matt harvey art

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.

Heres a detail of a recent portrait. I painted this using the usual process of working over a grisaille. Her skin tones were very subtle and perhaps the rendering is not so easy to see in a photo. I painted about 5 or 6 glazes over the grisaille, and it was a challenge to capture the translucency of the skin. This is exactly what glazing does so well though and in the way it allows light to shine through it functions in a similar way to skin, which is essentially translucent itself. I’m not after the most polished look and like to have a painterly surface where brush marks are still visible, as I think this adds to the magical illusion of painting.

One thing I love when glazing an oil painting is painting hands, and here is another detail:

Up close they are rendered in a fairly loose way, and with about 3 or 4 glazes as I remember.

Here is the finished painting:

I loved painting the Chinese dress and glazed it a few times with a mixture of Cadmium Red and Rose Madder, then added the details as a final touch to the painting. I decided not to paint the chair she was sitting on, wanting to simplify the format. I like the vertical tautness this gives the composition – perhaps it has echoes of a Chinese portrait. I like to ‘declutter’ the background that appears in my reference photos, most of the time. It depends on the relevancy to the portrait of an individual as a whole. I felt here that there  were enough references to the sitter here without any additional details, and these weren’t discussed during the photo session.

Artists have always provided visual clues about the character of a sitter in their paintings – for this painting the client asked that a favourite teddy was involved, and the child chose her favourite dress. Clues that represent the social life of the sitter are included by the artist to show the sitter’s ‘relational self’, the self that is seen by others and relates to others in a social context. To give an extreme example, royalty are often portrayed with all the trappings of their position, personifications of the ruling power, before they are portrayed as individuals (Brilliant, Portraiture P. 104). Despite having the odd reference here and there, I am always focussed on the sitter as an individual, before any externals. I want to focus on the sitter’s uniqueness and their shining humanity. I believe that if the artist looks long enough and hard enough, that humanity is visible in a person’s face and can be captured in paint on canvas.

The client initially made enquiries about commissioning a portrait because they had a portrait painted of themselves as a 13 year old, and wanted to commission a portrait of their son at the same age. It was agreed the portrait would be in oil on board, and I went to the family home and worked on the painting from life for a day before taking the painting back to the studio to continue working.

Because of time restraints I used a grid method which can work very well for portraits of fidgety younger people! After having a chat and getting to know the sitter I took a photo and after copying the outline onto the grid I completed the drawing. Then I could paint the sitter with a degree of confidence, and have the opportunity to observe the skin tones in real life. I used a fairly limited palette but didn’t paint with a grisaille so I could get a feel for the skin colours while I had the opportunity to do so.

I got to this stage after 4 hours and took it back to the studio to wait for it to dry and continue working. After another 3 or 4 glazes the portrait was finished.

It is also possible to use a sitting like this to make sketches and colour studies, so that I can then work from a photo and use a grisaille later in the studio.

I finished the 2nd glaze last week and have added a voiceover to my video, so it is all up on youtube now.

This is the last video in this short series, using a copy of a Bouguereau painting to learn about the glazing technique. I chose to make it the last video because my main aim is to demonstrate the technique – I don’t know how interesting it would be to show all of the potential glazes for this painting on video.

But if I do a 3rd and 4th glaze then I’ll post it on here.

Showing the 2nd glaze unedited (well very slightly edited) and in real time, I hope it will be valuable to anyone interested in this technique. I hope it shows that this is quite a straightforward method of working with oil paint that has beautiful results.

It is a method that can also be used with any approach to oil painting, i.e. it can be used to further enrich and deepen any oil painting that has been started in colour. You don’t have to do an underpainting in grisaille or brown to achieve these effects and can work up a painting however you like.

Grisaille underpainting and underpainting generally is my preferred method because I like painting in monotones, I guess because I was originally trained as a sculptor.

I feel glazing over grisaille or grey shows with great clarity the wonderful transformative qualities of glazing very clearly, so it lends itself to this kind of demonstration.