2: Haines' Half-Drawing
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Rebecca Haines
Oracle (recent but date unknown)
Oil on panel, w18" x h18"
From RebeccaHainesFineArt.com
Keeping with the bird theme for at least one more day, above is a falcon by contemporary artist Rebecca Haines. (I recommend visiting her website to see more of her work and to get a feel for how the above piece fits in to her general style.) She works in oils, but I do think it's a style that acrylic could (mostly) be adapted to.
Haines' work is an interesting counter to Kitler's; where Kitler highly finishes the entire subject/paint surface, Haines skews abstract and leaves a lot of drawing elements showing through and/or completely overtaking the subject. In the above painting (and as usual for her work), the only realistic/'finished' parts appear at the bird's eye and a little around the mouth — the rest is direct marks, intense unnatural color, little zips of outline or slight suggestions of form. Much of the mark-making resembles a child's crayon pictures (mostly due to the Crayola-esque coloring), or primitive drawings in chalk, charcoal or smeared pigments. It's all still quite deliberate-looking (for example the three lines of yellow spaced carefully through the wing), but the application is allowed to be very loose...the end result is part-potential-symbolism, part chaos, part vivid reality, like trying to interpret a dream that may or may not mean something.
For my own work, I'm looking at the way she handles outlines and how she transitions between the realistic features and the parts that are merely suggested. I already use color that's about as vivid as I'm willing to go, but it's also interesting to see here how she seems to use just three-or-so bright colors (a yellow, a turquoise blue, an orange or ocher) and moderates them with black or white — around the bird's face, this creates a concentration of grays, and these grays are about the only thing giving the falcon a slight realistic/3D feel. Putting un-moderated splashes of bright color behind the head also helps pop that bit of realism.
It's overall a lot flatter than Kitler's, but as I said before I'm not sure I want to be stop being flat myself. The main question is still color — without using oil paint, and without making the entire paint surface meticulous, is there a way to get that luminosity? Where and how can we shoot the gap?