Sunday, 24-Jan-16 16:33:50 CET

Francesca 24 January 2016

It is Sunday and I am on my way to Amsterdam to paint a portrait of Francesca for the third and final time. This idea of painting a new portrait every time came after the first portrait when I was drawing and wiping several times before I started painting. The idea was that perhaps if I did it again then I would learn to come to a good painting much quicker.

Then also I started the New Year resolution to use more colors and contrasts in my paintings. That project will take some time to master indeed. So that is where I am going today. The coloring ideas from the last painting is all well but it would be nice to get the perspective of the portrait right as well, so that is something I will concentrate on today as well.

The weather today is mild and soggy. Somehow I displaced my public transport card so today I pay full price on the train. Annoying. Where could it be?

Now I am on my way back from Amsterdam. Today Bas, Saskia, Lotte, Jochem and Dick attended the painting session. There was a lot of humming and whistling today. I convinced myself that I was not disturbed by it. Perhaps the clicking sounds someone made was slightly more annoying than the whistling and humming. Someday I get it figured out if I am annoyed or not by people doing clicking sounds. What is it that some people are urged to make sounds? They are so “present”. It is not just a nice way of saying they got a bigger than average ego? Personally I feel no need to forgive any La Tourette person just because he got either Tourette or a big ego. When I do things I usually get there to do things and not for being amused by someone making clicking sounds.

Regardless of sound circumstances I was spring loaded to be really productive and to do my very best. Today I really played out the color register. I decided to start by putting out fields of distinct colors. I watched Francesca’s skin carefully to see if there could be green, purple, blue along the yellow, brown and orange. The interesting thing was that when I had decided that a certain area had something to do with purple then throughout the painting work I could recall this decision and it was like the number of possible colors grew gradually as I continued.

The layout and the initial draft I did really quickly because I had practiced that before. I even had time to work on smoothing the surface. Actually when starting of which various patches of colors I had to connect these so they became overlapping surfaces and not little fields of various skin tones.

It was a nice experience painting like this. It feels like I am taking steps forward when doing like this. I will definitely try to achieve this again. I don’t necessarily need to paint a new entire painting every Sunday but analyzing the colors from start and “plan” the colors from start is really something I will ty to do again. It is true that until now when I just started creating a painting I am more focused on the shape of things than the colors. Often I made big fields of one color and then I worked in more and more colors on top of the first field. This time I started with smaller fields where each field had a unique color property. “That looks like purple, let’s make it a bit purple”. Then adjacent fields got their own purpose. It was really nice. When starting with a greater diversity it was easier to maintain a fresh view of what I was doing with the colors.