The importance of understanding what’s below the surface.

Week eight of lockdown in Wales. Pre L.D. we were in the last two weeks of our house build completion. Everything ground to a halt, just as the services trenches had been dug across the road, resulting in road closure; you can imagine how popular we are with the neighbours! We continue to live behind the, Danger Keep Out road closure signs, in the back garden of the construction site.  Alfresco living in Spring is fine, the Winter was hard, what would I do without my studio. 

This week I have been studying the skull, muscles of the face, planes and proportions, all in preparation for my tuition, with Jac, this session’s topic being, the face.  Hours of fun with my drawing pad Eliot Goldfinger, Human Anatomy for Artists and Muscle Premium software.

I would just like to share one of the most interesting things I found in my research. The skeletal muscles in our body attach to bones,  they have two or more points of attachment and crossover joints to achieve movement. It’s all basically physics, levers and forces the muscle shape creating the form of the body. I just assumed that our face would be the similar, but not so. Most of our facial muscles only attach to bone at one point and to nearby facial muscles or skin at the other. Many are thin ribbon like bands that pass around fat pads, the fat pads and bone creating the form, not the muscles. It’s tricky to describe but it’s something like a, ‘string orchestra’, fine bands of muscle moving the flesh in different directions, puckering, stretching, pulling and pleating like a curtain drawstring working in unison to create a multitude of expressions.

Someone said to me earlier in the week, do you really need to know the details of everything underneath when you are painting what’s on the surface? A few months ago, I may well have said; no surely not, as long as I have a rough idea. Yet again my opinion has changed. 

During the socially distanced two-day session I selected six John Deakin portrait photographs as source material and use these images to get the basic information down in radiant green and asphalt Grisaille on canvas.  

That stage finished I had one more chance to get some information down in paint then Jac said, “Put the book away, you are on your own!” My past experience painting faces with no source material resulted in features becoming ‘Cliché’, losing their originality creating a face with generic features. Panic set in, I tried the line… ‘I’m just off to the loo with John Deakin’,  hoping that whilst there, I could take one last look! When I had to make the leap to, no source material, I was convinced the cliché would start to emerge and still can’t quite believe what happened next.

All my research came out to play; the fine ribbon facial expression muscles, the bone structures and fat pads that create a sneering lip, a slack fleshed jowl, a surprised eye. These are just the underpaintings, but I am equipped to start manipulating expressions, accentuating features through colour and tone and all because I have a greater understanding of what’s below the surface.