Two Female Nudes

I came across a black chalk painting by the French artist Aristide Maillol ( 1861-1944 ) .  It was a painting of 2 nude females.  What captured my attention was the impressionistic depiction of the female body with firm bold lines and exquisite light values.  As a fan of photography, I wish my photos could exude those qualities.

I studied the painting for a few weeks, and decided I would try to copy the painting, using my understanding of Gou, Chuen, Ts'a, R'an.  I started out with charcoal sticks on Xuan paper, developing my lines and rubbings with charcoal.   I then used the coffee that I was drinking as a pigment to process the lines and shading, to get that sepia look.     Ink was used to further enhance the  lines and the shaded areas. Raw Xuan paper turned out to be a perfect media for this endeavor.
It took on the charcoal nicely, and by paying attention to the stray (excess) charcoal dust, one can incorporate them into a nice gradient when applying the wash.  The thick lines give thickness to the image and help to bring a 3 dimensional feel to the drawing, as was discussed in how to paint contour lines in my landscape blogs.

 

 

I don't want to merely learn from Aristide Maillol's interpretation of the female body, I also want to exploit the translucent property of the Xuan.  My scheme was not to paint the two bodies together as the original work did, but to paint them on separate pieces of Xuan, and then superimpose the images.  The result is quite interesting.  The two bodies seem to be in different dimensions now, and the conversation between them becomes more intriguing.

 

 

Amending the Tree

Riding on the energy and motivation of finishing the tree project, I decided to add to the 70%.

I tidied up the background with hints of vegetation with scattered brush.  I used these, along with titanium white to soften up the dark patches.  A yellow wash is applied to the whole painting after the Xuan has been thoroughly moistened.  Yellow is a very difficult color to handle, but it think it would coordinate the color scheme and give that impression of filtered light.  Dark green dots are placed along strategic branches to exaggerate the layering. I've also darkened some of the branches to appear more as a silhouette but leave others quite faint, to simulate the effect of squinting into bright light and the edges dissolve.

Finally I re-cropped the painting to give it more of vertical bias.  I think this helped to rationalize the overly long lines of the person's back.   Now I need to figure out a way to move the tree away from the center !