Stumbling and then Getting Back Up

The last couple of weeks have been an exercise in frustration. I decided to tackle sketching portraits and figures and have been attempting to get face shapes and body positions down on paper with limited success. Usually fine detail work excites me but lately my pencil sketches have fallen flat. I look at the results and my people look odd to me. Eyes are skewed, lips are droopy, noses too large. I recognize I have a long way to go here, and it is daunting.

So today, I tried something else. Finding my surroundings less than inspiring, I took a look through my art books and other materials for something to duplicate, thus taking the onus off me to create the subject and allowing me to focus instead on the artist's technique. 

And Voila, there I am again, the world narrows and the edges get fuzzy and I am lost in what I love to do. I chose to duplicate John Singer Sargent's 'Simplon Pass: Reading' which I found in the pages of a calendar. I love working with gouache paint. It give you the filmy and loose transparency of watercolour but allows itself to be controlled. And then there is the benefit of opaque white, which isn't available with watercolour. Gouache is chalky and a bit grainy, but I love that feeling of having something you can control and lift.

It is a work in progress, but I am loving the result. Happily, I feel some success again. Attempting to follow the way Sargent moved his brush and to re-create points he emphasized humbles me. What at first glance looks like it is haphazard and accidental is truly purposeful. So, Portraits: you can wait a bit until I am ready to bang my head against a brick wall some more. I am having too much fun here.