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See art in a fresh way.

The following presentation is a change from the short format from my tutorials, it is an in-depth look into the making of Denouement with over 45 images. I hope you will enjoy it.
 

Denouement, 1987, oil on linen, 54x78"

There is a beacon of love, light, and color that excites my whole being. Denouement is the expression of that existence.

Denouement began as an idea of the ultimate state of existence. I had thought of something like being at the top of Everest, but I rejected that as being too specific. I then thought of the love between two people--not a needy love, but one that exalts in simply being; with the implied idea that the people who can love like that are exceptional human beings. I had no idea what it would look like, but I knew that radiance was going to guide the entire process.

I began studies for Denouement in 1984, I was 27.

The first drawings of the idea were drawn from my imagination. In both images you can see the glow from the light between the male and female. I also had the idea that this scene was immediately following the act of love-making. In the left drawing the woman is arching back, in the right she has her hip turned. In the final version of Denouement, I used both the arch and turn for the woman.

I began to develop studies from live models for this composition.

I don't recall exactly how I did it with mirrors, but I am the model for the two left drawings. Figurative realist artists working from life go through financial hell trying to develop the figures. Often artists turn to photos, but that kills the process for me. One great way to work with the model is to be both the artist and the model; the model is always ready to work when the artist is ready and the model won't cost anything!

It seems to me stupid now, but in the first drawing, on the left, I lit the backside. What happens to the light in front of the guy? It is killed off. So I chalked up the 6/8 hours of that work as a loss and began again--this time with a backlit figure.

Backlighting the figure was necessary, yet I remember having trouble seeing in the shadows, and being in the shadow myself, which prevented me from seeing the whole working drawing properly.

There were only the most indirect visual influences for Denouement. None of the great artists in the past had done what I had in mind. Up until the French Impressionists virtually all the painters worked with white, ochre, brown, gray, and black. If there was color, it was blended with black to give shape and shadow. Or, it was applied as a glaze--something like a color tint on a b/w photograph.  This tradition is is still with us today in works of such artists as Nerdrum. The hook is that these limited colors lend themselves to realism.

In a radical contrast to the "brown" painters, the French Impressionists extended the range of color, embellished light and shadows with contrasting, fresh colors, and simulated the vibrancy of natural light. The rub here is that the Impressionists sacrificed detailed realism for this new vibrancy.

My aim with Denouement was to integrate the best from these two approaches: take the light and realism from the Old Masters and merge it with the colorful vibrancy of the Impressionists.

Little did I know I was embarking on a 3-year project rife with difficult problems.

In six years of college and art school education, I had one teacher that I respected and trusted, though his work was in the style of cubist Picasso. None of the others had an understanding, ability, or desire for figurative realism. I did come across a couple of traditional realists with the possibility of apprenticeship, but I found their work to be lifeless. And, if I didn't see life and intelligence in a teacher's art, I rejected them out of hand. The point of all this is that there there were no artists that I knew of that could help me with where I wanted to go. So I was literally on my own, without any prototypes or guides to create the visions that were in my mind's eye.

Perhaps the two most significant influences on the painting were the driving and successful characters from Rand's Atlas Shrugged and the luminous, passionate, and beautiful score of Puccini's Turandot. They had the spirit of the glowing epic I was after, but have never seen in art--the wildly radiant outcome as an end, and realistic, radiant color as a means.

I began color pastel studies with the male figure. The gold tones with hints of green and peach appealed to my feeling of colorful radiance. I found the cool highlights and shadows on the floor, parts of the body, and wall to be dull, so I rejected those colors and continued on my quest.

I began color studies for the bed and some of the surrounding atmosphere.  Again, I didn't like the gray color of parts of the floor and side of the bed, but I loved the green reflected glow on the white sheet, as well as the peach, pink, and gold highlights.  It's one thing to reject certain colors, but it is not easy to arbitrarily substitute colors successfully.  Therefore, I looked for ways to play with the color of the light sources--different light bulbs give off different colored light.

I worked on this pastel of the bed for about 10/15 hours and then I started work on the female.

Finally, I got the kind of colored light that felt absolutely matched my sense of the radiance of color. The primary purpose of the pastels was to show the shifting nuance of warm and cool colors.

It was important for me to show where the light was coming from. Here is study of the lamp. In many ways I could feel I was on a roll with the colors--everything about the light and shadow appealed to me.

Now I did another pastel study of the male and female. Around this time I began questioning my overall composition--the way it was set up in perspective. Wouldn't  the guy be gigantic and the woman tiny? Shouldn't the man and woman be closer, more physically connected?

So after all this work I abandoned my original compositions. It is almost unbearable to relive the angst and stupidity I felt at that time. It is so simple in hindsight that showing a larger-than-life man and a microscopic woman sends a grotesque message--the relationship is absurdly unbalanced.

I went back to the mental drawing board. One benefit of this disaster is that it opened up for me a new way of seeing people and environment in paintings.  The knowledge I drew from this is the foundation for a lecture I gave in a somewhat different context: Detecting Metaphysical Value Judgments in Painting.

One rationalization I use when I have wasted substantial time on images is that I need not go down that avenue again.  This makes me feel much better, and, simultaneously, encourages me to search for a new angle on the problem.  As well, I took all of the things I loved from the studies and used them as a springboard.

