The Eyes Have It

Check out this abstract painting. It's full of energy and bravura. Brushstrokes are dancing with wild abandon.

By contrast, look at this detail of a portrait. It's very closely observed and controlled, right down to the structures of bone and flesh around the eyes and even the tiny highlights in the eyes.

Perhaps you've guessed it already: they're passages from the same painting. It's a portrait by Valentin Serov of his friend and mentor Ilya Repin. The first image in this post is the outer edges of the piece spliced together and turned sideways.

From the point of view of visual perception, Serov conveys the hierarchy of attention that we apply when we gaze at another person's face. We lock onto the eyes, the window to the soul, and nothing else matters as much--at least we don't tend to spend as much time looking at other parts of the portrait.

Eye tracking heatmaps of the face demonstrate this uneven distribution of our gaze. New studies show that the heatmap may vary slightly depending on whether we're looking at an angry or happy face.

From another point of view, Serov was absorbing new ideas in painting, and combining them with his realist training. The painting dates from 1892 when modern currents were sweeping through all of Europe.

Am I suggesting that all portraits should be painted in this way? Not at all! Painters like Holbein and Vermeer show the beauty and the power of an evenly distributed sense of finish. And no one should copy this manner as a technical trick. But it's worth considering this way of thinking, depending on whether the spirit moves you.

And it's important for anyone painting portraits to keep in mind that no matter what you do with the rest of the painting, the eyes will get the attention, and they had better be right!
--------
Related GJ post: "Stroke Module," with another portrait by Serov.
Heatmap of face from Institute Pompeu Fabra
Wikipedia on Serov.

Wayback Machine

Blog reader Gene Snyder has shared a great link for old art texts online. He says:

I'm a big geek when it comes to art books. I can't get enough of them, especially old ones that were written while the artists or techniques that they are talking about were alive and in full swing. There's a site at www.archive.org that has a HUGE collection of books that go way back. Here's a small list of some books that I've collected from the site so far:

- "Treatise on Painting - Leonardo da Vinci", Translated by John Riguad, 1877.
- "The Painter in Oil", by Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst, 1898. (Neat thing about this book is Parkhurst was student of William Bouguereau).
- "Our American Artists", by S.G.W. Benjamin, 1879. (Has some great biographies of artists).
- "Asher B. Durand - A Memorial Address", by Daniel Huntington, 1887.
- "Velasquez", by R.A.M. Stevenson, 1906. (Goes into pretty good detail about Velasquez's technique).
Thanks, Gene!

To which I'd add:
"Aims and Ideals of Art" by George Clausen.
"The life of an artist, an autobiography" - Breton, Jules, 1827-1906
"The Science of Painting" - Jehan-Georges Vibert
"The Classic Point of View: Six Lectures on Painting." Kenyon Cox
"Cyclopedia of painters and paintings (Volume 1)" - Champlin, John Denison, 1834-1915
"Pictorial composition and the critical judgment of pictures" - Poore, Henry Rankin, 1859-1940

There's a complete annotated bibliography in the back of Imaginative Realism.
Visit Gene's website and blog.

The Giant of Nantes

Sketching the Mechanical Elephant

Here's a colored pencil sketch of the Sultan's Elephant, drawn a few days ago from observation in Nantes, France. (Click on the image for a big enlargement.)

I took a picture (left) after starting the sketch to show you one way to begin a small drawing like this (about 3x5 inches). The first step was to draw the basic outlines in graphite pencil.

Then I lightly rubbed the surface with a few browns and grays in water-soluble colored pencil. Since there was no delicate detail yet, I could smudge those colors around with a water brush, keeping the white highlights on the tusk and the forehead as untouched white paper.

After that dried, I went back to define the details with a black colored pencil. The whole sketch took about 45 minutes, and I had to finish because the thing started walking.

Enchantment Symposium Tomorrow

Tomorrow the Joseloff Gallery of the University of Hartford in Connecticut will open the exhibition "Enchantment Then and Now: Drawing Connections."

