Quent Cordair Fine Art

After searching the hard drives of two laptops, our main desktop and one external backup, I am finally convinced that I don’t have any other images of this painting’s progress. Strange that a computer crash could be a problem for an artist, whose job is just about as analog as it gets. At least I didn’t lose the reference material for a half completed painting. And of course, the painting itself did end up on the wall where it belongs, and where it will still hopefully be hanging long after hard drives have taken their place alongside the slide-rule, the telegraph and possibly the internal combustion engine as interesting but out-dated, obsolete technologies.

I also suspect that I have discussed the actual process of paint application often enough that for many of you, the compositional setup and the prep-work for this painting were possibly the most interesting part…other than images of the finished piece. Add to that the long delays in new posts while the Gallery re-located to Sonoma and while I was studying in New York, and the fact that I actually completed this painting nearly a year ago, and it makes almost too much sense to skip to the end, summing up the high points along the way. So I will.

The gentleman who commissioned this piece suggested the title “Breaking Through” which I had to agree, fit the theme perfectly as well as described the way the house and the cliffs interact with each other. So here it is, the finished painting, “Breaking Through”:

When last I posted an image, the cliffs had just been completed, and there was an odd sort of house-shaped gap of naked canvas almost randomly breaking them apart and giving them a distinctly un-finished feel. So it was not only a lot of fun to paint the house in a model-building, creative sort of way, but also very satisfying in a filling-in-the-missing-pieces, puzzle completing sort of way. But to be chronologically correct, I should mention that because I was painting with a deadline, and because titanium white is one of the slower drying pigments on my palette, I actually painted the Architect’s shirt next. But I digress…back to the house. The concrete sections were painted first, in part because they most directly interacted with the cliffs and in part because I am relatively comfortable painting concrete and it allowed me to begin filling in the space, establishing the shadow lines which help place the house within the cliffs, and it allowed me to work out a rough value structure for the other materials. As I worked on the concrete, I tried to keep in mind areas where the lighting would be affected by the surrounding structure. Many of those decisions are subtle, but you can easily see an example on the bottom surface of the third concrete balcony from the bottom on the right side. Not only is the glass reflecting light, but I imagined a partially covered pool in that area that would be reflecting ripples of light onto the ceiling above it. Again, it is always easier if there is an actual visual reference for situations like this, but it is also exciting to try and work through the intellectual puzzle of the play of the light in your head and on the canvas…especially if there is no exact visual reference available.

I painted the vertical flagstone walls next. Here it really helped to have the shadows on the concrete already painted, since there was more than enough to think about in creating a random pattern for the shape and color of the individual stones while also trying to keep them level with respect to the angles of the house and the linear perspective work I did in the scale drawings. The last time I spent this much time painting individual rocks was when I painted the railroad tracks in “Motive Force”.

There are only a few sections of roof that can be seen from this angle, but they were painted next. I was envisioning bronze with a dark patina to compliment the flagstone.

The last, and also the most enjoyable part of the house to be painted was the glass. This was also a study in modeling which consisted mostly of picturing what the sky and cliffs would look like if the viewer were to slowly rotate through a full 360 degrees, and then reflecting that view in the glass appropriately. In a few areas I also tried to show the transparency of the windows where light from the east would have been visible through the house and where the lighter area of the sky would be visible through the skylights.

Once I was happy with the house and the cliffs… with the background in general, I turned to the figure of the Architect and the foreground. As I mentioned, I skipped ahead and painted the shirt before I even started work on the house. This turned out to be a really good idea, since the lightest areas of the shirt, the areas containing the purest concentrations of Titanium White, were still quite wet when I got around to painting the rest of the figure. I painted the rocks on which the blueprints are draped first which, after the two-week long crash course in painting rocks that was the cliffs, proved to be fairly straight-forward. The pants hardly show, and represented a light 4 hour session to finish. The blueprints, on the other hand, were a little more of a challenge. The model, an architect himself, brought actual blueprints with him to the scrap shoot to use as a prop. So I had really great reference material to work from for the play of light on the paper and the general perspective of the lines of the house plans as they wrapped around and over the ripples of the pages. When I shot the scrap photos, I used a stool, a couple phonebooks and some other handy junk to try and approximate the shape of the rocks under the blueprints and on which the architect is leaning, so the wrinkles and curves in the paper were easy enough to paint. The tricky part was replacing the existing image on the plans in the photo with a plan view for the house in the painting. I ended up painting the paper first, waiting for it to dry, and then glazing the house plans over the top. It worked out really well.

