Linear Perspective and the Underpainting

When I made the initial sketches for this paintings, I eyeballed the interior. It worked out well for a small scale painting, but when I transposed it onto the larger canvas, it was apparent that I'd need to be more exact, in the interior is to look like believable space. This painting has taken far longer to lay out than this first. Some people really enjoy thinking about angles, numbers and ratios, but I'm not one of them. Paolo Uccello would spurn his wife to work on perspective drawings. So I got out my ruler, T-square, and protractor to make the space work. In the photograph above you can see some of this work. Since the pencil lines don't show up very well I've drawn over the more important elements with oil.

I've based the space on the size of the figures. Though seated here, St. Kateri would stand 6.5 heads tall, befitting her diminutive stature. The girl stands 5 heads, and the boy 4. The vanishing point occurs at the top of St. Kateri's forehead; the beams of the roof radiate outward from here. The angle of the floor and benches however, radiate from a second vanishing point near St. Kateri's neck. This second vanishing point in necessary to prevent the "wide angle" lens effect that results from the vanishing point being located high in the composition, and the location of the figures in the foreground.

The posts of the structure are very useful for maintaining a consistent recession of the roof slats. Essentially I have two calibration points with which I can measure from for the roof slats. Not all of these measurements and details will be evident in the finished painting. It helps me to paint with confidence, knowing the structure that undergirds my marks is geometrically stable. The watercolor below by Sargent is very expressive, yet the painting sits atop a very precise and calculated drawing. The detailed perspective drawing is most visible in the steps and columns of the buildings.

For anyone interested in the contemporary and classical uses of linear perspective drawing, a great place to start reading is Deborah Rockman's Drawing Essentials. 

Head Study no. 7 and 9

Since we took so many shots at the photoshoot, I've had a lot of work to do in sorting through them all. So far I've gathered about a dozen that contain information useful to making the painting. Even still, there are a number of issues that are better worked out in paint. Questions like "How am I going to simplify the hair?" or, "What if I adjust her gaze downward?" are easier to resolve by taking a day to make a small painting. This way I have some idea of what I'm getting into when I begin the large canvas. Last week I painted a few studies of Lauren, Jadalyn, Tyler, and the longhouse interior. Below you can see some photographs of the progress on the 7th study I've painted of Lauren so far.

An article about me appeared in the Evangelist journal of the Diocese of Albany. Check it out here:
Siena Artist Paints St. Kateri Tekakwitha

Figure Study

I began a scaled study of the entire painting on Tuesday. The anticipated complexity of orchestrating a multi-figure composition has made me anxious to get some visual confirmation that I'm on the right track. It's been pretty successful. Only some small changes are needed in the beams of the building to better reflect the scale of the space. The image above was taken from a small study of Tyler that I've also been busy painting.

Back to the Drawing Board

Every painting I make begins with sketching, research, and preliminary compositions. So far I've probably drawn between 50-100 pencil sketches and painted two dozen different color compositions for the second painting. That sounds like a lot, but some of the sketches only take a couple minutes. A variety of sketches and compositions are visible in the photograph above. The best thing I learned in school was that my first ideas would always be pretty lousy. In the illustration classes I took we would receive an assignment on Thursday, critique comps on Tuesday, and look at the finished work two days later. My professors pushed the class the invest time in creative thinking early on, and to be continually questioning our assumptions.

I've gone back and reread some of the material I began studying this summer. Now that I'll be painting St. Kateri in Canada, I want to be sure I have all of the relevant details form that season of her life in my head. I'd hate for anything in the painting to go to waste, so I'm thinking about what sorts of things one would find inside a late 17th century longhouse. What sorts of symbols and patterns would have been incorporated into their dress? How can I use these elements to tell her story?

An example of this sort of questioning that went on with the first painting involved the lilies. We all have an image of a white lily in our heads, but these aren't native to the Mohawk Valley, and St. Kateri might have been puzzled to encounter a white lily. But it wasn't enough for me to just include native lilies; I was thinking about how many I ought to include and their arrangement. Since St. Kateri's conversion and expression of her faith has been interesting to me, I included a numerical relationship that is analogous between Haudenosaunee and Christian iconography. The number four signified wholeness to the Mohawk, just as the number three expresses unity and wholeness to Christians. Thus all of the lilies are grouped in fours and threes--which then add up to the number seven, an expression of wholeness and perfection common in the old testament.

