As regular readers of this blog will already know, it is extremely unusual for me to utilise images of my own work in these articles; this time however, an easy way to illustrate what we are discussing today is in fact the use of some readily available images, all photos of details from my paintings (which is not to imply anything regarding their quality). That said, what I would like us to consider here is the approach to the rendering of the hand as experienced by a painter ... this painter! I have chosen to focus on hands as, together with the human face or head, they are widely regarded as some of the most difficult things to paint; they are certainly not easy but, then again, anything can be painted badly!
The image above is taken from a painting I made in 1984, from a live model - that is, not from a photo - and prior to going to Italy in 1989. My knowledge of the representation of hands, speaking as a painter, was based of course on direct observation of the living model, and on what I had gleaned from looking at photographs in art books. In this particular example, partially successful, it would seem that one of the principal concerns was the underlying bone structure of the hands, an element sometimes difficult to perceive if one is working from a photograph. The red outline is interesting as it reveals an awareness of Florentine linearity.
This detail, above, of a drawing, is taken from a preparatory sketch, again from the live model, while living in Italy, in Florence to be precise - a not unimportant consideration here - and demonstrates two things: first, the influence of Renaissance drawing experienced while living in Florence, especially the sinopia drawing (a reddish brown) discovered under frescos which had been lifted off their walls; and secondly, that the drawing has been 'squared-up' in anticipation of its transfer to a canvas. Squaring-up was, is, one of several methods used by painters to enlarge and transfer their drawings, more-or-less accurately, onto a normally larger wall, panel or canvas.
This detail from a quite big painting is an example of hands copied from a newspaper photograph, in this case, of an exhausted footballer at the end of a game. It illustrates one of the problems associated with copying from photographs, that is, the inherent distortion created by the lens of the camera. Here for instance, the hands appear, at least to me, as slightly too big for the size of the man's head; a problem perhaps not immediately obvious but nevertheless still there. This painting was made after my return from Italy and shows incidentally the influence, again, of those wonderful sinopia drawings which were uncovered during restoration work on the many frescos in Florence, especially following the devastating flood there in 1966. Those drawings seemed so successful despite the fact that they were never meant to be seen by the public, due to being ultimately hidden once the intonaco (or, final layer of plaster) was applied and the colours added into that. As you can see, there is no colour on this figure, only a developed drawing in a sinopia-like colour.
Again, another detail from a painting, a portrait from the live model, done after the Italian experience. This one has been included to point up the influence of Florentine Renaissance painting (15th century); what I would like readers to notice is the relationship of the colours. This period of painting, particularly in Florence, can be generally characterised as comparatively high-toned and heavily dependent on outline drawing - as opposed to Venetian 'plastic' colour (discussed below). The normally high-tone of the colours, especially in religious painting, contrasts with the later Roman and Neapolitan Baroque (more later). Note that despite no great tonal change, the hand manages to stand out quite well from the 'background' red garment; the hand is lighter in tone but nothing like what would occur in Italy in the 17th century.
This and the next two images are much more recent examples of hands painted by yours truly. Once more, a detail showing a hand drawn from a photograph; again, in my opinion, the hand is slightly too large in relation to the face; as stated earlier, some distortion, often of scale, is a common problem when depending on photographs. The benefit on the other hand (no pun intended), is that the painter does not need to have the live model in front of him or her and can work away without being worried about the model becoming tired; one can also revise and revise as many times as one may wish because the photo is completely static and unchanging: the pose and the light are fixed.
A detail of the hand of one of the two people depicted, from photos, in this large work. This painting was quite problematic because the two models were not photographed together and this led to difficulties with the composition and with certain details, including this hand. It was in fact photographed several times, that is, at least three different people offered their left hand as a model! In the end, it is not really in proportion with the rest of that figure. However, it does, like the preceding image, illustrate a factor mentioned earlier, the difference between Renaissance lighting and that of the Baroque period. These two photos show quite clearly a distinct difference between the contrast of tone in the fourth image (above) and in these later two; in the latter cases, the contrast is now between rich bright light and various much darker colours or tones; apart from a change in the religious situation in Europe - the Reformation and the Counter-reformation - the supposed influence of the manner of modelling with the paint, that is to say, with colour, (what I have called 'plastic' colour) in Venetian painting also contributed to a shift away from the relatively clear descriptive nature of Florentine drawing-based painting to the 'pastosità' of Roman Baroque.
'Pasta' (from which 'pastosità' derives) in Italian means 'paste' and, so far as this word applies to painting, it signifies 'impasto' (from the same root), a thickish, textured quality which is quite different from the almost 'colouring-in' use of paint in Florentine (and other) work of the 15th century; being dependent on the linear nature of drawing, Florentine painting was fundamentally constructed on a base of clear, distinct outline. Venetian painting however, while also initially similarly dependent on line, developed, in the hands of a Titian or a Veronese or a Tintoretto, a style in which the colour, not entirely independently of line naturally, did the drawing so to speak, as well as the modelling; and this mode of working is visible in the texture of the paint; that is, the paint, the stuff itself, is expressive, not merely 'colouring-in'.
All this to explain a shift away from that light Florentine clarity towards, under the influence of a much greater exposure to and familiarity with Baroque painting, a more 'painterly' mode of the modelling of forms. I no longer make preliminary drawings but rather sketch the figures, whether from life or from a photograph, directly onto the canvas; this inevitably means more corrections of placement and scale during the course of the work but it also means, at least for me, a greater freedom of execution and, for certain passages, of imagination.
Finally, another detail from a large painting, also made with the use of photographs. This image demonstrates the influence of the darker, so-called 'chiaroscuro' technique developed by Caravaggio (not invented by him): the almost net contrast between often isolated brightly-lit areas and much darker ones, especially the backgrounds. Here, the highlights on the hand are the 'whitest' or lightest areas in the whole painting, visually pushing the hand forward, both as a description of space - the part 'closest' to us - and as a focal point.
