Tips on portrait painting
FAS Instructor Hank McLaughlin has had many portrait commissions over the years, including a painting of the former archbishop of New York, Edward Cardinal Egan. That portrait hangs in the Archbishop’s Residence in New York City.
Recently, Hank had an inquiry from one of his FAS students regarding how to handle values in the background of a portrait. As he often does, Hank answered by citing several relevant anecdotes. The first came from a painter who was commissioned to paint a portrait of John D. Rockefeller. For three days, Mr. Rockefeller sat for the artist; and for those three days, the artist painted only the background, not the sitter. An interested observer asked the artist why he had bothered to have the sitter there at all, if he was just going to work on the background. The artist answered, “I wanted to paint the background as it would look to a viewer who was concentrating on the subject of the painting—the center of interest. In order to paint it that way, I myself had to be looking at the subject and not at the background.” Hank went on to explain that, in order to be sure that the face is the center of interest in a portrait, you use brighter colors, sharper edges, and more contrast in that area. The human eye doesn’t like to look at blurred images or low contrast, so will pass over those areas to get to the center of interest.
The student also wondered about whether the colors in the background should merge with the figure. Hank answered that you should always try to include some colors from the background in the figure, and vice versa. This creates the effect that both are bathed in the same light; it pulls the painting together. Hank’s second anecdote, this one from Monet, touches on this point. Monet said that if you paint a landscape with blue sky, green grass, and a red barn, there should be some red and green in the sky, some blue and green in the barn, and some red and blue in the grass.
Good advice from Hank—and the masters!
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