So today I thought I’d post this commission of the Baroque composer Henry Purcell. Yeah, that’s right someone commissioned me to do a portrait of a British composer from the Baroque era. It’s a first and it was a fun one and I’d happily do more. Just Sayin’. Anyway this painting was commissioned partly to be the avatar image for a new podcast that will be produced by a Winnipeg based professional choir that specializes performing Renaissance, Indigenous-Infused and contemporary music, called Camerata Nova. They are interesting and unique as hell, you should check them out. Full disclosure, my wife is president of the board of this choir, but the decision to commission me to do the painting was made independent of the board by the organization’s Executive Director, so no nepotism to see here!
Anyway, now that that’s out of the way, I wanted to talk about brushstrokes. You see I’ve been following a painter by the name of Jennifer Gennari, (@jen_art on Instagram). There’s a good chance you follow her too because she has 290,000 plus followers. Anyway, Gennari does fantastic portraits of animals. Now they are beautiful to look at, but speaking as a painter what I really appreciate about them is the visible brushstrokes. One of the things I love about realism in painting, is that from far away you might see something that looks almost photographic in its detail but as you get closer you begin to realize that what you’re seeing is an illusion created with paint. And sometimes you look at it and think that the paint is so luscious and beautiful that the image doesn’t even seem to matter that much anymore. I suppose if that weren’t the case, abstract painting wouldn’t even exist, but I digress.
Gennari is particularly skilled with the brushstrokes, because when you focus on them you see that she hasn’t really painted fur. The brushstrokes don’t do what you’d expect them to do if she was simply painting fur. Sometimes they don’t even follow in the direction that you’d expect fur to ‘flow’. And yet from a small photograph, or I presume (not having seen her work in person) from far away the illusion of fur is unmistakable. Amazing.
So as you can imagine, one of the things I’ve been wanting to do is get some of these visible brushstrokes into my work. I don’t want this to be my signature, like it is Gennari’s, I just want it to be a tool that I can have waiting for me when I feel like I need it. In my work I think it would be nice to sometimes see the push and pull between flat surfaces and areas where the brushwork is visible. I really like playing with the modernist idea of flatness with a kind of post-modern ‘anything goes’ approach to painting. So it won’t surprise you if I tell you that I’ve experimented with a variety of brushes to get something approaching the effect that Gennari gets in her spectacular portraits.
Cut to a couple of weeks ago when I decided to buy a few of Windsor and Newton’s highest-end professional brushes. Now I can’t tell you why I had never tried these before. I mean, they are expensive, but they’re not that expensive. But one reason is simply that my local art supply store doesn’t carry them, so that would explain it I suppose. The weekend before last my wife and I decided to go to Michael’s (before the next lockdown starts) and I got a few of them there. Lo and behold, check out this detail of the painting! Visible brushstrokes and just when they were really needed! They are so appropriate for this very painting, especially in the hair.
So that’s it, that’s the post. I was just so excited about this, I had to write about it. I’ve also done a study of a racoon since I got the brushes, which I’ll share at some point. Maybe next week in an exciting follow-up post entitled: Dammit, I Just Wanted to Bore My Reader(s?) with More Brushwork Shite! Don’t get too excited, I might just come up with another idea, who the hell knows?