Faces are HARD

I always struggled with drawing faces. And I've always looked for ways of avoiding them.

I think I always drew but I at some point when I was pretty tiny I started making comics. Because faces were so hard I made up a sort of creature that would be the characters that had very simple body shapes. The comics were usually about a cast of characters called things like the Reader (Leitora), the Vain (? Vaidosa), the Lucky (Sortudo, guy), Grandma, etc. The main character was the Leitora.. a girl. All vaguely cute and embarrassing. 

They looked more or less like this. It was important to have some versality, ie be able to draw lots of different outfits.

A few years later I was more comfortable drawing bodies so I created the Formigas (ants). These guys had much more bendable bodies, more joints. These stories were mostly re-tellings of my own life. Like a day at the beach, or that time I went to Fatima. All of these were really centered on step by step descriptions. Like, put on clothes, eat breakfast, go in car, get some place, etc. I will dig up pictures of some of this at some point.

Years after that I discovered super hero comics and started drawing compulsively. Suddenly school became this awesome amount of time where I could fill all my notebooks with drawings. It was such a marked transition that I remember my History teacher telling me, "I understand that you have just discovered this and it's great. But it's going to stop. During class you gave to pay attention." This memory allows me to pinpoint this: it was in 4th grade. It didn't stop. It was mostly superheroes: flying, jumping, zapping things, very dramatic. Now they were human bodies but without heads. Heads were still hard, I didn't know how to do it, and drawing bodies was amazing. Like its own special power, there was so much to explore. I was so comfortable with this decision I would even draw empty neck sockets. 

This was not at all drawn by me. It was drawn by Joe Madureira for a comic called Astonishing X-Men, back in the 90's. This was a drawing that so compelled me I drew it over and over. I'm fairly certain it was part of that catalytic moment when I started drawing all the time. I'm sure that remnants of Madureira's style are still part of how I draw.. especially hands and feet. Which are a favorite subject. Maybe because of him.

More years pass, already in college, trying to pass for an artist, I still didn't want to paint faces. I found all kinds of great reasons not to do it, much better articulated. I still like some of these reasons. Mostly that we are hardwired to pay a lot of attention to faces. A face in a painting is very distracting. Who is the person? Why are they in the piece? I like to find emotional expression  in the body language instead of the face - the hands are the faces, the curve of the back is the face - I still really like that. 

This is probably the best example. "That hand is the face" I would say, and sometimes still do.

(This is a panel from the painting The bud, the pot and the spider)

BUT. The paintings I've been working on now really need faces - worse yet, similar faces (the same person appears multiple times, to express multiple states of mind). So. I've been trying to deal with it: 

Face from the new series... still looks kind of funny but I was happy with that nose. Check out that double highlight! Does not look like the model tho.

Another study, another step: this face is TALKING! 

Making a new HeLa piece

I made a giant HeLa piece, it's 70 x 70 in! This isn't a great shot of the whole thing but it's really hard to capture the whole thing...

 

Here's the making of the piece:

In each HeLa piece I feel that I'm exploring different ways of interpreting the cells. The lines are the skeleton of the cell. In this case I kept the lines separated by cell, instead of connecting the mass of cells together. The whole body of each cell either fades away of replicates the line pattern. I was interested in the result of an impression of rhythm throughout the whole painting, which gave it a nice sense of motion.

I am really happy with individual moments in the piece that are below, there is a lot of movement and.. a lot to look at.. at least for my eyes :)

Girls and apples becomes a sculpture! (maybe)

The idea! making a sculpture:



Meninas e macas. Steel, about 1.8 m high.

I'm really excited about a project I'm working on right now: making a sculpture based on my Girls+Apples series. If you know my work, you've probably already been bombarded with this imagery :) In the series, I've played with the apple as the biblical symbol, a symbol of awareness, sexuality, maturity, etc. Most of these works were drawings or paintings of girls finding or being found by apples. In some cases, the girl is split in several aspects of herself, reflecting the multiplicity of states of mind. Recently, this series took a new direction where the girls went from receiving apples to being the source for apples - the girls became a tree. 


I was challenged to create an outdoor sculpture that would be seen mostly straight-on or straight from the back - instead of from every angle. It was also was meant to fit in in a yard surrounded by trees. I thought about this for a long time and came to the idea of converting one of the "tree" drawings into a 2 D sculpture.