Composing a Painting

© David Hockney

I had a question from a student about how I put this painting together, whether I had worked from a photograph, or from life. The answer is somewhere in between, and needs some framework to be fully understood.

Making a painting entirely from life was rare until the 19th century. Scholars believe that the incised marks that litter Caravaggio's canvasses as evidence that he departed from the usual conventions and worked from life. It was the pride of French realists such as Gericault or Corbet, that they often worked from life. The Impressionist Monet practically turned this into an obsession, switching canvases every fifteen minutes to remain faithful to changes in light. More recently Antonio Garcia Lopez has worked this way on his massive landscape paintings of Madrid. He typically works a few minutes a day for years on a single painting. There is a simplicity and directness about working from life. Some, such as John Ruskin, have attached a moral virtue to working from life. Yet often the scale, complexity, or even the weather preclude working from life. In such circumstances artists have turned to reference material in one form or another to guide their practice.

Being a recent invention, photography only became an important tool for painters in the past 150 years. Thomas Eakins worked out compositions and refined his drawing with reference to photographs. Prior to this, painters learned to work from their drawings. Sketches served as references. The trois crayons technique was uniquely suited for preserving value and temperature information from which a painter could develop a composition. Similar, artists would refer to the works of their colleagues in the form of drawing or paintings. When the original works were not accessible, prints would serve. One of the primary motives behind the formation of the European academy was to afford students access to visual libraries or the work of the Masters. Curators are fond of pointing out the borrowing of visual tropes on the didactics that line museum walls. Consider the similarities of Noah and Manoah in two these paintings by Natoire and Murat. Kehinde Wiley is a contemporary artist known for his appropriation of art history, as in this piece, which hangs in the Brooklyn Museum.

From the Renaissance to the Modern era, history painting, such as exemplified in the work Laurence Alma Tadema, or Charles Le Brun, occupied the highest position within the discipline of painting--as opposed to genre, still-life, landscape, or portraiture--because of the skill required to compose such a work. They required erudition, as well as the technical skill to orchestrate multiple studies into a single cohesive whole. The best painters in this vein cultivated a certain showmanship and sense for drama. They needed to be able to cut to the quick of a narrative and capture subtleties of emotion and body language. I would consider them more akin to film makers today. A good history painting tells a story in a single moment, but it wasn't possible to paint one in a single sitting, or even from a single reference. Artist brought in models, made sketches, and united these into a single image, much like David Hockney creates a single image from multiple photographs above.

I completed St. Kateri in God's Creation using such a methodology. I had the benefit of a model, and took a couple gigabytes worth of photographs. I worked from three distinct images to create her body--one for general body language, a second for the head, and a third for the lower limbs. I made use of additional sittings for the hands and eyes with a second model. The landscape came from sketches and photographs made in the Mohawk Valley and on campus at Siena. The ferns grow in a park near the river, but the lilies are located outside of the Sarazen Student Center. Through a careful study of light and color these disparate elements are united into a single, unified whole.

Planning the Final Composition

While the glue sizing is drying on the canvas, I've made some new sketches and adjustments to the composition. The coloring ended up a little on the yellow side. I found a lot of good ideas in the exhibition catalog from the Iroquois exhibition in Bonn that I obtained through the Interlibrary Loan service at Siena's Standish Library. I only have the book for a short time, so I've been trying to make good use of it. In the book there are great reproductions of period drawings and commemorative portraits by the English Court painter Johannes Verelst. It was from his paintings of the Four Mohawk Kings that I had the idea to place a turtle near St. Kateri's feet. This helps to reinforce her identity as Mohawk, and as a member of the Turtle Clan. 

I'm also forming a much better understanding of the Haudenosaunee dress during the late 17th century. The pencil sketch shows a patterned border and beadwork characteristic of the Mohawk.