Marching Band Part 3

Another figure used to animate my marching band composition is sketched from a film of a Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans.

His gesture is perfect for my purpose, but he has to face in the direction the whole spectacle is headed.  For the sake of a reasonably convincingly drawn young man, I worked from a live model.

Now almost everyone in the picture, including the dog, is part of a noisy commotion, moving across the canvas from left to right.  For contrast, I included three static figures, including a young woman taking it all in with wide open eyes.

The scale of the painting, I decided, had to be large, because it is a very busy design, and I'm looking for LOUD.  It is six feet four inches wide.

It took a long time to create, and the original costs about as much as a new car.  But in case somebody wants one, I can deliver a full size exact replica (giclee) on canvas for a fraction of the cost of the original.  See the post "Flatfoot Floogie" from Nov. 13, 2010. http://williambuffett.blogspot.com/2010/11/flat-foot-floogie.html

http://buffettstudio.com/



Marching Band Part 2

Another figure demonstrating the infectious pulse of the music with spirited body movements was the young man in the striped shirt.

His gesture is purloined from an illustration by Morton Roberts.  This artist drew a cluster of "second liners" for an article in Life magazine which caught and concentrated the excitement of the music better than any artist's work I have seen.  I made an outline drawing of the whole group and chose the 3rd figure from the left to steal.

Again, the attitude and motions of the figure were so complicated I had to use a model.



Marching Band Part 1

A traditional New Orleans marching band can fire off as much joy and exaltation as any art form I know.

A task I set for myself was to try to bring some of it indoors and hang it on the wall.  The musicians don't cavort; mostly they walk and play their instruments.  Therefore I reasoned that the only way I could convey the excitement of the music was through the people who were affected by it and expressed it with movement.

My first version of this canvas ("Red Wing") depended entirely upon two dancers and a strutter to objectify the infectious rhythms of the procession.  The center of the picture had only walking musicians.

However, I searched through photographs of parades and found a shot of a tenor man who was doing a little more than marching.  His head was tilted over, one shoulder was dropped, and his knees bent a little more than the others', causing him to dip slightly; his hip, at the same time, swung ever so subtly to one side.  It was just enough.



I had to employ some knowledge of drawing in order to bring the figure more into profile; the photo was too frontal.

Now there is a bit of a swing in the step.



Passion in Portraits Part 4

I'm touching on 4 painters in this post, about a century apart, all of whom painted a lot of portraits.

Rembrandt always gave it his best, even when commissioned to paint, for instance, a pair of portraits of a couple to flank a fireplace, a merchant, perhaps, married to a potato.  The artist's attitude seemed to be: she's a person and her daddy loves her.

In contrast here is a sitter of his own choosing who struck a deep chord in the artist.

Goya was not so charitable.  When obligated to paint someone which to him was not of interest, he nevertheless had to produce a passable portrait.  Often his solution was to paint an innocuous doll face and dazzle the client with a beautifully rendered costume, with fine stuffs, bows and lace or ribbons and medals and gold braid.

Who could doubt that this woman interested him?

Sargent appears to have been pretty even handed when setting out to portray people of more or less interest to him.  The two examples I have picked don't contrast all that much with one another.  However, I would guess that all of these 4 artists would choose to paint the lady in black if they had to choose.  I would.

I went carefully through about 250 of Hockney's portraits looking for an empty-headed dip, or a flatulent pseudo-intellectual, or a commonplace dullard or a blank.  No such thing.  He is careful; they all have the spark.