Robin Troy's Fine Art Journal

Lucian Freud at MoMA

I am standing in front of an oversized painting of an oversized woman lounging on a couch. The perspective of the floor boards is dizzying; the paint is spackled on in thick slabs. I am in MoMA's Lucian Freud exhibit and I can not pull myself away from this piece. I step back to view the overall effect, then dart in to examine the heavily textured brush strokes.

I remember my own work at home. How I struggled in the studio just a few days before with the new square canvases I have started to use. I have always worked on vertical canvases and the new wider format was making it hard to view of the model while simultaneously painting on the far right side of the canvas. So now I stand in front of this 160 cm wide painting and I wonder how he did it.

I must internalize this; I want to experience it as he did. The painting is hung on a narrow wall and I can see past it on either side. I hold an invisible paintbrush in my right hand. I am "painting" on the left side of his work, peering around it to view the nonexistent Benefits Supervisor resting on the couch.  Then I move to the right. Did he tilt his easel toward the model so he could see both her and the painting surface? (Is that why the perspective is so unsettling?) Or if not, did he dash to the left, hold the image in his mind and then dash to the right to paint in what he saw? (As I do now to see what that would feel like. The painting is huge.) Or perhaps he is ambidextrous so I switch my fictitious brush to my left hand, peer around the right side and dab at the canvas.  I step back to appreciate "my" work.

When I was a little girl, I asked my parents if I could take a giraffe home from the zoo. I told them I would keep it in my bedroom closet. Now I want to take this painting home with me, put it in my garage and reproduce it. I would learn so much. It would be easier to care for than a giraffe. 

Lucian Freud: Benefits Supervisor Resting
1994, Oil on canvas. 160x150 cm

 

Lucian Freud: Benefits Supervisor Resting (Detail)
1994, Oil on canvas. 160x150 cm

Seated Figure

I may make some changes to this piece but here's how it stands at the conclusion of three sessions with the model. Any alterations I make now are a little more risky because I will be doing it all from my head -- not that that's a bad place to tap in to but the brain tends to want to shore things up with right angles and parallel lines (i.e. all things that don't exist in nature.) But surely darkening up that back leg could only help. I'm tempted to go in with some line work on the figure but chances are pretty good that I would end up ruining it. If only 'command-Z' existed on a canvas, alas.

Oil 36" x 36"

Work in progress shots from the first two sessions:

It's kind of fun to compare the latest work with a similar piece I painted a year ago.

I was actually thinking of this painting when I added the pthalo blue to the floor of the one above.

Looking at the painting above, you can see that I'm starting to play with less saturated hues. It's tricky business; I'm neutralizing the colors on my palette but trying to avoid sucking all the life out of them. It will be interesting to see where this investigation takes me.

I like this excerpt

"You know, Hitler wanted to be an artist. At eighteen, he took his inheritance—seven hundred kronen—and moved to Vienna to live and study. He applied to the Academy of Fine Arts and later to the School of Architecture. Ever see one of his paintings? Neither have I. Resistance beat him. Call it overstatement but I’ll say it anyway: it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas."

- from Steven Pressfield's book "The War of Art"

He's right; it is an overstatement but nice use of exaggeration to make a valid point. Creativity realized takes courage, perseverance—and some talent doesn't hurt either. I'll have to check this book out.  

Painting Quickly in Seattle

I created a 24" x 24" oil painting Tuesday night using a direct painting method handed down to artists by the Impressionists. I've been working with Barbara Fugate at Gage Academy in Seattle for the last couple years to study this approach.

This style of painting suits me quite well because it leverages my natural inclination to render images with gusto!

The image to the right is the piece in the  early stages when I have some simple goals: cover the canvas with paint as quickly as possible, employ an intentional strategy with my color use (in this case reds and violets) and block out shadow and light (forgetting about the form in front of me) in simple forms.

The painting was completed in two and a half hours (with model breaks it's probably a little under two hours of actual painting.) I mention the time only to give you a sense of what it feels like to paint something this way with no under-painting as a guide and little time to think. Direct painting is reactive. One quickly lays in a color in various places on the canvas and steps back to see the effect. Then the mind races: how to fix, how to retain a perfect mark, what to do next.

 

Detail shot:

Seated Nude

Here are some in progress shots of a painting that is almost complete. I'm working with a limited palette - primarily blues and oranges with a touch of green for contrast. I'm building up the surface quite a bit and then scraping it back, a process that I find risky and exciting.

I've exaggerated the legs intentionally. The next and hopefully last thing I'll do to this painting is to add color and crispness to the legs so that they really pop and maybe highlight the shoes some more.

 

Two Girls and a Motorcycle

(And the Google search hits keep coming...)

I'm only a few hours in to this painting so its pretty rough but I like where its going:

The background needs to change dramatically. The figures and bike are coming along nicely and will just keep getting more refined.

Ribbon Painting: Nearly done

I made more progress on my ribbon painting on Saturday. I could work on this for an eternity but I think I'll clean up the edges, add some more depth to some colors and then abandon it so that I can move on to the next incarnation. I'd like to tackle another one but make a change in my approach. I am going to start the next one with no under-drawing. Instead of planning out the design in advance, I'd like to see what emerges if I paint one ribbon at a time and see where it takes me. It's riskier but could have a bigger pay off (such is life, eh?)

When it's complete I'll write about the inspiration for the piece and the reason I am pursuing this particular exploration.

Hopefully I'll have another start of a painting to post later today. I'm starting a new piece as an assignment for a painting class I'm taking. I have been studying with Barbara Fugate for some time now and she offered me and another long time student some additional mentorship. She is giving us assignments to work on outside of class and will be giving us feedback along the way. Today's assignment: "What is Red?" Stay tuned...

New Painting(s): One Work in Progress

I am making good progress on two paintings. The one below is unfolding at home -- acrylic on canvas, dark jewel tones in the background with warm orange and yellow tints on the ribbons in the foreground. The white that you see is bare canvas. I hope to have this finished in a week. I'll post a better quality photo of the final piece -- the shot below is pretty bad.

 

I'm working on another painting in the studio -- oil on canvas, a nude seated with her legs and arms crisscrossed and angular. Using a similar palette as the one above: orange, blues, yellow-greens. This painting will take a month to complete.

New paintings are up on RobinTroy.com

Q: How do you know when you're ready for a gallery show?

A: When your living room looks like this...

 

 

 

Painting with Barbara Fugate

My blog used to be on Windows Live Spaces which was unfortunate because the site's code of conduct policy didn't allow me to post images of my artwork. I was forced to delete figure drawings and paintings I had posted after receiving a threat by the site's administrators that my Space was going to be deleted unless I complied.  The painting on the right is the one that got me into trouble. It popped up on somebody's radar (eek! breasts!) and soon my entire Space was called into question.

I wanted to start a new blog on a more reasonable service but it felt like an overwhelming task. I had been using Spaces since 2004 and had a lot of memories stored there. I kept using my Space but stopped writing about my artistic pursuits. It's really too bad because I made some big strides in my work that year.  It would have been nice to capture some of my thoughts along the way.

Here are some examples of that work for posterity. These were created in the Spring of 2007 under the guidance of Barbara Fugate.

This first one is fairly large and hangs framed in our entryway: