This kind of work is by far the most difficult, in my opinion. I would always rather have some direct reference, either live or photographic. However, I find that quite often, my compositions require either architecture or landscape that is simply not available. This is why, over the coming years, in addition to constant study of the figure, I will be working hard on landscape studies, architectural studies and still life painting. The more familiar an artist becomes with various subjects, the more effectively they can be integrated into larger compositions. I am really pleased with the way these cliffs turned out, but in ten years, I better be able to do better or I am stagnating as an Artist.

Once I had the canvas sketched, I began working on the sky.  The idea was to set the scene at sunrise, symbolizing a beginning.  I spent a fairly long day blocking in the sky in the image below.  I was referring to a set of photos I took in St. George, UT a few years earlier, and thought the colors and angles would create a real dramatic backdrop for the painting.

The next morning, I walked into my studio and realized the sky was far too busy.  There would be so much going on with the cliffs, water, and house, that it would be overkill.  Besides, who needs all the negative press associated with one of their paintings causing a series of seizures in unsuspecting viewers?  Not me.  I spent the next two days re-painting the sky.  This is how it finally turned out.  Did I mention these images were dark and grainy?  When you see the photos of the finished painting, you will see what I mean.  Oh, yeah…did I also mention that I had a sizable number of images vanish into the ether of a computer meltdown?  Consequently, the water is also finished in this second image.

Ok, exactly like that.  At last I had final approval on the composition, and was ready to actually begin the painting.  The first step was to stretch and prime the canvas, which was to be 55X34.  This sounds like an odd size, but it was based both on measurements of the space in which the painting would eventually hang, and on the Fibonacci ratio (A.K.A. the golden mean or Devine Proportion) of 1.618 to 1. For those of you who may be interested, the Fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers given by starting with a zero and a one, and then adding the two consecutive numbers to get the next one.  0+1 is 2, 1+2 is 3, 2+3 is 5, 8, 13, 21, and so on.  The result of dividing two consecutive numbers in the series converges on 1.61803 as the numbers get larger.  This ratio is also the only number that differs from its inverse by exactly 1 (1/1.61803=0.61803).  So there’s today’s fun math fact.  Of more interest aesthetically is that the ratio shows up everywhere in the real world from the spirals in nautilus shells and pineapple skins to the relative lengths of the sections of a finger or of the upper arm to the lower arm.  And the Greeks thought it was pretty cool. Cool enough to declare it the most aesthetically pleasing ratio around.   I’m not claiming that I believe there is any superiority of this proportion in putting together a composition, but I do find it interesting. Incidentally, the horizon line is also placed based on a multiple of the same ratio.  I should mention that I didn’t set out to design the composition based on the Golden Mean, but when I checked the proportions in my comp sketch, they were so close that I decided to tweak them into compliance for the final painting. 

The next step was to find a model.  Oddly enough, after a few weeks of looking specifically for someone who fit the bill with no luck, the Greeks became involved in the painting for the second time.  Sort of.  Sara and I were enjoying a lovely lunch in a little Greek restaurant in Salt Lake, when Sara suddenly pointed out that there was a guy standing in line that looked exactly like the figure in my sketches.  Being my best model recruitment agent (and being a woman and therefore 75 to 80 percent less likely to get maced when approaching potential models), she immediately cornered the guy and made the pitch.  Not only was he interested in modeling, but coincidentally, was an actual architect and volunteered to bring a set of blueprints to the scrap shoot for use as a prop.

I put together this little combined image of the approved composition and the new house design to give myself a reference and the model some idea of what I was after.

Once I had all the reference photos, I sat down and worked out the final details of the composition incorporating the actual figure, all the perspective work on the house, and the final layout of the cliffs.  The image below is a scan of the resulting scale drawing which I then transferred to the canvas. 

This one was pretty stylized, and very angular.  Maybe a bit too futuristic…but I kind of liked it.  A lot of these design features ended up in the final house in one form or another.

I think this one was mainly a counter to the sharp angle of its predecessor.  It felt a little like a concert hall to me for some reason.

