This will be a quickie today
John Singer Sargent, is, without exception...my favorite portraitist of all time. If there is a painter that has his head on right aobut what painting is all about...it's him. He was an extremely prolific artist and a noted portraitist that was famous in his day and just as enduring today. Why you ask? Technique. When it comes to painters..it all comes down to technique. Sargent was a student of a french painter known as Carolus-Duran, who had an interesting little theory about art. Prior to this, the way everyone was taught to paint was to practice their forms, drawing people, trees, chairs, whaterver, and then build up a vocabulary of artistic devices. That way when you need to paint a person in a chair, you just hit the playback button on your old muscle memory memorex and voila...a tree or a person or whatever, pops out onto the canvas. Well, you can imagine that all of this made things look, well..a little static. Carolus Duran had a different idea. Instead, through away the rule book and look at each thing uniquely. Instead of just looking at an apple and pulling that image out of your reference file, really look at the apple, not as an apple, but as a mass of geometric planes and forms, break it all down and concentrate on the forms, not the apple. The beauty of all this of course is that you can paint anything with no prior experience painting that object before, just take it in smaller chunks. this theory was based on exaining the works of some specific masters...Velazquez, Frans Hals, Edouard Manet, all of which top my fav list. Sargent applied the idea with vigor to the depcition of people and its special emphasis on uniqueness was perfectly suited to portraiture, like that of Madame X here. Sargent spent most of his life overseas and got to know a lot of french artists and higher ups. When this portrait came out it had the dress straps down.. it caused a scandal, so Sargent repainted the image with straps ups and that made all the difference.
See you tomorrow!
