Etude #42

Retrospective Objective

This drawing is one of three works started at the same time as part of the Étude series. There were already several dozen egg tempera paintings sitting around that had been started and were not getting finished. Something needed to be done to shake things up a little.

This drawing, in comparison to the Etude paintings, was much easier to finish. That may simply be because there is a greater familiarity with paper-based media than with egg tempera.

Inspiration:

**Elizabeth Peyton Nick (Chateau Marmont, Los Angeles, September 2002)**

Elizabeth Peyton was able to do so much with her minimal use of mark making.
With just a little she conveyed a sense of a real person and brilliant colors.

**Maurice Denis (French, 1870-1943), 'Sur la plage (fillettes à contre-jour)', 1892**

Many painters have worked over a colored ground, allowing the underlying color to interact with the paint above it and create a kind of tension or glow. It looks to me like Denis may have worked this way here. I particularly like the quality of light, the sense that it is coming through the painting rather than simply being painted on top of it.
Tom Thomson is another artist I think about in relation to this way of working.

**End of Stage 5**

I like a lot about this but I feel like it is missing a ‘depth’ that I still want to strive towards.

**End of Stage 9**

I’m starting to like this one too much to dig into it more. In the future, it would be good to push the mark making even more.

**End of Stage 13**

These are kind of like diary entries.
I wrote the last entry thinking I was done.
I’m glad I kept it going.
To me its shocking how different this drawing is from where I almost left it at stage 9. They are to me completely different. I feel like I’m tightening strings and finding the perfect tuning for a chord. I really like the sound that chord is making at this point. I feel like it could go a lot further, but that it might be good to stop this drawing here.
When I am looking at this, I have such a strong desire to collaborate with a print maker on a piece building from this point.
What goes through my mind is just imagining the many possible paths one could take from here.

Review

At this point, the Étude works are concerned with three things: color, expressionistic mark making, and some kind of psychological presence in the figure.

Color is working reasonably well here. The color could be pushed considerably further.

The mark making is much freer than it is in the egg temperas. There is less fussing with it, which is probably a good thing. The drawing has a physical quality that the temperas have been missing.

The psychological question is a little harder. Is there a person looking back at the viewer? Or, more importantly, does the figure seem to have a soul? There is something there, but not enough. The image is too saccharine. The figure is pleasant in a way that is probably not particularly interesting. For some reason I’m seeing this as sort of like a Miami Vice character. This guy, Etude #42 has as much soul as Crockett.

I think this piece works well enough. I’m feeling happy with the end result.

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