He said: I just took a close up of the painting on my easel, and it is remarkable how cool the paint handling looks in a zoomed in format.
My point is also, that it is so easy to be fooled by the close up's we see in art books, or images on the net. A "normal" brush stroke can look so enigmatic and diverse in a large format."
To illustrate his point he showed me a picture of a painting he is working on at the moment and a large close up of just a tiny little section of it.
What he showed was indeed a marvellous piece of brushmanship that resembled a Rembrandt style. Had I not seen the work in progress it would have been easy for me to assume to rest of the painting looked just like that close-up.
In the light of this,I had another look at two quick portrait studies I did in pastels in preparation to portraits in oils of this lovely young couple. The studies were not too bad considering it was done prior studying Munsell and also prior to getting a decent set of pastels in flesh tones. However taking a close-up of sections that stood out to me as much better than the rest could fool someone in thinking the rest of the study was similarly done.
Here are the close-ups of the study I did of the young lady.
It is interesting isn't it?
However I must say that there is of doubt of course that close-ups of paintings from 'our' masters do also serve to show the brilliance of a painter overall.
It does make me look at close-ups with a slightly different mind set, and eyes.
With Thanks for the thought provoking subject to my friend.
A.
