It was 4am, two days ago. I was thinking about the mood of the country and, compared to last year, or perhaps even compared to before the European Elections,it seemed more sinister now somehow, riven with divisions. Suddenly I had an image of an Oliver Cromwell, his eyes shaded like a Rembrandt self-portrait. The rebirth of a spectre from the past... summoned. I was so struck by the idea that I thought about buying a cavalier hat! How good it would be to be Frans Hals every so often! - but only for short periods.
I spent today working on the plans for this painting. It's complicated by the fact that there aren't many portraits of Cromwell, there are probably more statues. The best painting is a miniature by Samuel Cooper, and a bigger portrait, which isn't brilliant, copied from it, which is often wrongly attributed to Cooper and silly on many levels (including wearing armour with a cotton collar!). Copying anything from a painting is difficult because so much is missing that our minds fill in automatically. Even Raphael's paintings are full of flaws that aren't obvious, never mind the poor quality of any images that you might have. Look how grainy this is!
Even here you can see the eye on the right which is lower and more distant has a larger iris when it should be smaller. Eyelashes, caruncles; lots of anatomy isn't there at all. Entropy! The disintegration of data with each copy! These are problems with every painting, and I have no choice but to fight my way through each problem to create a painting many times larger than the original. How can we paint something more accurately than the only painting painted from a live subject?
This idea reminded me that I had a Cromwell idea way back in 2006. Maybe I'll paint that up too, complete with carrots!
