Friday, June 23, 2006

Pink Sugary Inky Mouth Holes

I think I’ll sandwich some dodgy digiphotos of unfinished paintings between some nice new drawings. So here we go.

Here are some attempts at self-portraiture, done in pencil and I am occasionally getting impatient with pencils. But I still feel that I need to satisfy my meticulous urges and I learn from being all pernickety about the pencil drawings.

I was trying to illustrate the lopsidedness of my face. The right side of my face has shrivelled bones. Instead of a jaw joint it has a piece of my rib. It’s a long story.







Now here are some of the paintings in which I have used the ‘X Factor’ palette that I mentioned last time in the comments.

The thing is my digital camera is very cheap and the colours come out crude.





It’s hard to tell from that, but I have worked on this one. Oil paintings like this tend to go through distinct phases. There’s a phase when they’re new and fresh and they look all flushed with the glow of youth and potential and many an art teacher would shout ‘leave it alone’.


But I’m interested in potential so much as I am in trying to make perfect paintings. So often I want a more dense and finished finish, though not necessarily a smooth and polished one, so there are always tensions to resolve. But between the flush of youth stage and the point of ‘perfect finish’ there tends to be an awkward adolescent stage where it’s neither finished nor fresh and just looks a bit ungainly. That’s the stage Kurt’s neckhead’s at, not that you’d be able to tell from that picture.

It takes some concentration to keep the thing alive even with skin-disease-like levels of detail.

Click on the next little square to see Shelby, the unfinished internet pinup lady. She is holding her breasts.





Here’s some kind of sentimental angel:





This next (older) one might be my favourite of my uses of that palette. It’s different though, it’s oil glazes over layers of other media, in miniature:





Now here’s a fairly unedifying sketchbook page in which you can see my brain at work, also I was thinking through next oil palette options.

(You have to click on the tiny square to see the whole thing)







Now how could I let an entry pass without some great big sweaty wrestler faces.

This time Randy became an eggtomato, and as for Kurt, I think that because I felt so guilty for making him into Slimer I went overboard and made the most megacutesy sugar overload babyfaced kurts in the universe.

It did make me want to draw more in pink ink though. Like splatter it all over the place.





The pink Kurt looks like a fountain, he looks like water ought to start spurting out of his mouth hole.

Next time I might have begun to tackle my epicness epic painting desires. It’s time for something more like a summer blockbuster.

7 comments:

Danne8a said...

Beautiful Chloe! I love the way your paintings make me feel like i'm in another dimension looking at these figures with astonishment.
Cheezy I know! But I love them soooo!!!

Shawn Dickinson said...

Chloe! Another great post with beautiful paintings, as usual! But I particularly like your pencil drawings in this post. Your self-portraiture really caught my attention. Something about the way you draw eyes is very appealing to me. At first glance, it looks like you draw like Leonardo Da Vinci, but better! You add something to your faces that I love (some sort of satire). Are there any specific artists that inspire you while you draw?

Chloe Cumming said...

Hmmm artists that inspire me when I draw....

Probably ones I say will seem a little bit random and there are some that are more obviously similar.

Also I feel I've opened up whole new lines of influence or lineages since I've gone more consciously cartoony/humorous.

Honestly I don't think much about other artists in the moment when I draw usually, but some whose drawings I have consciously found exciting are: Mervyn Peake, Rembrandt, Michelangelo (especially his later drawings), Durer, R Crumb, George Herriman (curiously influential on me) whatever the name is of the illustrator of a lot of the Andrew Lang fairy books...

I've been IM exchanging with Marlo Meekins and she motivates me to get faster and lose my English uptightness. She's quite an infectious person... There are some fine draftspeople knocking about.

Shawn Dickinson said...

Maybe that's why I love your art so much. You have good taste in artists, and you love the same artists I do; George Herriman, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, and Robert Crumb are artists I love too.

But especially Marlo! Marlo's art has recently influenced me in a huge way! After looking at her posts, something just snapped in my brain, and now I'm drawing in ways I never have drawn before. I'm getting more loose and angular in my drawing, and my characters are actually fun to look at now! I draw comic books, and this next issue I'm working on will be strange to see. The first half of the issue is drawn stiff and conservative, and the second half emediatly becomes loose and fun (and there's almost no transition between the two styles). People are going to think I started using drugs at page 17. But it's just Marlo! She's amazing!

But I can see those influences in your work too. Thanks for the wonderful post!

Boris Hiestand said...

just found this: fantastic work! It evokes feelings in me, which is rare. it alos scares the shit out of me, keep it up!

Gerald de Dios said...

You have such a great style showing all the muscles and structure of a human being's face. Even for the women sketches you tend to keep them looking elegant. Bravo! You've got a great sense of color as well.

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