the left knee is technically correct and I hate it
Working on a seated figure, roughly 90 by 70, and I've repainted the left knee three times now. First two passes were wrong because I wasn't seeing it. This third one is right. Proportions check, the foreshortening reads, the shadow side sits where it should. It's the best-observed knee I've painted in a long time and it is completely dead.
I know what happened. I painted the knee as a thing to be solved instead of a thing sitting under cloth in a room. Every plane is accounted for and none of them are breathing. I've been circling it for two days, adding half-tones, taking them out, which is not painting, it's polishing.
What I think I have to do is scrape it and come back in with a much bigger brush and a lot less information. Which is terrifying because the drawing is good and I'll lose it. But the drawing is exactly what's killing it. It's a diagram now.
For the people who work from life: when you've painted something accurately and it has no life in it, do you destroy it or do you try to paint your way out from the inside? I've done both and I genuinely don't know which one is honest here.
3
4commentsSaveFollow threadShare
You have found the trouble yourself, ji, and you have said it plainly: solved instead of sitting. In our Mithila work also this happens. When we paint the fish or the peacock only as shape to be filled correctly, it becomes flat and cold, and the viewer walks past it. The grandmothers used to say the line should be drawn as if the form is breathing underneath, not as if we are copying an outline.
Maybe the knee is dead because you are looking at the knee. Look at the whole figure, the weight going down into the seat, the cloth falling from it. The knee will then be only one small part of a living body, and it may start to breathe on its own. Two days of half-tones will not do what one honest look at the whole will do.
Three times repainting is not waste, it is devotion. Keep going, the work is already good because you are seeing it truly.
The grandmothers are right, but I'd add one thing from the other end of it. I set stone, so I don't get half-tones to fix things with. Once a piece of smalti is in the bed you either live with it or you dig it out and it never goes back the same. What taught me the breathing thing was not looking at the form at all. I set a figure's shoulder wrong four times until I stopped looking at the shoulder and just watched where the weight wanted to go, and it went down through the hip, and the shoulder solved itself after that.
So yes, look at the whole figure. But the weight has to be doing something for the whole to explain the part. If the seat isn't carrying her, the knee stays a solved thing no matter how long you stare at the room around it. Just my two cents from a different material, ji.
The smalti detail is the part that stays with me. Not being able to go back over it, so the decision has to be made once and known once. That is the discipline I keep avoiding by telling myself the next half-tone will save me.
And you are right that the weight is the thing. I painted the knee correctly and the weight is not in it, so the correctness just sits there like a fact. This morning I stopped touching the knee and worked the hip and the cloth where it crosses the thigh, and the knee has already started to come back to life on its own, which is slightly humiliating after two days.
Question, since you set stone: does the weight have to be decided before you place anything, or do you find it as you build? With paint I can chase it. I am not sure I could commit to a shoulder four times the way you did.
"Drawn as if the form is breathing underneath" is exactly it, and your grandmothers put it better than my two days of circling did. You're right that I'm looking at the knee. I spent this morning instead working the cloth over the thigh and the shadow the seat throws, and the knee already reads less like a specimen. I'll leave it alone a while and come back to it when it's just a corner of the room again. Thank you, this was useful.