Quent Cordair Fine Art

I had so much fun painting this hand. Now that the new technique is getting more familiar, I am able to concentrate less on the technical side of things, and more on the aesthetic. I have always enjoyed painting hands. I find them to be often just as expressive as faces. This one was also lit in a very beautiful way, and so gracefully draped across the foot. As with the other flesh in this painting, I started out with an under-painting which was allowed to dry, and then came back with the flesh-tones, working into a thin layer of oil and burnt umber. In between those two steps, I decided to begin dropping the background into place. Having been on a bit of a concrete bender lately, I dove right in. I was already really pleased with the floor, and was limited by the reflections as to the basic set-up of the wall behind the figure. As soon as I finished it, however, I disliked it completely. It was far too busy and flat. I would eventually paint over it. At this point I was also beginning to think about what would be outside the windows.

Before moving on to the over-painting on the legs, which would represent a very large area of uninterrupted flesh-tones painted in a still somewhat experimental technique, I decided to paint the polished concrete floor on which the figure is sitting. This was pretty straight forward, as I had really good scrap of the concrete surface (though in the photos the surface consisted of a concrete coffee table, and I had to extrapolate the effect to the edges of the composition). Once that was complete, I started work on the legs, the right (and in this composition, the most distant and simplest) first. By the time I had finished work on the right leg, using the same basic technique as I had on the right arm, I was feeling much more confident with the new technique. In fact, the left leg, which should have been the most difficult part of the painting, was finished in only two six hour sessions, and turned out to be what I still consider to be some of my finest flesh painting to date. Even the foot went smoothly, the complex anatomical layout having been completely taken care of by the under-painting. So far, I’m loving this technique.

My next move was to do a little more under-painting, this time for the legs. I worked on the figure’s right leg first, the one in the back mostly obscured by skirt and the left hand. I started off fighting the paint a bit as I had with the arm. I was having difficulty controlling the transparency of the burnt umber mixture as I blended it into the thin layer of turpentine and burnt umber I had applied to the whole area. Keep in mind… this is a technique I had only used twice before. Once on the arm, that had been equally difficult, and once on the face, that had been an experiment and somewhat of an accidental discovery. By the time I started in on the under-painting for the left leg, however, I had figured out a few things. I did away with the first wash coat entirely and painted by building up areas of darker value with gradual additions of pigment. It was slow going at first, but the control was incomparably better and I got a lot faster. The left leg ended up taking roughly two thirds as long to block in as the right, even given its larger area and higher level of complexity.

By now the arm was dry enough for the over-painting. As I had with the face, I started by applying a very thin, transparent and almost colorless wash of burnt umber, turpentine and linseed oil over the entire arm. Then I mixed a string of flesh tones from titanium white, burnt umber, yellow ochre and cadmium red, and gradually worked the colors into the glaze layer, allowing the paint to remain translucent in the transition to the shadow areas and almost transparent in the shadows themselves often leaving the under-painting showing through. Only in the most direct light did I put down an opaque layer of paint. The glaze made blending exceedingly easy, and I was able to adjust the hues and chroma (color intensity) of the flesh tones on-the-fly right on the canvas as I went along. It was a little harried at first, but good practice, especially as I knew I would have to eventually do the same thing with the large section of continuous skin on the left leg, and it would have to be done in one sitting before the glaze layer began to tack up…around 7 hours at the outside. No pressure.

But first the under-painting on the legs would have to dry. In the mean time I worked on the skirt. The light shining through the fabric made for really fun painting. I started in the back (in relation to the picture plane) where the effect of the translucence was the most pronounced.

Next I moved on to the front section, starting on the right to keep my hand away from the fresh paint as I moved along.

And finally I finished with the hem along the edge of the skirt.

In order to work as efficiently as possible, taking into consideration that all of the flesh tones would have to be painted in two passes with the first pass completely dry before beginning the second, and that it is almost always simpler to paint those areas that are furthest back in the picture plane first, I elected to paint the under-painting for the right arm next, and then paint the shirt while I waited for that to dry.

The under-painting for the arm was a simple enough project, but its size combined with my relative inexperience with the technique meant that it took most of a full work day to finish. The good news is I learned a lot about controlling the transparency of the paint, and keeping the surface smooth in the process, and later areas of under-painting went much faster.

Over the next few days, I worked on the shirt. Moving in a general right to left direction (I’m left handed… this way I’m less likely to set my hand down into freshly applied paint) I painted sections of the shirt, trying to finish each day along a large wrinkle or break-line so that the next day’s work would join up seamlessly.

Here is a better shot of the finished shirt:

Sometimes a minor mistake or setback can lead to a major breakthrough.

From the beginning, this painting was going to be all about the figure. The background would be almost inconsequential, aside from adding special context and justifying the lighting, so I planned to put an unprecedented amount of work into the subtleties of the facial features and flesh tones. I wanted to work on refining the two-stage glazing method I have been experimenting with, where a complete monochromatic under-painting is then gradually worked over with the other flesh tones. Usually, I would have tried to complete the area in one sitting, blending the flesh-tones into the still wet under-painting. This time though, as I was working on the burnt umber and ivory black under-painting, I discovered some problems with my drawing, and ended up spending the entire day carefully refining the likeness of the face. By the time I was happy with it, the paint was already tacking up. This first image is of the under-painting as I left it.

At this point the painting was set aside while I worked on Monna Vanna and prepared for the QCFA Arts Cruise. While on the cruise, I received the final go-ahead on a commission for BB&T which I began work on as soon as I returned home. So this canvas sat around in my studio in this state for more than 2 months before I got back to it. Needless to say, by that time the under-painting was quite dry.

I wasn’t quite sure how I would proceed. I considered an opaque over-painting which would have completely covered the likeness I had worked so carefully on, and I even though about removing the under-painting and starting over. At the last minute, I decided to try a variation of a technique I used to get some of the atmospheric effects in First Heat. I painted a very thin glaze layer of burnt umber in oil over the entire under-painting, and painted the flesh tones into that. I couldn’t believe how well it worked. The paint was not only easier to control, but the polished under-painting allowed me to focus more on the flesh-tones. Even more to my delight, the transparency of the over-painting gave the skin a wonderful luminosity I hadn’t been able to achieve before.

I experimented with a similar technique while painting the hair, but with rather poor results. This second image shows the finished face, and hair that has been newly re-painted.