Self Portrait

Holy crap. I am a slow painter. I have been working on multiple canvases for several months and I’m not close to being done with any of them. I tried changing pace so I could actually finish something and started an egg tempera study of my living room on a larger panel. That was taking forever too. So I started this self-portrait study on a tiny 9” x 12” panel and somehow it still took me forever. Gah. At this rate I’m never going to finish anything.

My intention was to use egg tempera, which for me feels more like drawing than oil painting, and tackle this using what I’m calling the Palermo technique. I just coined that. I thought a lot about Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach, and Lucian Freud while working. These are artists in London in the second half of the 20th century. I admire how much time they spent looking, and how willing they were to change things as they observed the need.

Nick Palermo was my favorite teacher at RISD and he taught figure drawing. One of the biggest things I took from his class was an approach I think of as a never-ending series of corrections. He’d say, “Get the whole figure on the page in 20 seconds.” Then, at least for me, the rest of the drawing, even if it was an hour pose, became a constant process of adjusting. Over time the model would shift a little, and the point was to follow it. Even if you had a great drawing of an arm, if the model’s arm drooped an inch, you followed it down. From what I’ve read about the British artists I mentioned, they worked the same way in their drawings and paintings. I have a deep admiration for that mindset.

this video shows the process I took to paint this self portrait

I made a video showing the steps I took to get this to “done.” I’d guess I spent 30–40 hours sketching my face over and over, just trying to find the right overall pose. After that, it was small changes, plus values and color, until it finally landed. This was not from a photo until the very last tweek where I updated my cheek so it wasn’t drooping like I had a stroke. The video uses AI to jump from one photo of the painting to another. These photos were taken as I worked on it.

I feel like I made myself look too pretty in the end. Lol. When I think of myself, I think of a blob of goop, so it’s surprising to see what I ended up with.