After Goya

"Senorita Sabasa Garcia (after Goya)," oil on gesso panel, 24x18

 

Like many artists, I have learned my craft in many ways, not the least copying paintings by masters of the past. In my formative years I made copies of  works by Picasso, Velazquez, Monet, Hopper, and certainly not least Francisco Goya. Manet was an enormous fan of Goya's work, as many of his successors have been. The above is my copy of a Goya portrait of about 1806, which I painted maybe twenty years ago or more. . 

Francisco Goya (1746-1828) was one of the painters I enjoyed learning about in college, but I had never seen one until my first encounter during a first visit to Museo del Prado in Madrid. The Prado (as it's commonly called) is the repository of the Spanish Royal Collection from centuries past as well as other masters and more recent additions. When I visited in the 1970s, unlike today, it was quiet and less crowded but there were still plenty of college kids on their backpack tours of Europe. Hippies or their look-alikes were omnipresent on the grounds, under the plane trees. I was in Madrid owing to military assignment and had taken an hour or two to investigate the Prado. Then as now, the Prado ranks in the top 5 or 10 art museums in the world, along with the Met, the Louvre, the Orsay, and others depending on your taste.  

I knew that the Prado has an enormous collection of works by the two particular Spanish masters everyone knows--Francisco Goya and Diego Velazquez. If you're interested in either of those two, the Prado should pull you in. But the museum also has important works by Durer, van Eyck, Titian, Bosch, and Rubens to name a few. Anyway, during that visit I found myself stopped, awestruck, several times, notably by "Descent from the Cross," by van Eyck (ca 1435), an astonishing former altarpiece (but that story is for another time). Goya was my interest that day, primarily because I had yet to meet Velazquez face to face, but I had known of Goya since adolescence. 

In one gallery, facing each other I found what are arguably Goya's most famous works, "La Maja Desnuda," (below) and "La Maja Vestida" (that is "The Nude Maja" and the "Clothed Maja,") each a portrait of the same sitter and supposedly commissioned by a wealthy patron. Scandalous in its day, the nude was at first hidden from view but later discovered by the Inquisition, which prompted Goya being interviewed by them.. He somehow escaped prosecution by the Church, but the painting was hidden away for at least twenty years. It was astonishing work, the sitter challenging us directly, her exquisite skin tones and anatomy equally masterful. I was enraptured by both works.

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, "La Maja Desnuda," oil on canvas, ca 1795-1800

Years later, when learning portraiture, I copied "La Senorita Sabasa Garcia," a lesser-known work, because I wanted to see a Goya portrait with fresh eyes. During that part of his career when he painted this beautiful young woman, Goya was court painter to the Spanish king, and much in demand. He seems to have seen her one day, put down his work in progress, and demanded to paint her immediately.. 

My copy is slightly smaller than the original, but the colors, especially skin tones, are comparable to the original. To make this copy I gridded a blown-up image and transferred it to my panel, then made a charcoal drawing. After fixing the drawing I painted the portrait directly, in several sessions, working carefully to match value, color and other details.

As a copy, this has never been shown or offered for sale. I happened onto it in storage a few days ago.  

Update on Corel Painter

Less than a year ago I began working with Corel Painter 2019, an update of Painter, a venerable program that has been available for a long time to graphic artists and others. As expected, the incredibly rich program gives opportunities for beautifully realized images. And also as expected, the sheer complexity of it makes progress toward mastery a difficult task.

"Joe," 2018, digital drawing

Painter began in the 1990s as one of the first digital drawing programs. Painter, though similar in some ways to other image editing programs, was actually intended as a way to emulate traditional media digitally. That is, to make the resultant image look like, say, an oil painting and furthermore to make the experience emulate the materials in question. That is, a "watercolor" digital tool behaves like a traditional loaded brush--the color spreads in a familiar way when the brush is touched to the "paper" surface. And the surface behaves like paper with different finishes and absorbencies.


Drawing and painting to learn the program has been a steady pursuit these past months, but most of my digital work has been with another program. Painter is useful though, because you can emulate any kind of image you'd like, from charcoal to graphite to watercolor, or oil paint. The drawing portion of the interface was simple enough to learn and combining a bit of knowledge of layers plus a fairly simple tool set made drawing come more quickly. The image to the right is a drawing of the famous 20th century illustrator, J.C. Leyendecker, done from a reference. The date of the drawing is only a few weeks after acquiring the program. Learning to emulate traditional oil painting is more difficult owing to the complexity of the traditional medium.

"American Sphinx," 2018, digital mixed media

If one is to emulate oil painting in pixels, there are properties of oil paint that need consideration. For example, oil paint is variably transparent and can be modified with various additives to be more or less so. Oil paint varies in thickness and in flow, depending on how it is compounded and on how it is thinned or thickened. Furthermore, oil paint behaves differently depending on the surface to which it is applied. And so on. Painter is said to be up to the complexity of oil painting,

The image to the above, a portrait of a 1950 Ford pickup truck I once owned, is a melding of drawing with dark colors and layering of additional colors using various tools in the Painter assortment (there are said to be more than 900). This is based on an old graphite drawing I've had in my studio for years. As effective as this image turned out to be, it certainly doesn't emulate an oil painting.

"Frozen Cherries," 2018

Learning Painter 2019 (indeed, any digital art program) requires repetition, practice and careful attention to detail. For me, first steps have involved relatively simple surfaces and brushes. Rather than go deeply into digital devices I chose to attempt to reproduce reference images without any particular emphasis on surface or brush modifications. While that approach can provide interesting images like the one to the right, learning to more closely emulate the look and feel of oils seemed worth the time, so I decided to take on making copies of masterworks of the past.

In Painter Part 4 I posted a progressive series of images made as I copied a portrait by Rubens of the Duke of Buckingham. Although I didn't post a final image, the progression posted shows remarkable similarity to the look of oil paintings. Below is a final iteration of the work shown here last summer. While the finish is considerably less than the Rubens original, since the goal was learning the program rather than faithfully copying the master, this study was very useful. Continuing in that vein--copying masterworks--will be the next step in learning to use Corel Painter 2019.

"The Duke of Buckingham (after Rubens)" 2019

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Previously
Corel Painter
Painter Part 2
Painter Part 3
Painter Part 4