Getting ready

Someone remarked to me that they liked the way I recount the process of making a picture. This one carries the marks of its evolution on the canvas. I started this on News Year's Eve and worked on it intermittently until 11 January, so it was not the realisation of a vision as i usually strive for. but a composition that developed over that time. The core idea was to portray a man and woman getting ready to go out and celebrate the change of year. He is in the trousers of a dinner suit, dress shirt and bow tie and she is modelling her little black dress, hence "the lbd" in the title.

In line with my recent practice the image originally contained large areas of complemetary mass colour. I intended the figures to register as silhouette, top lit, so that the heads and shoulders would be brightly coloured and other parts would be in shadow.

The main area at the top was a light yellow, ochre mixed with Naples Yellow Light. There was a darker band of pure ochre at the bottom of the canvas and a bar of brown/ochre for the man to be seated on. I did not like the way that read. Maybe the figures were too figurative: presenting the dress depended on fairly conventional drafting. Maybe the area of light yellow was too large or there was not enough animation in the colours. So day by day I explored ways of modifying this.

Firstly I had to accept that rather than having a single pictorial field the two figures would be "in the foreground" and therefore the rest of the field would be "background"... space had been allowed in. Next, I had to accept that the seat had to be come a thing, a furnishing. So I draped it, shaped the drape here and there and put in some stripes of colour, to suggest a throw. I introduced shadow areas at the supposed edge of the throw with the ochre at the bottom of the canvas and with the undersides of his trousers. I made these the same Prussian Blue as his trousers so that a new shape began to emerge.

I felt that the light yellow area was too large in relation to the figures, so I decided to make it into a "wall", which I broke up by chalking in two rectangles to represent paintings. I use chalk because I can wipe it away as I paint. Within their framed areas I inserted additional figures, basing them on paintings that hung in our house but without going to look at them in case they became quotations. What I wanted was visual interest such as Matisse got from showing his sculptures and paintings breaking up the uniformly coloured space around his principal subjects, goldfish in bowl or seated/reclining figures.

I was still not satisfied. As the figures had a lot of blue in them I introduced a pale blue chair on the left, now an L shaped blue tone mass was established.

My almost final move was to emphasise the location of the light source touching the upper part of the bodies by painting in a pale blue stripe the with of the two heads. I then painted a dark green over the area either side and dry brushed some of the same green over the "paintings" on the "wall". In all of this I deliberately left some of the light yellow under paint show through. I then revisited the edges of the figures with a violet line on the left and under side of their limbs and a chrome yellow line on the right and top. Done!

Each of these moves were contemplated overnight at the end of a day's painting.