Spent today glazing the second Clair Luce portrait (G1460A). My first was painted in 2005.
The smoothness is good, and colouration, but the likeness is poor. I'd mastered painting a panel with smoothness by 2007 and the 'Untouchable Strawberry' painting, even if perhaps some techniques such as glazing with opaque colours, and how much detail to add during underpainting have improved since. My colouration too has been good for almost as long, though again some improvements are constantly being made, and I was certainly not confident at colouration until recently; yet for the most part, it felt today that I've hardly improved at all technically in 15 years.
At times I've painted portraits directly to the canvas, like the Telly Savalas painting, the recent portraits of Volodymyr Zelenskyy and David Lynch. This is a relatively recent development, and something I'd not have tried before. Perhaps the lesson is that line/edge drawing is a more difficult discipline than body drawing, primarily because it's more difficult to check and adjust a likeness in line, because we're not copying a line drawing but a solid form. At one point I made shaded pencil studies, but generally don't do this now. These were sometimes were done as tone studies, but also as tests of likeness in portraits.
Perhaps it would be better to draw portraits as tone drawings rather than outlines from the outset. I don't want to paint a portrait on the canvas in the way most oil portrait artists do/did because the correct colour in the correct place first time is the ideal for the perfect finish I desire. Any paint on the canvas first will muddy the result. A third option is the way some artists, like Steve Caldwell, paint, creeping a high quality image out, rather than working on the whole, but this limits blending or makes it impossible (in acrylics that is not an issue). Painting in layers is vital for actual beauty, as well as giving a power of colour effects impossible in other ways. Intricate though acrylics are, they look flat and poor in real life compared to oil paintings.
My glazing today was very smoky, sfumato. This technique can come from an obsession for smooth 'perfection', or an insecurity, not knowing where the lines are, not wanting to find them. I became convinced that Leonardo painted like this for the latter reason, that he was, unexpectedly, insecure about his drawing ability. This makes sense, because he was brilliant at drawing, and we only become brilliant at something by insecurity about it, and fighting yet harder to improve. My line drawing woes reminded me of the two Mona Lisa paintings (I have no doubt that the Isleworth Mona Lisa is a genuine Leonardo, and a first version). They are the same person, yet not quite the same, the likeness is different.
