This is like one of those moments where you stare yourself down in the mirror, and with a single blink, finally recognize how much older you look. The progress I’ve made as an artist over the past decade after I decided that visual art would be my life’s passion instead of singing (out of spite for a truly awful chorus teacher), is sitting here staring me down.
Do not mistake this as some kind of dedication to my magnum opus.
Charlotte reached out to me at the beginning of January trying to connect me with a friend who wanted to commission a painting for another friend’s birthday. I was still deep within the throes of unemployment and said yes because I thought the reference photograph had a lot of character. I did not bother to mention that I had never stretched my own canvas or that I had not been face to face with a palette of actual real life paint in nearly four years.
^ the last time I did any traditionally painted portraits (April 2020)
Was I a little bit nervous? Yes. Should I have been? The mindless ease of the select and transform tools have taken over in the past four years. Another victim of the Ipad+Procreate+ApplePencil combo for the history books. In hindsight maybe there was nothing to worry about. They say you can never unlearn how to ride my bike but I definitely hesitate everytime I try to hop back onto my ripstick as a party trick every couple of years. Maybe it had actually been too long this time. Maybe I never learned how to ride the painting bike well enough to begin with.
It also doesn’t help that I am terribly impatient. Every day is a struggle to be a better man than my father, a man who would spend an entire weekend writing a facebook status update one word at a time, unable to write a first draft for his life. I think it’s genetic. I still haven’t figured out how not to freak out when the first layers of paint don’t look amazing. If I could paint something inch by inch, perfectly rendered, in one long painstaking go, I would feel so much better about the process and also be following exactly in my dad’s footsteps. Oh well.
I tried my best to document the many layers it took to bring out the character in this painting. Can you see me lose hope momentarily around frame four? Can you tell I was wondering how I was going to tell the girl who’d commissioned me that I had forgotten how to paint? So dramatic. I went to bed beyond frustrated the night I started and it didnt help that my canvas was loosening up the more I painted on it. The man behind the oil painters blog who suggested I gesso both sides of my fabric before stretching it around the frame must have made his post on April Fools and I didn’t notice. Half a pack of shims and a good nights’ sleep did end up fixing most of my problems though.
I am tremendously happy with the final product here. I can see a quality in this painting that I used to dream about seeing in my artwork when I was younger. I don’t feel the kind of disconnect between the platonic coneption of this painting in my mind’s eye and the actual paining I’m holding in my hands in front of me the way I used to growing up and I wasn’t really aware of that progress until now.
This is for all of the times that I printed out drawings from artists I admired on deviantart and taped them into my sketchbooks and nodded my head coyly when someone would ask if I had drawn them, lying, desperately wanting people to think my art was as good as I wanted it to be. I just wasn’t there yet.
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