Trouble with Ellery

I'm having trouble with Ellery Hanley, I thought I would, but thats why I chose to do him, its a challenge you see, I've never done a black person before.

What on earth are you talking about and how on earth could this racist rubbish be hosted on a site like this ?


Well its like this you see...

I've recently switched from painting landscapes to painting portraits.

I've been painting landscapes (and townscapes) in all sorts of media for about 30 years now and its time to try something else, what better subject to try than portraits ?

The problem with portraits is that you can paint the most technically superb painting ever, but if it doens't look like the person its supposed to be it will be rubbish. When you are painting a landscape no-one is ever going to tell you that you moved some trees or there are actually some farm buildings in that field, because no-one really knows what your subject is unless they were stood next to you when you did it - they just look at the landscape and consider it for its technical ability.

Not so with portraits, everyone, not least the subject, has an opinion, a strong opinion on whether or not its the person its supposed to be.

I've done a few rugby players and they came out OK, a few people have passed complimentary comments on them and I think they are OK so far although I'm still only hitting the likeness thing by chance and I'd only say that I've hit the likeness thing on one occasion, this one, but I was ready for a new challange last week.

And so I picked Ellery.

Certainly the greatest rugby league player of his generation, argueably the greatest RL player ever I had no shortages of images to work from, the big challenge is that Ellery is a black person and I've never drawn or painted black skin before.

In the event its not the skin tone that has stumped me, although black skin has a huge range of tones in it, far more (I found out) than white skin does, the range of tones in Ellery's painting range from green through a yellow ochre and all shades of brown inbetween and then finally blue, but its the likeness thats giving me problems and particularly the eyes. I've redone his eyes six times now, each time I blank them out with a deep grey (his eyes are in shadow in the picture) and the rest of the face comes together and starts to look like him - with no eyes. When I add the latest version of his eyes the whole thing falls apart again , its really wierd and although frustrated with it I'm now even more determined to complete the painting even if it takes all weekend of painting eyes.

All of which prooves one astounding fact - its not skin colour that determines how we recognise faces, its eyes, the first point of contact on any face.