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wildbrush's art.to.day - you entered my world of technical art info - |
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The portraits as colourist paintings |
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The portraits as colourist paintings: |
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colourists, Tsarouchis observed, see colour harmonies where
others see objects. The best of the Fayum portraits are not
coloured-in drawings, but fashioned with the full painterly
expertise of their artists, who reduced preparatory underdrawing
to an absolute minimum and laid down areas of
colour that work together to give an illusion of depth. When
we speak of a painterly quality we mean a quality that is
unique to painting: paint, the medium, becomes the protagonist
in the pictures. The way it is handled shows up its
characteristics - its consistency, fluid or otherwise, and its texture.
The revealing signs of how it was applied - with brushes,
other tools, or even the painter's finger [35] - and
of the ease and speed with which it
was put down have all contributed
to the portrait's painterly quality, and consequently
to the spectator's enjoyment. The illusion of reality
is achieved through paradoxical means, as is the case too
with certain portraits by the early Impressionists. In a panel
from Akhmim [97], for example, the quintessentially painterly
composition of quite 'messily' painted surfaces has allowed
a face to emerge whose beautifully delicate features are
quite unaffected by the jumble of scruffy paintwork. Here
a great painter has been at work. 38)
Producing this kind of
quality may well have been a result of the tension felt by the artists
aspiring to immortalize their subjects within the time limit that the wax
medium and the circumstances imposed - a state of controlled abandon that
celebrates the materials and the colours it is using (and indeed the
painter himself) as much as it does the person being portrayed. Colourists
use cold and warm hues, rather than dark and light
tones (chiaroscuro), to make objects recede or seem to come
forward. Receding planes are cooler than advancing ones,
even when they are lighter in tone. This amazing effect can
be best seen in the portraits of the sunburnt athletes or ephebes
in the Petrie Museum [69, 70]: the bronzed skin of the men comes forward,
being a warm brown, even though it is much darker than the cool pale-grey
background - which, despite its lighter tone, recedes. A colourist
painting seen in black and white is distorted by being deprived of the
interaction of its colours which provided its original internal logic.
(The variety within Monet's Rouen Cathedral at Sunset,
for instance, is conveyed by the subtle play of warm and cold hues in a
basically monotonal picture, and its power is lost altogether when reduced
to black-and-white.) Colouring itself can play with distortions. Matisse,
the colourist par excellence, often distorted his perfectly correct
drawing in order to make it visually right once the colours were applied.
Two portraits from Antinoopolis have been attributed to the same artist on
the basis of certain shared elements, notably that in each case the right
eye of the sitter is
painted slightly lower than the left. 39)
Black-and-white photographs
reveal this 'fault' quite clearly [19], and the images
appear to have been wrongly drawn. In the original paintings,
however, or in a good colour reproduction, the colours are balanced in
such a way as to make absolutesense. 'The European' [86]
is one of
the most accomplished portraits of the whole corpus, and the unevenness of
the eyes may well be one of the reasons for this. The intensity of
a colour makes the space it occupies seem bigger. Placing the eyes
on different levels may have been a subtle device instinctively used by
the portraitist to achieve greater impact. While the Fayum portraits may
appear to be quite simple in execution, they in fact incorporate an
infinite number of subtleties that contribute much to the impact they have
on the viewer, and of course to their quality. The long tradition to which
they belong lends them a solidity that makes them sophisticated
and highly accomplished works of art. < back to page 8 page 10 > |
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