Here the Architect makes a showing.  There were a lot of things about the house that the client really liked, including the general layout, the curved sections of glass and the lower left side built into the face of the cliff.  But, the pointed peaks of the roof, which I included in an attempt to mirror some of the shapes in the cliffs, just weren’t working for him.  In retrospect, I agree.  He also wanted to lose the pointy prominence of the cliff face centered under the house, and bring a little more of the living space down the right side of the rock.

This is a slightly better version of the previous design.  I really liked the angled balconies on the lower portion of this one.  It still needs some of the changes mentioned above, including the roof sections which I believe were occasionally being referenced by this point as the ‘tongues’.

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.

Many of you may be aware that I spent a large portion of last year working on a commission painting of an architect. For various reasons neither the Cordair Gallery nor myself have not posted any but the most cursory, compositional images of this painting…until now. In this installment of the Artist’s Studio, I will be discussing the creation of this piece from its first conception in late spring of 2007 to its completion in October.

First, a little disclaimer. Last November, I had what could be politely described as a minor disagreement with my computer. Had I written this paragraph then, I’m sure the FCC would have had several full-time censors pouring over it with red ink before it met even the internet’s standards for civilized language. Even now, the details of the altercation are not pleasant for me to reflect on, and I have no reason to inflict then on any of you. Why then, you may wonder, would I bring it up at all? Only because in the midst of the chaos I lost a large number of image files, including about half my record of this painting’s progress. So, if you find yourself in the least bit irritated with any minor gaps in my commentary, or with the sometimes incredibly poor quality of some of the included images, feel free to fire off a polite letter to the good people at Microsoft and HP who helped to make it all possible.

And yes, I should have backed up my computer.

Back to the painting. I think much of the interesting work on this piece happened long before I put any paint on the canvas. Since the painting was a commission, and the client had a very specific but difficult to articulate idea of what he wanted, the composition underwent a considerable evolution during the planning stages.

When the gallery first approached me about the idea, I was told they had a client who wanted to commission a painting of an architect and his first great house which would be on a cliff, looking over the ocean. It would represent the first breakthrough creation of a brilliant career. To me this immediately suggested the more general theme of creation. I was also given some rough measurements of the space where the painting would eventually hang. I wanted to give a sense of the height of the cliffs, show enough detail of the house to hint at its overall style, and show something of the intimate relationship between the Architect and his creation. I came up with the following four compositional sketches, and sent them to the client to see if I was on the right track. You will see the obvious influence of Frank Lloyd Wright in the design of the house. Less obvious is the fact that I was thinking of the house as being under construction.

And here comes what is probably the most tedious part of the entire painting. The guitar neck. But first…

The head and tuning pegs. Why? Because, frankly, I’m not excited about jumping right into the neck and frets and strings and all those nasty little things that have to be all aligned just right and spaced just slightly further apart and turn at just a tad of an angle each time in order to accord with the slightly tilted angle in which he’s holding the instrument. No, for some reason it seems more agreeable to bite off the other end of the guitar first, like an old man easing into a nice steaming hot bath of natural spring water. At least, that’s what I tell myself. Okay, so here we go.

In painting the lower three nylon strings on the guitar, I mix a little bit of the wood color into a gray color to give them a slight sense of transparency, while I do not do this for the top three. If you’ve seen a classical guitar before, you’ll know what I’m talking about, but it’s as simple as that. High contrast elements like brass and lacquered wood (without the wood grain, that is) are probably easier to paint than some might expect. Just get a couple basic colors in the right place, add a couple clean highlights and very dark darks and *hey presto* you usually end up with something that looks pretty nice. I cannot say the same thing for wild animals. This is probably why I am not known as “Damon Denys, painter of wild animals”, and you cannot buy embellished prints of armadillos and possums at a customized personal gallery of mine in your local shopping mall. Yes, I’m sure this is the exact reason for that…

Anyhoo, on to the dreaded neck. My first task is to paint all the little islands of exposed neck wood that are bordered by the fret markers and the strings, as you can see in the second photo included. There are a lot of these showing; 92, in case you were wondering. I’m careful to keep them all as straight and in order as far as their logical adjustments of spacing and perspective demand. They are not all perfect, of course, but I want them to be as close as I can at this point to save more work. I wait for this paint to dry so that I can then glaze over it with semi-opaque colors that are slightly adjusted from the original. This is to show the mild reflective quality of the wood on the neck. This is done before painting the fret markers and strings, because it’s a *whole* lot easier not having to worry about getting any of this paint on top of those elements. This effect, as well as the completed neck, can be seen in the final image.

