Breaking Through: Step 2
It turns out I wasn’t on the right track, but after an actual phone conversation with the client I had a much better idea of what direction to work in. The Architect would be looking at the house from a vantage point across from the cliff, the house would be newly completed as opposed to under construction, and the scene would be set at sunrise to suggest a beginning and provide for more dramatic lighting. I worked out a new composition (below). I set the house in the distance, trying to keep the sense of height above the ocean, and put the Architect in the foreground, looking over at the house and sort-of gesturing to it. The pose was incredibly rudimentary, as was the design of the house, but I needed to know if I was getting any closer to what the client wanted.
The response was good. The client liked the general idea, but wanted the house to be more prominent. While I was working on the sketch below, I was beginning to recognize that I would have to eventually come up with a design for the house. This version is drastically different from the one we finally settled on, but there are a few elements that survived through to the finished painting.
Closer. The pose was now more of an issue. The gesture was, admittedly, a little vague. After some discussion, we hit upon the idea of the Architect holding the plans for the house to indicate both his having designed it, and its recent completion. I did a very similar thing in A New Height.
At this point, most of the exact details of the composition were still very rough, the house had not been designed, I had no real reference material for the cliffs, and I was working without a model for the figure. Although I can often move forward with an idea this way, a clearer picture of the final painting forming in my mind while some very general spatial issues are worked out in the thumbnail sketches, all the client had to go on at this point was the drawing above. Now that the overall layout of the painting was beginning to concretize, his major concerns turned to some of the specific details. The house still needed to be bigger, the Architect needed to be more physically fit, more muscular and represent a more mature age closer to 40 than 18, and the house needed work. I was sent a few images of houses designed by John Lautner, a student of Frank Lloyd Wright’s, and a favorite architect of the client’s. After at least a dozen iterations, I sent off the sketch below.
