My self portrait from this January (you can see it in this post) is in the Eleanor Ettinger Gallery’s Self Portrait Exhibition which opened last night in New York. It looks like a great show and I’m sorry I couldn’t make it to the opening. Paul Oxborough’s portrait on the Ettinger website looks especially brilliant.
Every year on my birthday I paint a self portrait. Many I’ve abandoned and destroyed, some years I skipped it, and I lost a hard disk a few years back with the only images of some of them. These are the ones that survived. It’s interesting for me to look back over the years to see the change in my understanding of drawing and painting.
My early attempts were pretty bad. The first two are from my three years at the University of California at Santa Cruz. The art department there wasn’t very didactic, and students were left to their own devices for the most part. All my technical knowledge at this stage was from books. Notice the poor compositions, the poor handling, the poor understanding of form…etc.
Self Portraits from my UCSC days. 1989-1992
The second two are from my first years at Charles H. Cecil studios. Notice in the painting the over-modelling of the hair as well as the poor design and annoying fuzziness in the clothes,
Early Cecilian Self Portraits. 1993-4
The portrait on the left was from 2002 (I think), and it starts to show a more mature style. Better design overall, better handling of the paint, and a more successful rendering of atmosphere. On the right is a sketch of Saint Mark’s Church in Venice as I was there on a plein air trip for my birthday one year.
Self Portrait from 2002(?) and Saint Marc’s Church .
The next three portraits are recent and are more ambitious in scope, being 3/4 and full length with backgrounds. One thing about self portraits is that they can be a great way to experiment with new materials and techniques. The first one was one of the more complicated portraits I had ever set up, and the objects in the background were selected to describe aspects of my life. The second painting was painted on a much heavier weave of canvas than I am used to, and the last one was my first attempt at an outdoor portrait.
Self Portrait, 2005.
Self Portrait, 2007
Outdoor Self Portrait, 2008.
Here is a quick video (2 minutes) showing a time-lapse of this year’s self portrait. My experiment this year was to do the reverse of a grisaille, so I did the underpainting with a high chroma and glazed and scumbled the grays, greens, and browns over it.
(Update: Here is the final image.)
Self Portrait, 2010.
Improvement in oil painting is not a linear progression in my opinion. The ability to see improves before technical skill, and we often have difficulty assessing honestly exactly how our work looks. Below is my attempt at graphing the progression.
(Being my first attempt at visually interpreting quantitative information, it probably looks similar to the self portraits at the top of the post.)
This is a project I’ve wanted to work on for a while. An outdoor, full length self-portrait at midday in the summer. Lots of light everywhere.
At the moment I’m working on the composition and trying to figure out problems which will arise with the larger version.
Here are some early photos (cellphone camera):
