-Jour Painter

David J. Curtis (1948- ) is an English painter adept both in watercolor and oil. His background is unusual in that he led an engineering team at Hawker-Siddeley till 1988 when he began painting full-time. (Another engineer-artist that comes to mind is R.G. Smith, who painted aviation scenes with impressive atmospheric environments.) Curtis' Web site is here, and the Royal Institute of Oil Painters page dealing with him is here.

A good many works by Curtis are of the contre-jour kind, where the light source (the sun, in Curtis' images) is behind the subject. Normally, artists have the light source behind the painter or towards one side or another, illuminating the subject directly or from an angle. James Gurney discusses contre-jour painting here.

Needless to say, to be an effective contre-jour painter, one must have a very good color sense. This Curtis has. He also has a feeling for making strong, interesting compositions.

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Moorings on the Chesterfield Canal

Fine Autumn Day, Clayworth Wharf

Mooring at Hayton-Chesterfield Canal

Pembrokeshire Sea Cliffs, Port St. Justinian

Rocky Cove, Lleyn Peninsula

Vintage Car Workshop

Mikhail Vrubel: Square-Brush Paintings

Mikhail Vrubel (1856-1910) died blind and not totally sane. Before that, he was one of the most interesting artists Russia produced as the traditionalist-academic school of painting crumbled and Modernism worked its way to ascendancy.

Vrubel had a law degree, but then studied painting at the Imperial Academy of Art in St. Petersburg. For a few years he worked on a project in Kiev to replace 12th century murals and was able to travel to Venice, but also began to work on images of a demon based on an epic poem by Mikhail Lermontov. His first Demon painting in 1890 was noteworthy enough to launch his career. This and more biographical in formation can be found here and here.

Vrubel could vary his style, but his best-known paintings feature a good deal of square-brush work to create a fragmented, jewel-like effect around more smoothly painted faces and other features of his subjects. The best place I know of to view Vrubel's art is in Moscow's State Tretyakov Gallery a short distance south of the river bordering the Kremlin. When I was there, an entire room was devoted to Vrubel.

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Head of a Woman (Emilia Prakhova) - study for "The Virgin and Child" - 1884 or 1885
Pencil and gouache. I include this to show Vrubel's approach early in his career. Later drawings were more wispy with plenty of possibly excess lines included.

Nadezhda Zabela-Vrubel - 1904
The artist's opera singer wife. This was painted not long before he lost his sight. Vrubel was not completely wedded to the square-brush - jeweled effects he is most famous for.

Seated Demon - 1890
As noted, he made several Demon-themed paintings, and this is the first and most famous.

Swan Princess - 1900
His wife depicted in a role she sang in a Rimsky-Korsakov opera. Another of his best-known paintings.

Fallen Demon - 1902
Vrubel continued the Demon a dozen years after the first painting.

Artist's Wife in a Stage Dress - 1898
More of a sketch than a finished work here.

Siren - 1900
Absent the woman, this would be an abstract painting.

Six-Winged Seraph - 1904
Another classic Vrubel image.