My first major problem to solve was to draw the man closer in size to the woman, and to get them connected. I really loved the woman's pose, so it was definitely the man's figure I had to work on. There is one pose I always loved in life drawing, a semi-reclining pose.

These five pencil drawings represent about 24 hours of working with the model, a mere $360 of modeling expenses. The drive to get what I wanted had no limitations, though I always hoped I would get everything I needed in one sitting. A conservative guess is that everything took 20x more effort and time than what I had hoped for.

But, this pose of the male figure, integrated with the female pose, exceeded my most hopeful expectations. Here you can see the grouping of the two figures. One of the things that furthered the composition of the painting was the two of them together, creating a diagonal line through the composition, like the flight path of a jet. It's a common experience that verticals create a kind of stoic feeling, horizontals a passive, calm feeling, and diagonals a dynamic feeling. I loved how they came together.

A second consequence of this grouping was that they became entwined, like cords of a rope.  One of the things I constantly heard from critics, teachers, and students was that everything had been done before in figurative art. They used that as a justification to break with representational painting. In truth, it is very difficult to come up with fresh ideas and original compositions. In this case I am extremely proud that I accomplished such an original grouping.

A third thing about this diagonal grouping is that it is placed in space, starting at his foot in foreground, continuing back through the center of the painting, then ending in the background with the flourish of her hand. This takes us through the universe of the painting, helping to create vast depth.

Having solved the imaging of the man and woman's size and physical connection, I was back on track with the composition for the painting.

Now everything else began to fall into place with the composition. Two chairs on either side of the couple's diagonal line would serve as guardians for their flight path and balance the composition. The placement of the chairs opposite to the light in the center also helped to enhance the radiance of light--adding a great deal to the overall atmosphere.

The numbered grid on the compositional sketch was used to transfer the image to the canvas.

I relied on two-point perspective to get the perspective of the carpet right.

The numbered grid of the duvet-covered chair was used to integrate it to the compositional drawing. One of the nightmares of this work was that almost every object had to be transferred to the compositional drawing by this method--I never saw the whole image together, in reality, at any one point.

I had a lot of fun setting up and drawing the sheets. I wanted them to have a rumpled look to indicate the activity that had gone on before. I can't tell you how many times I blindly tossed the sheets onto the bed, looking for beautiful, yet accidental folds. The same thing went for the duvet and the dress hanging over the chairs.

Here are a few studies of her face, arms, hands, and fingernails. The trickiest part about her detailing was that she was, in real life, so far away from me.  I needed to tweak the tones in the painting considerably to give the illusion that she was in deep space.

The following are several pastel studies of various things:

Having drawn virtually all of the information I needed, there was still the small matter of how all the this information was going to be integrated into the final image. It is impossible simply to copy each item exactly as I drew and to make the whole thing look natural. It's the forest through the trees problem. Here I had lots of trees, as I had focused individually on each object.

I had a few more problems ahead of me.  First, I needed to create the feeling of about 20' of depth in the room.  As well, every object had to fit naturally in its space, even though many of the objects covered a range of space.  For example, the carpet and the couple moved from front to back in depth.  Lastly, the overall lighting had to feel like it was from one source.

To accomplish all of this, I found I needed to develop a radically new theory of integrating light and objects in space. You can find two tutorials in which I discuss this theory: Transparency: A Key to Spatial Depth in Painting, Part 1, Black/White  and Transparency: A Key to Spatial Depth in Painting, Part 2, Color.

The detail of the lamp on the left is the pastel study, and the detail on the right is from the painting. This gives you some idea that I didn't transfer the tones and colors of the studies over to the painting literally. For example, if I had painted the black base in the painting, it would have completely destroyed the effect of glowing light that I achieved in the painting.

The canvas for Denouement is quite large, 54x78". Not including the time on the studies,  I painted it over two years, painting Monday-Friday. I worked at a job on weekends to make my expenses. My guess is that, including everything, I worked 4,800 hours on it. It originally sold for $15,000, $3.13 an hour. The most shocking aspect after completing the work, however, is that it has never been reviewed by an art critic. An extremely interesting question to that phenomenon is why?

It could be because I go my own way, not playing off of the temporary, contemporary trends.  Or, it could be because the work is so original that critics do not grasp it.  It could be because I don't have a presence in the gallery scene.  Or, it could be because Denouement is about the radiance of love, which might be unacceptably benevolent to critics.  It could also be because 95% of my energy is focused on painting, with little time for cold calling critics for their approbation.  Another possibility is that virtually all of my work is in private homes, with collectors that have no intention of selling them, thereby keeping the paintings out of the public eye.  Or, it could be due to the gigantic can of worms of aesthetic thought, in which postmodernism negates beauty, skill, and integration in figurative art.

Probably, there is some truth to all the above. Regardless of my conflict with critics, the joy and confidence I got from bringing Denouement into existence has been an end in itself and one of the fantastic points I have reached in my life. I am blessed that many good friends and collectors feel that Denouement is meaningful to them.

I hope you enjoyed seeing the creative process in a fresh way.

Michael Newberry
New York, March 16, 2007