And while this is not the best image of the finished painting, I’m sure the gallery will have a very nice image of the painting online soon for you to enjoy.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this stroll down painting lane, and I look forward to doing it again in the future. A very pleasant 2008 to you all, and don’t forget to send your orders for possum paintings directly to the gallery.

Cheers.

Well, I’d hoped that I could get a slightly better photo of the classical guitar, but I got very dark, overcast clouds instead and this is the best my artificial lighting could achieve, I’m afraid.  At least you can see the different color of blue I’ve used in his shirt, and how its higher intensity is meant to seize more attention than the blue areas around it.

There’s not a lot I can say about the process of painting the shirt that you probably haven’t heard already, but I can probably add that I like the idea of the shirt giving him a more casual look.  At other times I might have given him a more formal sort of attire, to give a sense of professionalism to him, but in this case I want his precise nature to seem purely natural; the by-product of his mindset and state of being.  It doesn’t really change the theme, but it adds just a slight shade of Z-axis dimension to it that I like.

Here comes the clutch moment of the painting.  I need the figure’s expression to show both concentration and pleased, subtle confidence.  Most of this can be communicated in the eyes and mouth, since he is more or less completely at rest and has no reason to have a strong expression on his face.  Of course, I also like the idea of having him wearing glasses, since glasses are a very clear and obvious reiteration of the theme of precision.  This means that his eyes will be somewhat obscured through the lenses, and I’m taking advantage of the opportunity to include a mild distortion of his face through them, which is a fun optical effect to add a little interest.

The face, for working purposes, I treat as being divided into sections.  The first is his forehead, bordered by his hair and the top of the frames of his glasses.  The second is his glasses and eyes.  And the third is everything under his glasses, including his nose and mouth.  Thinking about approaching the face in this way is not only practical, allowing me to stop work before the whole face is finished if I happen to see the “Damon Alert” symbol suddenly being projected onto the clouds from city hall and have to hurry away, but also helps reduce the daunting feeling of having to get the whole face and expression just right in one fell swoop.

I more or less put in the basic dark areas first, add the midtones, and then zap the lighter parts of the face in last, with the knowledge that I’ll be going back over later with some semi-opaque glaze work to help blend things more smoothly and do some final, more subtle shaping of the features.  I also make sure that the darkest tones of the eyes seen through the lenses are a little lighter than they would be normally, to help with that feeling that there is something between us and them, kind of like a very mild filter.  The effect is subtle, but I think it helps.

My next task is to put in the dark region marked by the figure’s trousers, which serves as a reference point for work on the figure and guitar by establishing the darkest darks that will be present in the painting.  Even before this area is officially completed, just getting in the general darks helps me to control the contrast I use in the central area of the figure and guitar.  In this way, the lower left quadrant is a sort of anchor for the painting.

Hair often presents a slight amount of complexity in our far-to-near approach to painting the elements in the work, because while much of the hair overlaps the face, some of it also ends up being “behind” it, as in the case of the neck or ear, etc.  If I paint hair on top of an unpainted skin area, and that hair dries before I can start the flesh underneath it, the result can be an awkward hard line that can detract from the visual harmony of the painting.  To prevent this, I mix a simple, general flesh tone and paint in the areas of flesh that make contact with the hair.  This allows me to get an even blend, avoid hard lines, and also come right back on top of these unfinished flesh areas when I start on the face properly.

The arms and neck I’m able to get in, but the face will have to wait for another day, which is why this bordering technique is useful.  For the exact same reason, I also paint in the part of the black glasses frame that goes under the hair.  For good measure, I also quickly block in the face of the guitar in preparation for putting a wood grain pattern on top of it later.