As has been my most common practice, I saved the figure itself for last. Traditionally, this has served not only as a sort of reward to myself at the end of the painting (the figure is always my favorite part to paint) but also keeps me from accidentally smudging paint on the finished figure while painting the background. Recently, I have realized an additional benefit to completing the background first, and that is light and color control. Flesh tones are some of the most subtle color choices that can be made during the course of a painting, and, as with all color choices, can be heavily influenced by the surrounding colors on the canvas. Having a complete context of color in place while painting the figure makes the process of choosing flesh tones not only easier, but much more effective.

Most often, the face of a figure is where the most emotional content is vested. In this case, however, since the face is turned away from the viewer, the hands say a lot more than the facial expression. While the right hand of the figure is supporting weight, leaving the majority of the expressive aspect to the left, both hands add to the composition. The model had a lot of really nice musculature in his hands and fore-arms, one of the reasons I ended up using him. But I still ended up exaggerating the play of the veins and muscles to evoke a feel of capable, experienced hands…hands that could work with stone or guide the razor-sharp tip of a drafting pencil. The left hand is tracing the lines of the plan while the eyes, presumably, are tracing the lines of the house itself. I liked the idea even while working on the first sketches and instructing the model how to pose, but when I was working on the painting, I started to see an interesting similarity to the way a musician moves their hands over an instrument, which seemed even more appropriate to the composition. The figure in this painting is one of my personal favorites that I have painted.

So, there you have it. One of the more challenging compositions I have painted, one of the largest, one of the most time consuming, one of the most instructive and certainly the most complex commission painting I have undertaken so far. Once again, I apologize for the lost images and the slow updates. I would be more than happy to answer any questions, of hear any comments, and I’ll see you again soon in the Artist’s Studio. Thanks for reading.

The next step was to paint the cliffs. While I wanted some photographic reference to base the cliffs and rocks on, the overall form of the landscape was determined by my original compositional drawings. The diagonals and value ranges were important to the structure of the composition. So, working from several different sets of photos of cliffs from the east coast of the US, from Great Britain, and from some details of smaller cliffs in Little Cottonwood Canyon neat Salt Lake City, this is what I came up with:

This kind of work is by far the most difficult, in my opinion. I would always rather have some direct reference, either live or photographic. However, I find that quite often, my compositions require either architecture or landscape that is simply not available. This is why, over the coming years, in addition to constant study of the figure, I will be working hard on landscape studies, architectural studies and still life painting. The more familiar an artist becomes with various subjects, the more effectively they can be integrated into larger compositions. I am really pleased with the way these cliffs turned out, but in ten years, I better be able to do better or I am stagnating as an Artist.

I used a grid to transfer the final to-scale sketch onto the canvas.  The grid should be pretty hard to spot in these images, thanks to a handy little trick I picked up in the Artist’s Handbook (by Ralph Mayer).  Incidentally, if you are an Artist yourself, or an aspiring Artist, or a really serious, geek-level art enthusiast and you don’t already have a copy of this hefty tome of art-related information, you should really consider picking one up.  Anyway, the trick is to draw the grid with water-based color pencil, and then sketch the cartoon on to the canvas with oil-based pencil or charcoal.  Once the drawing is complete, the grid can be carefully removed with a warm washcloth.  This may sound ridiculously anal, but oil colors have a tendency to become increasingly transparent over time, and the last thing an artist wants for a carefully planned and painstakingly executed painting is for a nice set of grid lines to mysteriously appear in it after several years.  For this same reason, I sketched the composition onto the canvas with white colored pencil, which seemed the least likely to ever make an unexpected appearance down the road.  I have seen original paintings by Bouguereau, one of my personal favorite figure painters, in which the sketch for the composition has become easily visible over the lifetime of the piece, sometimes even revealing alternate positions for arms, drapery, etc.  This makes for really interesting viewing for anyone curious about the methods of as competent a craftsman as Bouguereau, but I guarantee he (Bouguereau) never intended for it to happen.

Once I had the canvas sketched, I began working on the sky.  The idea was to set the scene at sunrise, symbolizing a beginning.  I spent a fairly long day blocking in the sky in the image below.  I was referring to a set of photos I took in St. George, UT a few years earlier, and thought the colors and angles would create a real dramatic backdrop for the painting.

