Painting Humans

Portrait. Oil on Canvas

30 by 40 cms.

1.

I’m holding a pallet correctly for the first time in my life, thumb through the hole, the way it was meant to be held. With the same hand I’m also holding a handful of brushes, one brush per color block, trying not to get them mixed up or drop them, separating the light from the dark.

We are advised to sketch faintly, making such light HB pencil marks with the pencil that the naked eye can barely see them, and once we start painting, to use minuscule amounts of paint.

This, our teacher promises, is how you coax ideas and flat shapes into form.

2.

Our teacher begins our second class by talking about Monet, the master of values, and about chroma, value and hue. Back at our easels, he encourages us to do one stroke per feature, as few strokes as possible, and to start with the biggest shapes first, with the biggest brushes we can manage. More than objects, we are painting the way light pours onto objects.

He visits us one by one, first of all examining our attempts in silence, as he tries to work out the way to help us most. I have over-darkened one of the model’s legs, and made the skin of one hand too yellow. Hands, like all extremities, are redder because of the blood flowing there. I need to go more slowly, mixing each color tone separately.

I work on for three hours, enjoying the struggle, at the end rewarded by my best portrait so far. An even greater reward is the enhanced way in which I see the world on leaving class, the tumbling opulence of gray clouds with dazzling white edges, the breathtaking spire of a church, bathed in the day’s dying light; gold and silver and pale blue.