Portrait Society of America Conference — Day 2
On Saturday morning, Everett Raymond Kinstler kicked off the day with a slide presentation about the portrait artists of the past who had inspired him, including: Sargent, William Merritt Chase, Joaquin Sorolla, Anders Zorn, Giovanni Boldini, and James Montgomery Flagg.
Following Kinstler, Burton Silverman gave a demonstration entitled “Searching for the Truth”, though there wasn’t much philosophy in the talk and instead was pretty much a straightforward demo. Starting with a scraped down canvas from a previous painting he hadn’t been satisfied with, he began a quick portrait of his sitter, Anne E. Hall, costumed in a deep magenta hat and black coat. Starting with very brushy strokes and working all around the canvas (in a way that made you think at first he wasn’t going to get very far), he pulled together a very interesting piece in about 75 minutes of painting.
One problem with all of the demonstrations at the conference was that the video screens didn’t seem to be properly color calibrated – they were invariably too warm and too saturated. In addition, sometimes the camera focusing on the model was cooler while the one focusing on the canvas was warmer so that it looked like the artist wasn’t doing a great job of mixing colors. Yet when you looked at the actual canvas rather than the screen, you could tell that the colors on the painting were more nuanced and less intense, more closely matching those of the sitter.
David Leffel gave a demonstration about “finishing” a painting, though he started with a blank (toned burnt umber) canvas. Rather than do a complete painting from life, he painted an eye (and then a nose) from memory and brought that portion of a painting to a decent state of completion. Leffel says that most of his “consciousness” is on the tip of his brush, either on the palette or on the canvas. He says the most important part of learning to paint is gaining the ability to manipulate paint on the brush with total confidence so that it will do what you want.
I skipped out early from the Aaron Shikler late afternoon session because the talk wasn’t particularly well prepared and wasn’t accompanied by any visuals (and I was tired!). Shikler is the artist who painted the official White House portrait of JFK (painted posthumously) and has also painted official portraits of Jacqueline Kennedy and Nancy Reagan. Unfortunately, by this time in the afternoon, I wasn’t in the mood for being awestruck and felt dinner was calling.
Tags: Portrait Society of America, portraits
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