Goof-ups and Fix-ups

Often, even if I am happy with a painting or sketch as soon as I finish it, I start hating it after a while. It can get to the point that I can't stand looking at it, and when it gets there, I sometimes redo it. Now since I have taken a break of sorts from painting for a while, I am thinking of using this hiatus to fix up some of my existing work before taking on something new. I might do some small new ones now and then.

Hariprasad Chaurasia portrait - Charcoal on paper- 18" x 24"

This is a charcoal portrait from years back (retouched last night). It was the first drawing I ever did that was this big. I had only drawn in notebooks until then. I knew nothing about art, and this was a hard piece in two respects: a) translating colour to gray scale - you really need to observe hard to decide whether a certain colour when translated to gray scale would be lighter or darker than another, and how much lighter or how much darker, and b) blowing up the scale - I copied this from a CD cover, so this was a major size blow-up. Since I didn't use any axis or grid techniques, it came out as an approximation. Moreover, the original had more width than length and the surface I was drawing on was the opposite. Due to these completely different aspect ratios and proportions, the face in my portrait has turned out to be skinnier than the original one, making it look sort of more taut, and this makes the subject look younger. So overall, it's a very approximate imitation.

This portrait makes me very nostalgic for my grad school days. I did it right in the middle of my living room, with friends coming and going, a few stared for a while, a few gave critiques, and a few didn't care. And how ridiculous of me to put myself out there like that when it was my first big drawing venture ever! Sometimes I can't understand my actions in retrospect. Anyway, I was pretty happy with the way it turned out after I got done. I didn't see anything wrong with it.

About 2-3 years back I swallowed my reserve and pride and had a friend who's a professional artist comment on some of my work. About this one, he said I should've used some kind of an axis technique for the face. I still couldn't see what was wrong! It was much later that I independently observed how flawed it was! And I was absolutely surprised how my eyes had missed such a flagrant error; basically, the center of the mouth did not align with the axis of symmetry of the face. So I fixed it up some last night. I can still see some flaws, but may be I'll get to them later when I am more motivated. (There is no guarantee that I'll like this one forever, but I am posting it since I am satisfied for now, just like I probably would have posted the earlier super-flawed one at the time I was happy with it. :-) )

I realize I could've shown a 'Before' and an 'After' image for you to judge the make-over, but I'm not inclined to do so since I hate the 'Before' image (now). :-)

You might see more of my earlier work retouched, in the coming posts.