Anyone want to critique my new paintings?

Cafe Society
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Most of the new stuff is still in progress (one of them I just started painting tonight, in fact) so please take that into consideration. My theory is that all paintings look like crap until day 3, at which point you can actually start to make the adjustments you need, having established your basic blocking of value on the canvas. That said, I would be interested in hearing what people thought as I’m going in a few new directions that I’m not sure about. I have a lot of abstract art inside me, but I’ve rarely let it out, but I think I will start to pursue some of that in the next months as well.

Here is my Paint & Ink album. At the beginning are sub-albums with daily progress pictures of the paintings I’m currently working on. After that are images of paintings I’ve finished (at the end there are progress albums for those, too.) Pretty much all of this was created in the last year/year and a half. I get my mom saying they’re good but I’d like some more objective feedback and I figure that this group tends to be brutally honest about such things, so I’m throwing myself into the fire.

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(oh yeah, since you guys were so good at this last year, so far all of these have “working titles” only and will need to have real names eventually, so feel free to suggest names if you feel like you’ve got a good one.)

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Sure, why not. Some thoughts on page 1:

Nude #1. Kinda interesting, but I don’t quite like the composition. My eye is kind of let all over the place. The negative space on the left is distracting me, and my eye is immediately drawn to the belly and breast of the model. The lines just don’t work for me. I would have preferred for the right arm to be more open to help make a slightly more forceful line into the painting. As it is, it just feels kind of out of balance to me. I would also prefer for the face to be a bit lighter.

Secret Illumination - looks good enough to me.

White Horse - Bottom left of the image distracts me. I don’t know whether it’s that light or if it’s just a reflection from the photo.

Afternoon Reverie - looks good to me, but I wish I could see just a tad more of the boys face.

The Enlightenment - Nice, but I’m not completely sold on the composition.

Leaving Chinatown - Cool steam in the background. I would have liked to seen this painted from a lower vantage point, so the boy stands out more sharply against the steam. As it is, his form gets kinda lost in the darkness of the street.

Chromaticism - Once again, nice, but that big expanse of black in the upper left that takes up a quarter of the painting is not doing it for me. Give me some interest in the shadows. I mean, look at that Rembrandt copy you did, and look at how much more there’s going on in the shadows.
It looks to me like you’re painting several of these from photos. You certainly can paint a hell of a lot better than I can, but your composition can use a little work.

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Really nice paintings; the middle one is my favorite. The horse creeps on the edge of being cheesy but I think when all is said and done falls on the acceptable side.

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Thanks for the feedback! It’s always good to get fresh eyeballs and opinions and suggestions.

Keep in mind that none of these are finished, by the way. For example the first one (the nude) I have just blocked in the major value areas so far, in only one sitting. It’s just the very rough underpainting at this point. There isn’t really much the way of nuance or detail yet. Just a basic "it’s dark here, light here, something between light and dark here, and it’s generally this shape, etc. And the belly/breasts are among the areas that I had to give up on until the paint dries because everything I tried to do with that much wet paint seemed to be counterproductive. It was annoying the hell out of me because there are a number of changes that are staring me in the face, but the material won’t let me do them until the paint dries. The area on the left has to be very dark before I can add the detail work to it, so right now my concentration was just getting as opaque a dark layer of paint as possible to start from. It won’t stay that flat, it just has to start that way. (The background of the Rembrandt started out much the same way, though I did slap a little burnt sienna on parts of it to warm it up. Since this painting is going to be monochromatic there is no warm/cool issue to address, just value, which will come later.)

The horse picture is also far from finished, but as the process I’m doing (very wet, dribbly paint at this stage) can only be done a little at a time before it dries, the progress is very slow. There will be dark stuff added after all the light stuff is in and I think that the end result is going to look quite different from this halfway-point.

I’m happy with the progress on the Secret Illumination. It is moving faster than than the others.

Yes, several of these are from photos. Leaving Chinatown just turned out to be a cool looking snapshot when I was walking to the Metro in DC after eating dinner with my son in Chinatown. I never expected it to be as dynamic as it was, and so I decided to paint it. If I had that sort of thing in mind I’d probably have tried to set up the shot more artistically rather than just “ooh, neat, go stand over there so I can take a picture” which is how it really happened. Heh. Similarly, Afternoon Reverie was a snapshot I took on my way through the living room and never expected the photo to be as interesting as it was.

I’d like to take more photos (& photoshop collages) specifically as setups for paintings. I haven’t had the opportunity to do that yet, but I feel that would give me even more control.

Chromaticism is actually a humongous printout from The Rasterbator that I mounted and painted over. It’s a neat tool–and it’s free online. But because of that I don’t technically think of it as a painting. More a mixed-medium.

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That’s what I came in to say. Many of these pictures, while the technique is obviously due to a lot of experience, have that static look that identifies them as having been painted from a photograph. It’s hard to find a good model, but the more you work from life the more, um, life your paintings will have.

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Well no, not due to a lot of experience. I started painting about a year and a half ago. And I haven’t painting anything since last April until I started these 4. Pretty much what is in that album is every painting I’ve ever done.

Much as the idea appeals to me, I am not in a position right now to paint from a model. There is nowhere to do it at home, and I have no money to pay one anyway (full time student). Plus I am a single parent and so I can’t just wander off to some other facility for hours at a time. If I can’t paint it in the corner of my office at 1am, I can’t paint it right now. So it’s either from photos or from my head at this point. Those are the only logistically possibilities. Hopefully eventually in the future I’ll be in a position to paint from live models.

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Some comments on Secret llumination:

  1. The boy’s left shoulder is longer than his right by a pretty good amount. Though given your medium, you might be stuck with that, of course. It’s something that tends to happen when you paint near the edge of the canvas–an internal alarm saying, “We’re going to run out of room! Shrink! Shrink!”

  2. His ear is also a bit high. The top of where the ear connects to the face is at about the same level as the corner of the eye. Since we’re looking down on the boy, it should indeed be higher than that, but at the moment it’s more about 45[sup]o[/sup] angle downward rather than the 10[sup]o[/sup] or so that it looks like we should have from the face.

  3. You might try having rays of some sort coming through his fingers. Filling out the bottom left corner wouldn’t necessarily look better, but I think it might make it look a bit more “complete.” Of course, I usually paint on the computer where, if an idea doesn’t pan out, I can just delete it…

Note that I studied to be an animator, so getting consistent and correct body proportions is important to that sort of drawing. For your sort of drawing, not so much, so I don’t think that #2 hurts you any for this reason. But #1 is an issue. If the canvas is controlling the shape of the picture, rather than you controlling where it goes based on the dimensions of the canvas, then the picture won’t quite look professional-class regardless of the quality of brushwork.

http://206.196.22.137/random/hi-opal.html

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Let me just note that I like the painting. Most of what my art teacher did was make minor fixes over the original like that, so it seemed like the thing to do here. :slight_smile:

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I like the ones that make strong use of light and shade a lot - secret illumination, nude, and some of the others.