Amdall Gallery

Sometimes I just paint without any specific reason or goal, but with this piece I actually had a couple specific things I wanted to practice. I was talking with some colleagues about my appreciation for John Singer Sargent’s paintings, particularly Lady Agnew of Locknaw. I love the way Sargent captured the nature of light on fabric, and a nature instinct is to see if it’s something I could practice. I also wanted to work on natural looking figure poses – particularly the back’s curve and how limbs might rest. These are both things I want to return to, but I pushed on those themes with this painting. I think both goals were largely successful with this figure study.

Although I am certain I’ll never catch this blog up with all 240 oil paintings I’ve done over the last two years, I do at least want to incorporate some of my favorites. And this figure study is certainly one of them, so I thought I’d go all the way back to November 2023 when this painting was done. This study was painted on 12 x 12 oil paper and was my 164th overall. I’ll follow my standard format here, which is to share an image of the painting, the Instagram time lapse, and some verbiage specific to the piece. Then, I’ll embed the YouTube discussion video, including another brief writeup on the topic, materials used, and some other hopefully useful information. I’ll wrap the post up by sharing the YT Shorts time lapse and some other similar painting videos.

Much like the previous post, this piece is an exercise in some of the more subtle aspects of oil painting. My first year of painting was very much brute force attempt to learn the basics quickly – in the last couple months of 2022 at the start of my journey, I somehow did 53 portraits in oil. And then in 2023, my first full year, I did 147 oil paintings! The quality was often quite iffy, but I expected as much and knew from learning pencil portraits that this was just part of it. I slowed down significantly afterward, and that’s where those subtle aspects I mentioned come into play. Now that I’ve got some of the basics, the overarching goal has become to start to learn how to use confident brushstrokes to convey texture, suggest form, and hint at details (rather than shout them with discrete lines). This painting was one of the first that I started shifting focus in this direction towards the subtler elements of painting.

As I mentioned at the top, one aspect I wanted to explore (and needed to practice) is free-handing subject proportion and form. Does a figure appear natural and relaxed, or does it seem forced and sitting? I believe this requires a delicate touch, and although I’ve definitely improved, I am still developing my skills in this area. This specific figure study was a good effort that has held up pretty solidly in the time since I painted it over a year ago.

Another subtle aspect I wanted to highlight is the fabric’s fold and interaction with the light. Going back to John Singer Sargent and his skill in capturing the essence of fabric in his portraits – his purposeful and confident brush strokes and colors create a natural illusion of fabric. Definitely something that I greatly admire about his style and approach, but also clearly an aspect that will take a massive amount of practice to even begin to emulate. I wanted to achieve a sense of light filtering through the fabric and creating a textured effect. While I didn’t quite capture the texture, I managed to capture the idea of fabric hanging down with a faint glow of light. Overall, not a bad effort!

Here are some additional details of the discussion video I shared on YouTube, including materials used and some other information. I’ll also embed the Shorts video, although it’s kind of redundant to the Instagram Reels post, as I typically just share the same edited vertical time lapse on both platforms. As I mentioned, it was my 164th total oil painting, and is actually my most popular Giclee print on the Etsy shop. The video discussion I’ve embedded is about 4 minutes, and is similar to some of the others I’ve done (also linked after the timestamps).