When looking at John Singer Sargent’s “effortless” portraits, I often wonder how long he actually spent on each. He wanted the painting to look fresh, with an economy of brush strokes, so a painting that looks like it was done in one sitting could have taken many. He’s said to have scraped off hours, days even months worth of work because there was too much evidence of his struggle. Here’s a painting that Sargent did in a single hour. Aha. This is helpful.
“A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth.” – John Singer Sargent
Yesterday I posted an introduction to the most unusual art class I’ve ever been a part of. I talked about Cezanne’s approach to recording a scene by using short lines distributed across the page, and how this can be used to integrate abstraction, time, space, and movement in a piece. One of the students in …
Over 4,000 30SAL Artworks posted to Padlet and Instagram In January, artists all over the globe sketched, inked, sculpted, collaged, and animated their way through our 30 Day Creative Challenge. Challenges exercised a wide array of artistic skills, including observation, composition, sequence, see & respond, vocabulary, and transcriptions. If you think “Uh… January was a …
Helen Rae (1938-2020)“Her drawings, in colored pencil and graphite, are immediately striking for their vivid imagery, resonant use of color and innovative reworking of source material. Using fashion advertisements as a point of departure for otherworldly journeys into the subconscious, Helen transforms the original images into something uniquely expressive, which possess a strange beauty and …
JS Sargent: 1 Hour Portrait
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John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Eleanora Duse
When looking at John Singer Sargent’s “effortless” portraits, I often wonder how long he actually spent on each. He wanted the painting to look fresh, with an economy of brush strokes, so a painting that looks like it was done in one sitting could have taken many. He’s said to have scraped off hours, days even months worth of work because there was too much evidence of his struggle. Here’s a painting that Sargent did in a single hour. Aha. This is helpful.
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