This is the drawing the sculpture was based on: Tree. Mixed media on paper. App 14 x 14 in. 2011.


I had been curious about laser cut metal sculpture. This is an industrial process where a laser cuts outlines or shapes out of sheet metal. The machine can read designs from a vector image in a digital file. So I converted one of my drawings to a vector drawing using Adobe 

Illustrator.

Above is an image from the work in progress. One of the figures in the original drawing was bugging me - it just didn't look right. The drawing was based on a photoshoot I did with my lovely, helpful friends (thanks guys!). While I loved the drawing, the same figures were not working in the sculpture. So I went back to the original photos and re-drew the figure (in blue) over the old design. Then this new figure was merged into the rest of the sculpture.

Final design.

Converting a drawing for this purpose was particularly interesting because the drawings are already a study in line and flat color fields of the body. For this translation, the lines and fields combine and it becomes a 2-color composition.




To figure out what to do I contacted a shop and they were very helpful in determining the best material and giving feedback on the design. I am really excited about the level of detail that is possible (check the toes and bellybuttons) and also how organic the outlines can look. Since the sculpture will be outdoors in a humid, salty environment (yay, coast!), it's planned to be made in a type of steel that will weather particularly well, becoming that dark, rusty metal we call "ferro forjado" that looks so beautiful.


Nothing is settled until the actual sculpture is put in the ground.. I've actually been holding on to this post for a few weeks. Today the ok was given to start CUTTING the metal!

Open Studio in December

I had an open studio a week or so ago and it was GREAT. Thank you to everyone who made the trek in the middle of the first super-cold night of the year!


It was a great motivator to get a bunch of paintings I had been planning, here is a video panorama for you who couldn't come :)

Dunno.

"Dunno," 36 x 36 in, 2011. In-progress.

In this one, I'm really breaking up the brushstrokes instead of smoothing them out.

I dunno and but I like it :)

What? UNDO.

Continuing the "Multitudes" project...  expanding the series started with Hum?Hum. and Secrets.

The piece is Look, 36 x 36 in, oil on canvas.

Closer to done! 

After working with trios for a long time, I'm enjoying working with pairs. I stayed away from pairs for a long time because they tend to become opposites. Now they are becoming interesting as a way of subverting that notion.


I take a lot of snapshots during the painting. For many reasons. The main one is that there is no UNDO! And, in painting, you can really lose something you liked before. There's no getting it back. It's the opposite of life really. In life, if there is no proof you can always deny it! 


It's also important to capture these snapshots because they give me an over-all effect - they give me some distance from the piece. Quite literally. I'm constantly surprised by the huge difference of seeing the same painting up close and far away. Snapshots and their analysis become a routine exercise for me. For example, these shots helped me realize the head on the right was HUGE! It is now fixed.. Also, they help me capture the more illusive notions of a "composition that works" or a "good rhythm." Sometimes a piece will pass through a good stage and then lose it, and I study these pictures desperately to try to understand why it looked so much better at that one point! 

This one is What, also 36 x 36 in. What I learned from this shot: I really like the face on the right, it looks natural, sort of amused and very loose - I'm going to have to resist the temptation to play with it more; the head on the left is not working though, it looks a bit square. Also the shadows on the hands and rib cage from afar look a bit too dark and interrupt the natural modeling of the body.

Many new things

I thought it might be fun to share some of the steps on a current piece. I would say they are a method, but ask me any other day and the answer will likely be very different.

I've been working on a series about HeLa cells. I explain here more about why they are fascinating. The focus of these works have been the study of the cytoskeleton, a structure each cells forms and destroys dynamically as they decide where to go. The cytoskeleton is made up (loosely) of small tubes that assemble into longer tubes, at the membrane they form a structure that allows them to grab onto the floor so they can drag themselves around.. towards food and whatever needs the cell has. This essentially is a window into the decision making of the cell.. how cool.

Here are some sketches of the latest piece...

Original sketch. The sketch is based on microscopic imagery I got from a lab at Carnegie Mellon. I've been studying the same set of photos for a while, looking at the lines created by the skeleton in different ways. As the structure and body of individual cells, as the connector between cells, or as the structure of the larger group of cells..

A few weeks in.

Detail.

A bit later in, I took a photo of the painting to draw digitally on in Photoshop. This let me play with different locations for the skeleton lines without causing irreversible damage. When o when, will there be an UNDO in painting?

Right now!