Felix D'Eon

Diary ~ A Pastel Painting with Joey

June, 2006

 

Joey had a few days off last week, so I convinced him to come to the studio and model. He doesn't want to be photographed anymore - he's worried about his carreer, but he graciously agreed to come by and model again for old time's sake. He's one of the best models I've ever had, so I was very grateful. We didn't have much time to work (only three days) so I decided not to use my usual, more time consuming process. I did no preperatory drawings, and no gesture drawings, but instead figured out the pose and went straight to the painting. I had been thinking about doing a painting for some time based on the Apoxyomenos, an ancient Greek statue of an athlete scraping off olive oil with a strigil. The Greeks rubbed their bodies with olive oil before performing in athletic competitions (which they famously did in the nude), and they afterwards cleaned themselves off with a small metal knife-like object. It was actually Joey who had inspired me to this paining, quite some time ago - we went to a nude beach together, and his movement while applying sunblock reminded me so much of the Apoxyomenos that I developed the idea for the painting then and there, and have only now finally realized it. Below is a Roman copy of the Apoxyomenos

It didn't occur to me to monitor my progress with photographs until well into the painting (partly because Joey was uncomfortable about being photographed, so I forgot), but about a third of the way through, on the second day of modeling, I started to like the painting very much and thought I would document it. So this is jumping in almost half way through. But in any case, my process continues below.

Since I already knew what the pose would be, starting it was easy. The first part (which is not pictured here) was a simple drawing of Joey in the pose, done in charcoal pencil, with the shadows roughed in with vine charcoal. I afterwards put in the basic shadows and lights with pinks and browns. Most of my major compositional desicions had already been made by now - the figure has a strong diagonal of his arms, so I balanced it with a counter diagonal of the rocks, and realizing that too much weight was being pulled to the area where his arms and the rock meet, I decided to drop a low horizon with lots of contrast to the bottom right corner to balance the painting. The rest is just filling out these decisions.

 

 

Above, I put the rocks next to his leg dark, to bring out his body, and those next to his arm of a more medium tone, so that the strong diagonal thrust of his arm would not be too strong and lead the eye off the page. I also started to put in a rock at the bottom right corner, because I realized that even with the low horizon, there was still not enough weight in that corner.

The description continues on the following page.