Irene 23 April 2016

Today it is Saturday 23 of April 2016 and I am on my way to a life model painting session at de Stoker in Amsterdam. The train tracks are serviced today so I got on a replacement bus at 8 AM. The bus is one minute late so the bus driver is taking us for a cheap roller coaster drive.

Today it is an XXL session at de Stoker. It starts at 10 AM and it goes on until 5 PM. The model is Irene. I don’t recall how she looks like. I think it is a perhaps a big model. We will see.

This bus driver is awful. I hate him. The traffic on the highway (motorway) is flowing nicely so that is great. Last weekend it was terrible. In Muiden the bridge had to open. In the little break the bus driver smiled, looked at my i-Connex keyboard and said it looked like a really clever setup. I smiled back and thanked him for the compliment. Within I cursed and thought I had to say that with a bus driver like him all my stuff is flying all over and that I hated him, but I did not say that.

Since it is an extra-long painting session I decided I want to paint the hands better than last week. The session is 6 hours of painting time. I will try to do the drawing in 30 minutes. Then I paint all but the hands in 4 and a half hours and then I have about two hours for the hands. Something like that.

Now I am on the Train from Weesp. It is 9 AM and I will manage to arrive on time.

I want another spot today than I am usually painting from. I want to be able to take a step back and view my painting and the model at the same time. Just have a little freedom in the painting for once. Since I got my lamp I am freer already in choice where to be standing. Now I want to make use of that.

Ambitions, ambitions. The train is slowly rolling into the Amsterdam city Centre. Mövenpick hotel. Funda. Muziek Gebouw aan het ij. TomTom. Grafitti. All sorts of things pass by my window.

The model session started and 30 minutes into the session I am almost finished with the drawing. The face looks weird though, there is more work to do. Irene is lying on her back and I figured the hands will move between each break. I cannot use the hands as two reference points so I decided to use the distance between her nipples as a measurement. Irene comes from Italy.

After the first break I realized I had been drawing her with a too shallow angle on the line between her nipples. After the break I wiped the drawing and restarted. This time around things fell into place much quicker. Indeed, after the break the hands were lying differently but the nipples where lying where I had expected them to be. Now the only issue is the hair but Saskia got plans for the hair so that will get sorted.

The artists’ todays are Luc, Bas, Jiri, Saskia, Anna and me.

Irene was lying and I elaborated how to lay out the colors. The big warm lamp was illuminating the silhouette of Irene and I wanted this painted with a warm light yellow. There are large areas of skin in shadow. For that I use all sorts of green and purple.

Between 1 and 2 PM we had a lunch break. After lunch I started working on the right hand lying on Irenes belly.

Anna liked to talk much. I think she came from Russia. She told me she could not paint light. I have been thinking about that I hear people easily say they cannot do things. It is as if you can allow yourself to stop thinking about a challenge as soon as you proclaimed “I cannot do this” but the important question is why you cannot do something. When you analyze why you cannot do something and you got the reasons figured out then you can start work on these challenges and finally you will figure out that “yes, it was difficult but you could do it”. So I told her this. Luc directly named me as a philosopher. So I asked Anna why she cannot paint light. The rays of light are emitted from that lamp there and then reflected and picked up by your eyes. Why can you not paint what you are seeing, the light?

At the last break 16:20 I had not really started on Irene’s face and right shoulder. This is going to be stressful.

One minute until the end I started to sign my painting!

When the session had ended I made a picture of the palette as well. It is the glass plate I started using after reading my new book. You can notice there is a splotch of black paint as well this time. Usually I don’t need that but this time I had a little bit of black accent here and there.

Now I got onto the train to Weesp from 6 PM! It is a wonder but I got a place to sit as well so I could continue typing on my blog post of today.

There is one “new” thing I tried during the painting session today. I painted with retired nylon aquarelle brushes. I had already tried this over a year ago and back then I decided it was not working for me. Well no it is not working as well as pig hair brushes works but nylon brushes has an advantage above pig hair brushes and that is they stay together! Pig hair curls in water and I use Cobra water soil-able oil paint. When I paint I don’t use linseed oil or turpentine, I just use water. After some time the brushes get curled. That starts to annoy me really much. I had two retired aquarelle brushes with me today and I manage to use them plus a big brush. Actually that other big brush is not curling. What is it made of? Have to look into that some time.

All in all, this was a great day. Now I take a break from painting models next week and then when I am back there will be a male model. Oh well.