A Little Background On The Background

My mom asked a good question in the comment section of my last post: what’s with all the space?  Why did I place the figure at the bottom of the canvas?  What’s up with everything down there?

This self-portrait, and the next couple to follow, are in part an extension of the ideas that I have been exploring in the wire paintings.  Here is an excerpt of my artist statement for those paintings:

“The most interesting pockets of the American landscape lie just outside the standard visual frame.  Those areas of quiet and sometimes neglected spaces are filled with all the things we’re not supposed to notice, like abandoned buildings, unkempt sidewalks, and most notably, electrical and telephone wires. Wires are the most elegant and loneliest-looking of American infrastructure, but they serve as a sort of proof that—much like a heartbeat on a monitor— there is life here.”

One element of electrical and telephone wires that interests me is that they act as points of entry into our lives and as avenues of exit from them.  Objects, ideas, or individuals who occupy the liminal spaces in our lives excite me.  In these self-portraits, I’m placing myself in the margins (or more specifically, the lower half of the painting) and in doing so, my body is spanning multiple borders.  I’m interested in exploring why we choose to connect or escape the spaces we occupy.

Now for the hat.  Sometimes I add things in self-portraits for practical reasons, reasons of composition or design.  One thing about the way I work is that the viewer sees it backwards from my view: I work from a mirror, and the part of my hair gives it away.  By placing a hat on my head, I can alleviate some of the weirdness.  Other times, I add a prop of sorts to help me get into the painting, to maybe think of it at times as a character.  It’s lonely looking in that mirror.  Sometimes you need a hat-buddy.  It also gives me a way to connect a series of paintings together.  If these three self-portraits all have a hat or a prop or a string of some sort, it helps to tie them all together.  Otherwise, it’s just three dumb paintings of little ol’ me.

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February 22, 2011 | Amy | Tags: | No Comments »

Self-Portrait In Progress

I’ve been working on this painting for the past few days, and it is much weirder to paint a self-portrait than draw one.  Drawing is a skill for me, but painting is where the magic happens.  These past few days is like going back to your childhood home and nothing has been moved or changed.  It’s exactly how you remember it, although you have to figure out how to navigate around the space.  The last few days have provoked anxiety and exhilaration.  This painting is not finished.  But, it’s worked up enough for you to get an idea of where it’s heading.  Below is a simple, 23-step guide on how to make me:

The stretcher is 20″ x 20″, so this painting is a little bigger than the work I’ve been making over the last few years.  I begin by adding a light tone to the preliminary sketch, and then adding a second tone.

I am continuing to add lights and darks, keeping it really general and as neutral a tone as possible.

The image is starting to take shape a bit.  I am working from a mirror with two daylight bulb spots angled towards either side of my head.

Pro-tip: skin tones, especially caucasian, ruddy Irish skin, is best achieved using Naples Yellow.

I like this style of hat, and I knew I wanted to use this as a compositional device.  Details on the meaning to follow (in the next several days, not in this post.)

Tightening things up, trying on different postures and shirts.

I’ve changed the background to better contrast the skin, and decided to remove the shirt to highlight the contrast.

The image is taking shape, slowly but surely.

Being mindful of the three dimensionality of the cap, I try to make it seem like it’s sitting on my head, and not stamped on like a cement blob.

Adding facial rosacea, etc.

Things are starting to take shape.  Not because it’s starting to look like me, but because it’s starting to look like a painting.

And here’s where I’ve left things.  it’s beginning to seem like what I meant it to seem.  I’m planning on doing three paintings total like this, as I am wont to make things in groups.  Three is my lowest possible number of a series.  But it will do the job of teaching me about painting, myself, and painting myself.

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February 21, 2011 | Amy | Tags: | 3 Comments »

Today’s Drawing

I spent this afternoon drawing my first self-portrait in a long time.  Total apologies for the terrible lighting in the photographs.  In these first stages, I set up a few architectural lines to act as a framework for the image.

As the drawing progresses, I add more detail, working from the inside of the face to the exterior contours.

