Camille and I play hide and seek. Vincent wins.

The Portrait of Camille Roulin is our project this week.  Thanks again to everybody who is reading along!

Camille Roulin was 11 years old at the time this portrait (one of several by VvG) was painted.  Camille was a relatively young man when he died in 1922, at 45 years of age.

I wanted to make sure that I had selected a canvas that was close in size to the original, because I thought I might have a problem if I chose a support (fancy art community word for "the thing that you are painting or drawing on") that was too big or too small.

Vincent's painting was 32.5 cm X 40.5 cm, which translates (very roughly) to 13" X 16" - the closest canvas I had to that size was 14" X 18", so that is what I used.  (Fear not, mathphobes!  This conversion was googlable.) Next, I pulled up the original portrait on the GAP, and enlarged it to be as big as my computer screen would allow.  I then hung my t-square on the top of my mac, centering it vertically on Camille's face.  I taped two small clear rulers on either side, to designate the center point of the canvas.  I then drew corresponding lines on my support, so that I would know approximately where to place the features in my pre-painting sketch.   To my surprise, I found that the center point of the image is just above the bridge of his nose, just to the left of his left eye (the eye that appears on the right side of the canvas).

That placement was not what I was expecting.  I figured that the middle of his nose would be the middle of the canvas.  I could not have been more wrong.  So, I was glad that I started by measuring.  The hat was a lot bigger than I thought it would be,  and had to be redrawn many times to get the proportion correct.  Initially, I made his face far too small, and little Camille ended up just looking like an elf in search of Christmas.  Notice at left how many times I drew and redrew his mouth, nose and chin, and just how far off I was - you can see the hint of the nose at the top of the image, and the corresponding early chin just below the lips.  I was glad that I started this in pencil, rather than the charcoal I had initially thought to use - there was a LOT of eraser sacrificed on this drawing, and, had I used charcoal, I would have ended up with a smeary mess.  Although I did spend a lot of time correcting the drawing, I think it will save me considerable effort in not having to correct the painting.

Now,  where to begin with the color?  I think, given the subject, that Van Gogh must have painted this portrait quickly.  The blue cap appears to be just two main colors of blue, with accents of black, brown, white and yellow.  The eyes are the same color of lighter blue - so, I think I will just start with two shades of blue, brown and black.

Cue Adele - it is time to paint!

As Adele agonized over her breakup, I joined in her blue mood - mixing together cobalt and light blue until I had a base shade for the cap.  I got out my trusty filbert and began to paint, roughing in the shape of the cap and leaving plenty of space for me to add in the darks.  I was trying to paint quickly and decisively, not only to emulate Vincent, but because acrylic paints, once out of the tube, can dry like cement on your palette while you are still looking for where the color should go.

I moved the brush in the direction that I thought the weave of the fabric would go as it folded over his head into the cap shape.  Therefore, most of the strokes went from the crown to the face, with a wave over the top of the skull.  At the point where the cap curved under from the top to the sides of the head, I curved the brush strokes to follow, as well.  The eyes were simple circles,avoiding the area where the pupil would go.

I kept working on the cap and the eyes, adding in some dark lines with burnt umber (a medium dark brown) and ivory black (not ivory at all, just black).  Next were the lighter blues, which I pushed into the highlighted areas of the cap.  Following VvG's painting made it both easier and more difficult - he gave me a guide as to where to put each color, but the closer I looked, the more I appreciated that it wasn't just "a couple of blues."

To make the lighter blue, I mixed in this transparent mixing white, which lightened the color without clouding it.  I will speak in a later blog post about what transparent, translucent, opaque and semi opaque mean on the outside of the paint tubes, and how and when to use and even alter these different paints.

Next, I opened up more colors: (from left to right starting at the top left) titanium white, cold grey, cadmium yellow (lemon), prussian blue, cadmium yellow medium, and ultramarine blue (red shade).  These were the colors that I thought would be the base for the colors that I would find in the hat.  You can see that I still had a bit of the original blues left.  The red is from another project - I was just reusing my palette paper.

So the hat was starting to tweed up a little bit.  I was happy with the rounded parts and wrinkles outlined by the darks on the far right, and I thought the shading was getting me where I wanted to go, but my little lines looked like swimming blobs when I compared them to Vincent's precise and so much more evocative placements.  My colors were also much more saturated (bright) than the ones on the screen, but who can be sure what the actual colors on the "real" painting are (when viewing through a computer screen)?

 As I examined Vincent's version, I saw colors that I thought I recognized - alizarin crimson on the mouth and around the left eye - burnt sienna (not burnt umber as I had guessed) on the eyebrows, and chromium oxide green on the face, eyes, and jacket.  I could also guess where VvG had intermixed these colors and others - one nice thing about the fine painting system of naming colors is that the good old basic colors have been those very same good old basic colors for hundreds of years.  This continuity of names and formulations allow us, as modern artists, to produce the same colorations as the old masters - but, again,  I suspect that the older paintings may have been somewhat altered in color (no matter how well conserved) by the march of time.

