Chris Simonite's Cubo-Weirdism Blog! A Blog about Chris Simonite's Art by Chris Simonite. Who the Hell else?

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that a friend made some suggestions on how to improve my work, and of course improvement is something most of us strive for anyway, so I welcomed his input. And even if it looked like my work had a sameness to it, I was tentatively trying to do some of the things my friend talked about, such as doing less dry brushing and using more paint.

But after chatting with him, I decided to try to kick it up a notch. One of the things most painters do is what's known as a "master copy". Often artists actually go to galleries and sit in front of paintings and do sketches, take photographs if they're allowed and go home and try to copy the painting style of one of the old masters. I've even seen people who apparently had permission to paint a copy right in the gallery. Anyway, you know what I'm talking about, the dead (mostly) guys who perfected techniques that were largely abandoned in the modern era. And of course this was something the "Old Masters" did themselves when they were just starting out.

So partly as a means to force myself to not be so stingy with my paint, I decided to do that myself. Sort of. I mean, I couldn't go to a gallery and do sketches first but considering that I can find lots of images online, I was able to choose something to work with pretty easily. I decided that I would try to copy one of John Singer Sargent's many portraits and just for fun, put my own twist on it. You know, move the nose and eyes and such. I chose Sargent because, if I'm not mistaken he mostly worked alla prima (wet on wet–no Bob Ross did not invent that technique).

George Frederick Mc Corquodale, by John Singer Sargent

The truth is I have no idea how Sargent approached a portrait, all I can do is guess. Well I could do some research too, but I haven't done that. I will, but I haven't done it yet. But I'm guessing he started with an underpainting which is something I usually do. That is I usually tone the canvas so that I'm not working on a bright white surface. I find if I do that I often use paint that isn't dark enough. But the underpainting I'm talking about here, is painting in the shadows of the face fairly dark and the highlights, well, not as dark. That's not something I usually do, at least not as much as I should. The idea is to force myself to work truly dark to light as I build light areas on top of the dark areas. This means creating a painting that truly has an 'ugly stage', as you can see here.

And here is the finished painting. As you can see, I didn't exactly try to copy the features exactly. I mean, I was going to move them around to make a Cubo-Weirdist painting anyway so I wasn't careful to make my initial sketch perfect. This exercise was all about the painting part of painting. And I also wanted to have fun with it. Anyway, I feel like this is something I should do more often and maybe incorporate into my work. What do you think dear reader(s)?