A new painting: Henry Miller
Nik Maack
I just posted a new painting on my website. It's a portrait of Henry
Miller. I've also included the photograph that inspired the painting.
http://www.nikart.com/new/37.html
Any comments on it would be appreciated.
chris
to ask what did he ever do to deserve this?
It's interesting to compare the photo and the painting, since the photo says
a good deal about Henry Miller, and the painting very little. For example,
the photo is highly asymmetric with respect to the face (use your hand and
cover up the left or right halves, or the upper and lower ones) How much is
due to the photo & how much to the asymmetry in Miller's own face is hard to
tell on this scale, but I think it is something you shied away from in your
own work.
Bit also note that Miller's face in the photo is consistent - for example,
the eye's lie along the same line, and if you extend that line well to the
left, it roughly meets the lines drawn parallel to the nostrils and to the
mouth at the same point.. That skew you also seem to have shied away from.
You'll also note that the photographer didn't try to minimize any of the
other effects of hard living that show up in Miller's face - i.e. the puffy
poutiness and sort of weak self-assurance that seems to go along with to
much drinking. I guess I'd say he is daring to be pretty honest about
Miller - he wasn't trying to be pretty - and in that sense he expresses one
of Miller's own dictums - that "imagination is the voice of daring".
But that daring is missing from your own picture; it's as if you backed away
from painting Miller as he was.
Cheers;
Chris
PS. Sorry to be so rude, but I know you can do a lot better.
"Nik Maack" <nikm...@sympatico.ca> wrote in message
news:3C9362AC...@sympatico.ca...
Nik Maack
Let's have an interesting conversation about me, because I am the most
important topic I know of.
chris wrote:
> Well, I've never been much of a Henry Miller fan, but in his defense I have
> to ask what did he ever do to deserve this?
He married five times, and (from what I've heard) treated his women poorly.
Miller looked sad in the photo, I decided to make him happier. I gave
him fuller lips with a slight smile. And I didn't like his frou-frou
scarf, so I scratched that all away. What I liked was his bald
forehead, his dark eyebrows, and his chin. I focussed on those. I
always make eyes larger than they are -- it makes faces more expressive
-- so I expanded his squinty little eyeballs a little.
> It's interesting to compare the photo and the painting, since the photo says
> a good deal about Henry Miller, and the painting very little.
Some critic and fellow artist once told me that all artists should only
paint portraits of people they know. He gave me hell because I went out
with my girlfriend, she snapped photos of interesting looking people,
and then I painted portraits of them based on the pictures.
He told me that this was just plain wrong. (I suspect some art teacher
fed him this nonsense.) An artist, he said, should get to know his
model and strive to capture what's in the person. If you don't know
them, how can you capture who they are? Painting strangers means you
can never hope to capture their pure essence.
All this strikes me as a little too thoughtful, a little too
intellectual, a little too serious. A painter doesn't paint the soul of
a person. A painter paints their perception of the soul of a person.
What you get in a portrait is, more often than not, the painter, not the
subject. And that's fine.
This is why I like Modigliani's portraits. They're not really about who
he saw, but a way of seeing people. Yeah, it's sort of about THEM --
the people out there -- but mostly it's about Modigliani and the inside
of his own head.
Plus he paints nudes that actually give men erections.
> But that daring is missing from your own picture; it's as if you backed away
> from painting Miller as he was.
I really don't see it that way, but you are, of course, entitled to your opinion.
I find the original photograph useful to work from, but rather bland.
Miller's head is tilted to a jaunty angle and one of his eyebrows is
higher than the other. You can almost hear him saying, "Hmmm?" Except
it's more than that. It's more a "Hmmph? You're taking my photograph?
Oh God, how many of these fuckers have I posed for? All right, let's
go." Not so much naked as openly contemptuous. Bitter in a thoughtful way.
But I don't really know anything about Miller. I haven't read any of
his books. That might not be true. I think I read one of his books,
but I don't remember it very well.
Personally, I see my portraiture as "translation". It's not so much
catching how people look, but how they SHOULD look. Take a face, add
the colours it really should have, and create a complicated
monster-clown of silly sarcastic bliss.
> PS. Sorry to be so rude, but I know you can do a lot better.
Not at all. I did ask for feedback.
Nik
Esther Aigh
>
>
>I just posted a new painting on my website. It's a portrait of Henry
>Miller. I've also included the photograph that inspired the painting.
Okay. You seem to have a "Close" obsession
with portraiture, so here is my suggestion,
rather than a critique of the Miller painting.
Take the Miller image and paint it as many
different/varied ways as you can think of.
Do it with a "fresh" approach in mind each
time. Do AT LEAST 5 more variations on the
theme. Then put the finished portraits
on a web page for us to see, sized the same
size so that they fit comfortably in an
array (grid arrangement).
Esther Aigh
>Some critic and fellow artist once told me that all artists should only
>paint portraits of people they know.
The best advice I ever received was, "When someone
criticizes your work - doesn't like it - take that
criticism and cram it down their gullet by doing
it even WORSE the next time." In other words, take
every negative and make each a positive. If someone
says, "the eyes are too large" you make them even
more prominent next time, etc.