So who is to say that Camille was not bright and saturated with rich color as Vincent originally saw him on the canvas?

The blurry photo above (I was holding the camera and my paintbrush while I took the shot - lesson learned!), and somewhat less blurred image to the right show my many guesses with regard to color as I looked for Camille's face.  At this point, I was very concerned that the best I would be able to do was a portrait of a very dirty faced, crookedly smirking little boy.


 I began adding in yellows on the background, mainly to conserve my yellow paint (by using it to make progress on the canvas rather than allowing it to dry on the palette) and clean up the yellow paint that was blobbing up my brush.  With acrylics, the paint dries so quickly, that if you are not going to waste it, you have to get it up on the canvas rapidly, and sometimes that involves slapping it somewhere other than where you are doing (perhaps) fine work (such as on the face).   Vincent, who had so little money, also had a strong motivation to preserve and utilize every squeeze of his paint.  The oil paint that Vincent used (acrylics had not been invented in his lifetime) takes much longer to dry out (than acrylics), and can often be revived by the addition of more diluent (paint thinners), but once it is out of the tube, it can't really go back in.  Did Vincent start out with the sunny yellow background, then "clean his brush" with strokes on the face, or did he start with the face, then clean up his brush on the background and jacket, or did he care about this aspect at all?


 If you look really closely at the original VvG on the GAP, (image at right) you will see some very thinned very faint green strokes on the edges of the background, just above the shoulders.  It looks to me like Vincent wanted to bounce some of the green (as a reflection?) up above the jacket, and he started with bolder strokes on the right side of the painting (see right), then added very faint strokes just above the left (side of the painting as you are viewing it) shoulder. (Not pictured.)  These strokes appear to be very thin and floating on top of the yellow.  I think the addition was deliberate - I don't thing that there are many things in any of Van Gogh's works that are not... But it looks to me like he had a limited pool of that particular (probably already mixed) green left to work with and he thinned it and thinned it until he used up every molecule.

So, I kept on painting, adding stroke by stroke (not fluid, even, smooth strokes, but chopped, on and off, contoured strokes which were very challenging to do!) to the face, jacket, and hat until I got a jaundiced, cat like boy looking out at me.  Always with the good eye, Bryan pointed out that his hat looked too cut off on the right, giving him a lobotomized appearance, and that the chin was too narrow to actually hold a jaw bone.

So, I incorporated those corrections, as you can see at left.  I outlined the new edge to the cap and added to the left (side of the image) lower portion of the chin to provide more surface area.  I then filled in with the appropriate color.  Those two changes helped a lot, as did the addition of the highlights and lowlights on the jacket.  The eyes, also were not quite right, and were muddied in pools of yellow with little definition on the creases.  That was corrected with some lines of prussian blue (the ivory black was too heavy) applied with a very thin, very small brush. My final count of colors that I used in the painting was more than 20.  And I started with the premise that it was basically just four!  Four!  I would mix in a dab of this or that until I had what I thought was a match. Often it was was a match, just not to anything that Vincent had put into his painting.

  My boys' nose remained quite troublesome, and I could never get it to have the  rounded, tough guy, "future stevedore's nose" quality of Vincent's portrait.  My modern version of Camille's mouth was also a little too pretty and perfect (and by perfect, I mean not perfect); it was a great challenge to try to replicate Vincent's version.  I tried and tried to get the pursed lips right, but much of what I put on the canvas ended up looking like Jack Nicholson's Joker's mouth from the Batman movie. Before I laid down my brush, I did cover quite a bit of the yellow that I had placed around the eyes and cheeks, and that helped a lot.   Below is the finished portrait.

Is it an exact copy of Vincent Van Gogh's original?  Absolutely not.  Is it a successful painting?  An utter failure?  Somewhere in between?  You tell me.

When I finished with the painting on Friday night, I put it on a little easel that I have next to my T.V.  As I watched the late news coverage of the ugliness of the Jerry Sandusky trial and the righteous, albeit "what does it fix?" verdict, I kept on glancing over at my meta version of this sunny, adorable little boy, who was born, lived, and died, all before World War II.  Eventually, the awful Sandusky story (and all of the other stupid news, T.V. shows, gossip and snookies, hatred and hard times, and all of the other 2012 distractions)  will go away, but my painting shall live on, at least for a little while here in my house.  It made me happy to see this painting on my easel, and it made me really happy that over the next 50 weeks, I will make 50 more "Vincents" to look at and enjoy (or not - I am open to whatever the outcome of this process).

I hope that you have enjoyed reading this, and I welcome your comments - including requests for any of Vincent's paintings you would like for me to attempt.  I hope that my work this week will inspire you to make some art of your own to enjoy...

Until next week.

Catherine