The exhibition includes Briton Riviere (above), J.L. Gerome, William Bouguereau, Howard Pyle, NC Wyeth, Graydon Parrish, Walton Ford, and a selection of other contemporary painters whose work addresses the theme of enchantment, narrative, and romanticism.


Above: Howard Pyle, "Why Seek Ye the Living in the Place of the Dead?," 1905.

There will also be a panel discussion tomorrow, Friday, Nov. 6th, 1:30-3:00 p.m moderated by former Dahesh Museum director and current editor of Fine Art Connoisseur Peter Trippi. The panel includes Alison Moritsugu, Graydon Parrish, Patricia Watwood, the Director of the Dahesh Museum of Art, David Farmer, and me. The opening reception will be Friday from 5-7.
-------
Review of the exhibtion in the Hartford Courant.

Preview all the art in the exhibition at the Joseloff Gallery's Flickr Page.
Information about the symposium and the opening reception on Friday.

Soviet War Art

Here’s a interesting gallery of Soviet war art, showing how great is the cost of war, and how universal the eye of the artist.

Link to Soviet War Paintings.
Thanks, k-tron

BoingBoinged

Thanks to Mark Frauenfelder for mentioning Imaginative Realism on BoingBoing. It was a treat to meet the man behind so many fascinating posts. He's a good artist and a good dad, and he has a bemused, rumpled, curious air about him, something like a friendly mad scientist.

I did a sketch in his book of a giant frog at a laptop, with the line "To Post is To Exist."
-------
More about how to get Imaginative Realism, signed and doodled in by me!

Reviews on John Fleskes' Blog and on Drawn! and on the Spectrum blog.

Backlit Parked Car

Here's a quick impression in a mini-Moleskine watercolor sketchbook. What interested me was the ordinariness of a parked car alongside a canal. Because I was looking toward the hazy source of illumination, the challenge was to save out the little bits of rim lighting as I did my first overall wash over the dry paper surface.

In a contre-jour situation, it helps to keep those light bits crisp, and then let the shadowed areas——such as the areas around the wheels and the base of the car——relatively soft and out-of-focus.

If you like Moleskines, check out the creative showcase blog Moleskinerie.

Drawn Together

"We are like children," said illustrator Aleksi Briclot (second from left). "Give us a pencil and some paper and we are happy and quiet." Center is J-S. Rossbach, Gilles Francescano and J-B. Monge.

Mr. Briclot and Jean-Sebastien Rossbach, who collaborated on the fully illustrated Merlin, were drawing sketches as a team, one of them beginning the sketch and the other finishing it.

It was a great honor to meet artists like Leo, J.B. Monge (above, with me on his shoulder holding his pencil), Erlé Ferronnière, Didier Graffet, Manchu, Enki Bilal, and many others.


I am touched also to meet students (such as Dmitri, above) and teachers from the art school Pivaut.


The people from the city of Nantes were very gracious and generous to Jeanette and me. Thank you to Marie Masson who arranged the festival, to Patrick Gyger who put together the the Dinotopia exhibition, to Mr. Paul Billaudeau and Mr. Jean-Marc Ayrault for helping welcome Utopiales to the Cité Internationale des Congrès of Nantes, and to Madame Agnès Marcetteau of the Musée Jules Verne.

Prix Art et Fact to J.B. Monge

Last night at the Utopiales festival in Nantes, France, Jean-Baptiste Monge received the the Art and Fact Prize (Prix Artetfact). Mr. Monge (b. 1971) has created several magnificent oversize illustrated books on the world of faeries, and recently won the Silver Medal from Spectrum Annual of Fantastic Art.

I was honored to present the award to Mr. Monge during the ceremonies, as we are friends and I am an enthusiastic admirer of his work. He has a reverence for the masters of illustration, such as Rackham, Dulac, Bauer and Rockwell, and an uncanny ability to create believable characters in the world of faerie.
-------
Art et Fact Association (website and gallery in French)
Website of J.B. Monge
Lines and Colors post on Mr. Monge with lots of links to his books, etc.

The award was supported by the Maison d’Ailleurs Museum (website in French and English) of Yverdon, Switzerland, whose director, Patrick Gyger, appears at left in the photo.