Shifting Shadows

Human Figure class,second week with male model.

The room I paint in is quite dark. The model is on a raised platform with a light shining from above and to the side. He holds his pose for 20 minutes, then we break for about 10 minutes. He is an excellent model...and very experienced.

At the beginning of each class and after each break, he re-establishes the same pose using marks taped to the floor to show the position of his feet.One hand rests on a pedestal, the other holds a staff behind him. Thus he is somewhat stabilized. The pedestal never moves and he also has a tape mark on the floor to show where to place the tip of the staff. Still, with all of these efforts to re-produce the pose exactly, the slightest deviation in his stance causes the shadows to vary widely. If he takes a breath or shifts slightly, his shadows move and I find that I am looking at light and dark patterns that are not the ones I have been establishing on my canvas.

A human can't become a statue. He breathes, his head, shoulders slump sometimes...if he slightly twists his body, the shadows swing wildly.

One minute, the shadow on his thigh runs in an angle from his hip to his knee. The next, his whole leg is in shadow!

I put the matter to my teacher. He replied:

'There is always a shift when a model poses. Ours is one of the best but I'm sure that standing on one leg has forced him to shift his weight slowly to relieve the strain (some models are so weak that they change very radically all the time). The only way to deal with this is to establish the pose and the shadow shapes right away and then wait for the times when they are most like that initial block in, in order to go into them and add more detail.'

What do I look at when I want to refine my shapes and show reflected light in the shadow areas if the shadows are different from my original ?

At some point during the session the shadows might return to their original pattern...or not.

Consequently, I think there is no real continuity to my shadow patterns. And I don't think I have gotten the pose, the stance right because of that.

I'm used to painting vases and fruit and eggs that sit still. The shadows they create and that fall on them and the surface they are on remain constant.

We had our third Human Figure Painting class yesterday. And the same model will be used for the next two sessions.

Our homework is to copy Jacques Louis David's "Patroclus". I began yesterday and will do some more work on it today.Here also are the original and a piece showing the underlying musculature of the figure!
Trying to copy this painting reminds me of a quotation I once read:
"The music teacher came twice each week to bridge the awful gap between Dorothy and Chopin." -George Ade.



The next step is to glaze this painting to give it warmth.






A monochrome underpainting at bottom.

Figures

I've begun a Figure Painting classes. Here are two studies.

Cubism

I was looking through a book comparing the lives and works of Picasso and Matisse.

It showed a painting that Matisse had done in a Cubist style of a still life by Jan Davidsz de Heen as inspiration.De Heen's painting is entitled A Table of Desserts.

I looked at the original and I looked at Matisse's "copy" (both shown here).

Then,I read about Cubism...

' In cubist artworks, objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form — instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context.

Often the surfaces intersect at seemingly random angles, removing a coherent sense of depth. The background and object planes interpenetrate one another to create the shallow ambiguous space, one of cubism's distinct characteristics.'

I'm not sure I quite understand that..especially when I am looking at a "cubist" painting.
How, from the explanation above, does one come to this painting by Braque of a Woman with Guitar ??






I found another painting by de Heen and tried to do what Matisse had done in a Cubist way. And I looked back at Matisse's interpretation of the old painting he chose and could not for the life of me, see in the Matisse copy, an expression of Cubist principles as I understood them from the definition.
Here are a few versions





I removed the berries on the left.Repainted the bowl removing some fruit adding a diagonal darker shape through the table and bowl.


Repainted curtain orange.Replaced table on left with planter.Added a darker, triangular area to top right corner.


Replaced curtain with shutters.Removed clouds.Darkened the planter and the orange wedge to the left of the bowl, and darkened the window frame.