matt harvey art

This is the first of a number of Velazquez paintings I would like to try and copy. You can see the video in real time on my patreon channel, see the link here on my website.
I was interested in what palette he used and also in his use of the imprimatura and how that was left for some of the middle tones and her clothes.
He may have painted this in 1 or 2 sittings and I show that it is possible to achieve it in 1 sitting, although how he did it in a single sitting with such breathtaking technique is anybody’s guess.
The point of the video is to gain an understanding of the technique so that I or anybody else will be able to use it in their own paintings. There are a number of things that I feel could be worked on a little more but due to the fact I was filming it I stopped working here after 1hr 10 minutes. The technique comes with practice and I think something anyone can do, but of course I mean A LOT of practice. Personally it was very enlightening to make this copy. One thing I did struggle with was not being able to see it all properly, for example the area around her left eye is very dark and difficult to make out. Because of this I think I’ll leave it here, because I don’t know how I can improve it so that it looks more like the original.

I love Velazquez because I think he was a great human being as well as a great artist, as well as being obsessed by status! When he painted various ‘outsiders’ like his bonded slave (who’s freedom he later bought) or peasants, or the jesters and dwarves in the royal court, obviously some would have been the result of royal patronage as well as his own interest. But he painted these people with what I would describe as empathy because he still respected them for their humanity. I wonder about the girl in this portrait, and differences in their ‘status’ notwithstanding, Velazquez does paint her with a sensitivity and tenderness that make this an outstanding portrait painting. She is not sentimentalised like Bouguereau would have painted her, and you can see in this portrait a precursor to Manet’s modernist portraits of people in his everyday world. For this project my main interest is the technique he used, but I still find this a touching portrait that also demonstrates Velazquez’s profound empathy.

The colours I used, and I am pretty sure Velazquez also used, were:
Titanium White
Ivory Black
Burnt Umber
Vermilion
Yellow Ochre

Of course mine are modern equivalents

I’ve started making a copy of this beautiful portrait painting by Rubens, with a view to learning about his underpainting and glazing technique. I realised its quite similar in subject to the first portrait I added to my youTube channel, so it feels fitting that its also the first on my new Patreon channel. All my real- time videos will be there from now on so please have a look patreon.com/mattharveyart

I will try and get a bit more information about this painting when I have time, but for now here are some images of the work in progress.

The video of the second hour of the first pass is available on youtube:

And this is how it compares at the moment. Glazing next!

This is another painting of a dancer I finished recently. I am combining my love of glazing with drawing, here starting to draw the line with the brush in a bistre. This has a translucency I like. Then I glaze over in thin layers of paint in the same way I would paint my portraits. Glazing really has an unrivalled luminosity! I’m not sure where these are heading but I was pleased with the more liquid effect in the paint and I think this is something I will be exploring further. I have painted some other ones but mixed the colours to start with, but these don’t seem to have the quality of translucency like this painting.

I think I like to strip an activity down to its absolute essentials; here the original drawing is done in a single translucent colour, and then 3 other colours were used in the later glazing. There is no modelling apart from the drawing, and really its nothing more than a line.

In a 3rd arabesque the dancer stands on their right leg, with their left leg extended behind. The right arm is extended forwards at roughly eye height, and the left arm is extended parallel to it at shoulder height.

Painted in Raw Umber and white. Raw Umber bistre to start with, and then worked into with some white. I am trying to paint like a drawing, and sculpt a painting! I would like to make something reminiscent of sculpture on the painted surface. When I paint the line I am carving it, modelling the paint and then refining by taking it away. This is also how I initially do the underpainting for portraits, or any painting. As a sculptor who likes to carve stone, in my mind I am always ‘carving’, whatever I am working on.

I wanted to paint some more using Raw Umber and Titanium White to paint the underpainting for portraits. Looking back over some earlier work from a couple of years ago inspired me to start using them together again. This is a detail from a recent portrait before the glazing. I wanted to approach it with a more fluid, perhaps bolder (for me) style. The underpainting took a couple of hours and when painting it I wanted to allow the brushwork to show a bit more as you get more of a sense of the process of painting it. I also started the painting on a ‘ground’ which was a middle tone of the 2 colours. You can see I left it in the space on the left side of the painting by the chair. Soon I hope to do a video on my youtube channel exploring how Caravaggio used grounds in his oil paintings.

I will also post a video of me doing the glazing for this portrait in the near future.

My hope is to paint freely, without really worrying too much about it, without being a slave to technique or overthinking it. I’m presently attempting to return to a simpler process, where the focus is on the drawing, the underpainting. Working in the grisaille holds and extends the moment when I feel I am most deeply connected to pure painting, whatever that is. It helps in sustaining the emotion I feel when pushing paint around, drawing with paint and attempting to conjure a likeness. It removes any other distractions to painting, like choosing the right colour! At the moment I enjoy breaking this process into the two stages, drawing and colour, hence grisaille and glazing. As a sculptor my first love was always drawing, and grisaille fuses the two, becoming like a bridge between drawing and painting.

When starting to paint portraits seriously a few years ago I looked hard for a way of working that suits my disposition and the need to paint as efficiently as possible so as to make it a viable career. I wanted to work with technique, without becoming its slave. To be able to work efficiently so as not to waste time, but to paint with feeling. There’s a certain emotion I get from a painting when it is going well, and I have felt that emotion disappearing by degree the more I have focussed on technique. I think this is something I can correct easily but I need to work through it a bit to maintain the pure pleasure of painting portraits. Its a fine line because I still believe technique is important. If there is a way to do it I want to somehow get lost in the emotion of painting. I see this after finishing a successful portrait, but then the ‘how’ disappears and I can’t recall what happened exactly to make the painting work.

I was happy with this Umber grisaille, but when I tried to recreate the same quality it has in the next painting, I couldn’t do it. There are a thousand, an infinite number of variables and I think I am narrowing in on what I want to do. Hopefully work will reveal it slowly and I can record that on this blog and youtube.

Incidentally, speaking of emotion or feeling in a work, a famous quote from Van Gogh goes: “I want to touch people with my art. I want them to say ‘he feels deeply, he feels tenderly’.”

I landed on the technique, or method, of painting with grisaille as I thought it covered all bases. The magic of painting a portrait is found in the way brush marks can transform inert paint into something that can conjure a likeness, even a character or personality on a canvas. I don’t want to fixate on recreating reality, or paint in a photorealist style. I love paint, making a mess with paint, and to leave a painting as a record of this experience.