The next morning, I walked into my studio and realized the sky was far too busy.  There would be so much going on with the cliffs, water, and house, that it would be overkill.  Besides, who needs all the negative press associated with one of their paintings causing a series of seizures in unsuspecting viewers?  Not me.  I spent the next two days re-painting the sky.  This is how it finally turned out.  Did I mention these images were dark and grainy?  When you see the photos of the finished painting, you will see what I mean.  Oh, yeah…did I also mention that I had a sizable number of images vanish into the ether of a computer meltdown?  Consequently, the water is also finished in this second image.

The end result of all the back and forth was a sketch for the design of the house that looked a little like this:

Ok, exactly like that.  At last I had final approval on the composition, and was ready to actually begin the painting.  The first step was to stretch and prime the canvas, which was to be 55X34.  This sounds like an odd size, but it was based both on measurements of the space in which the painting would eventually hang, and on the Fibonacci ratio (A.K.A. the golden mean or Devine Proportion) of 1.618 to 1. For those of you who may be interested, the Fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers given by starting with a zero and a one, and then adding the two consecutive numbers to get the next one.  0+1 is 2, 1+2 is 3, 2+3 is 5, 8, 13, 21, and so on.  The result of dividing two consecutive numbers in the series converges on 1.61803 as the numbers get larger.  This ratio is also the only number that differs from its inverse by exactly 1 (1/1.61803=0.61803).  So there’s today’s fun math fact.  Of more interest aesthetically is that the ratio shows up everywhere in the real world from the spirals in nautilus shells and pineapple skins to the relative lengths of the sections of a finger or of the upper arm to the lower arm.  And the Greeks thought it was pretty cool. Cool enough to declare it the most aesthetically pleasing ratio around.   I’m not claiming that I believe there is any superiority of this proportion in putting together a composition, but I do find it interesting. Incidentally, the horizon line is also placed based on a multiple of the same ratio.  I should mention that I didn’t set out to design the composition based on the Golden Mean, but when I checked the proportions in my comp sketch, they were so close that I decided to tweak them into compliance for the final painting. 

The next step was to find a model.  Oddly enough, after a few weeks of looking specifically for someone who fit the bill with no luck, the Greeks became involved in the painting for the second time.  Sort of.  Sara and I were enjoying a lovely lunch in a little Greek restaurant in Salt Lake, when Sara suddenly pointed out that there was a guy standing in line that looked exactly like the figure in my sketches.  Being my best model recruitment agent (and being a woman and therefore 75 to 80 percent less likely to get maced when approaching potential models), she immediately cornered the guy and made the pitch.  Not only was he interested in modeling, but coincidentally, was an actual architect and volunteered to bring a set of blueprints to the scrap shoot for use as a prop.

I put together this little combined image of the approved composition and the new house design to give myself a reference and the model some idea of what I was after.

Once I had all the reference photos, I sat down and worked out the final details of the composition incorporating the actual figure, all the perspective work on the house, and the final layout of the cliffs.  The image below is a scan of the resulting scale drawing which I then transferred to the canvas. 

On the condition that I continue design work on the house itself, that sketch went over well.  So, the basic layout and proportions of the composition were finalized, the pose of the figure and his position in relation to the house were decided on, and I was beginning to form a much clearer idea of the color scheme and mood I wanted to achieve in the painting.  I began to keep my eyes open for a suitable model, and started gathering potential reference material for the sky, ocean and cliffs in the background.  But more importantly, I put a lot of time into the design of the house.  I did scores of sketches, most of which ended up in the trash, many of which I don’t have images of, and some of which were really pretty silly…though a legitimate part of the brainstorming process.  Most of these design drawings were done just of the house itself, though occasionally I would include the figure just to get a feel for how the whole composition was working together. I sent many of these quick drawings to the client to get feedback, and incorporated new ideas or deleted parts of the design based on his reactions.  Below are a few examples.

This one was pretty stylized, and very angular.  Maybe a bit too futuristic…but I kind of liked it.  A lot of these design features ended up in the final house in one form or another.

I think this one was mainly a counter to the sharp angle of its predecessor.  It felt a little like a concert hall to me for some reason.

Here the Architect makes a showing.  There were a lot of things about the house that the client really liked, including the general layout, the curved sections of glass and the lower left side built into the face of the cliff.  But, the pointed peaks of the roof, which I included in an attempt to mirror some of the shapes in the cliffs, just weren’t working for him.  In retrospect, I agree.  He also wanted to lose the pointy prominence of the cliff face centered under the house, and bring a little more of the living space down the right side of the rock.

This is a slightly better version of the previous design.  I really liked the angled balconies on the lower portion of this one.  It still needs some of the changes mentioned above, including the roof sections which I believe were occasionally being referenced by this point as the ‘tongues’.