This boy had a head with a great symmetry and the final portrait had an almost hieratic quality. There was a lot of correcting while painting the glazes, but as Philip Guston said, painting should have a moral aspect, and somehow all the effort spent in painting a picture or portrait is stored as a kind of moral worth. The opposite would be something like doing it with a photoshop app and a click of a button.

Here is a recent portrait commission using the grisaille method, where the colour glazes overlap and create an optical effect as the light passes through each layer. This one has around 6-8 layers of oil glaze over the grey underpainting. As I have mentioned before, I use M. Graham’s walnut alkyd medium, which dries quickly enough and doesn’t give me a headache.  I was constantly repainting and working into the drawing as I went, and the main problem in the end is the risk of over-working it, so at this stage I decided to call it a day.

The portrait has a rather serious quality that I like. There was a lot of revising and correcting, but the head looks as if it could be carved out of marble. As a sculptor by training I definitely enjoyed painting this head with its beautiful symmetry. It’s one of those things but I would rework it if I could get it back now, but actually I couldn’t because it lives in its own time and I correct it in further paintings. Each painting is part of a long chain of work that link one to the other, and each painting has its own quality, for better or worse. Actually I would have loved to carve a portrait sculpture based on this portrait.

There was a lot of correcting while painting the glazes, because the grisaille was probably not complete at the time of the first glaze. But as Philip Guston said, painting should have a moral aspect, and somehow all the effort spent in painting a picture or portrait is stored as a kind of moral force. The opposite would be something like doing it with a photoshop app and a click of a button. This is absolutely true and you can always sense this in a painting, and in the most subtle way all the effort, all the revisions and alterations, all the agony and effort, and joy, show in the final painting. Philip Guston was a true hero of art.