I stopped wearing contacts a few years ago, and I will tell you that it’s a lot easier to draw yourself with glasses.  They make for visual rest stops, making it easier to see the planes of the face.

I used just two pencils on this drawing, an HB and a 4B.  I waited until the very end to go in with the 4B, something that I never used to do.  And in the end, the drawing isn’t perfect.  There are a lot of things I would fix, but that’s why you keep drawing.  You don’t draw or paint to finish the thing, you draw or paint to draw or paint.  I’ve done maybe one to two thousand drawings and paintings of myself, and each one is different.  I am my own snowflake.

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February 18, 2011 | Amy | Tags: , | 3 Comments »

Amy O’Neill: Light Carpentry Enthusiast

I’m starting two new projects.  One series expands on the work of the wire series, and another is a small series of self-portraits.  Self-portraits!  My go-to subject matter for years and years.  I purposely avoided doing any for years as a sort of artistic cleanse.  But lately, I’ve been thinking about going back to them, if only briefly.  Self-portraits are my base line, the control I can use to test and evaluate my painting chops.

So yes.  I’ve been thinking about self-portraits.  Then a week ago, I got an email asking if I had any recent self-portraits; a curator wants to include my work in an alumni show at UW-Milwaukee.  So that’s an artistic high-five, for sure.  THEN!  I received word that the portraiture course I developed for Fisher College is slated to be offered this spring.  Pedagogical high-five.

The picture above is three stretchers I built years ago.  Yesterday, I took off the old canvas and replaced it with new linen.  When I removed the old canvas, I had a moment where I really admired my handiwork.  I looked at the kind of wood and nails I used and remembered which studio I was in when I made them.  It was like looking at rings on a tree or something.  And they really hold up over time.  I build my stretchers the old-fashioned way, the way I was taught by a carpenter.  And they’re pretty, so I took a picture of them.

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From the Archives:: My Painting Process

I just got back to Boston and spent the day putting the studio back in order.  It’s exciting and the space looks so shiny and new.  I’ll post some pictures later in the week, but in the meantime, I thought it might be interesting to look at one of my past paintings and talk about how I made it.

This painting (pictured) was, in the parlance of Oprah, an “a-ha” moment for me.  I painted this in early 2002 during my first year of grad school.  For a good number of years, I focused primarily on self-portraiture.  This was borne from a love of figure painting and a need to paint from life.  It is difficult for me to work from a model because I paint at odd hours and I get feelings of guilt, like I’m wasting their time or something.  It’s a feeling that is as irrational as it is genuine.

In response to a suggestion from my major professor, I changed how I made this painting.  Up to this point, I would begin most compositions with a rough, Cubist-like sketch on the canvas.  I would then build up the image slowly, sometimes over a series of days (this is, in fact, how many painters make their work).  My advisor challenged me to make a self-portrait in a single sitting.  So I sat down, looked in the mirror, and just began to paint.  Instead of sketching out the shape of my head and the placement of my features, I began the painting at the center of my nose.  Instead of “filling in” the sketch, I looked at the contiguous planes of color and light on my face.  I worked from the inside out, rather than the outside in.  What made this painting my “a-ha” painting was that it taught me the difference between a painting and a drawing.  For the first time, I was utilizing the properties of paint in the best possible manner; I was painting light rather than placing lines.  I looked for shifts in value to construct the whole painting.  Rather than painting a nose, I painted planar shifts that together created a nose.  By focusing on shifts of light, I was able to paint the eyes and the lids simultaneously.  Painting from the inside out allowed me to feel as though I naturally came to the edges of my face and hair.  I made this painting in a single sitting, and it took me approximately four hours.

This painting is by no means a flawless one.  There are a ton of “mistakes” that I would have normally fixed, most notably the flatness of the shadows and some anatomical drawing issues.  But it’s better to keep the mistakes visible than to forget what you need to be mindful of in the next painting.  I loved this painting and I learned so much from doing it.  I had it hanging in my house until last year when I gave it to the person who really made it happen, my major professor from graduate school.

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April 5, 2010 | Amy | Tags: , , | No Comments »