Van Gogh painted pictures of each of this eleven year old kid's family. I wonder what the kid thought of Van Gogh and the entire process. How weird to be a kid and have your portrait painted in oil by a man with serious social problems. And this kid doesn't look like he likes sitting around in one place. The painting sort of reminds me of that famous John Singer Sargent one,
The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit with four sisters. How did people get little children to sit still for so long? And to do multiple sittings? It sounds like some form of torture.
Here is my attempt to copy the Van Gogh. Another failure. The kid is looking in the wrong direction. The proportions are off. The colour is totally different. The snarl is really missing. Things like the hat are just very badly copied. This was obviously done in a rush.
But even accepting all those things, it was a lot of fun to paint. Larding on paint is weirdly fun. And I'm starting to see how you can simulate oils with acrylics if you just get a sense of how quickly they dry, slap the paints on the canvas, and then just mix them roughly as you paint instead of mixing them on the palette.
Another thing this painting really made me realize is that if you screw up a portrait's eyes, you are doomed. You can mess up the nose or ears or chin. But if the eyes don't seem alive and accurate, no one will even want to look at the painting. I feel like spending the rest of my life staring deep into people's eyeballs, trying to get a sense of how they look and work. A fleck of reflected light here, a hint of a moist tear there, a fleck of unexpectedly bright colour there.
I should keep reminding myself that these paintings aren't supposed to be perfect. They are meant to be experiments. Everyone knows that mad scientist experiments go wrong 99.9% of the time.
And come on, I did a pretty damn good job on that green coat. I painted the shit out of that.
