rembrandt

Although Rembrandt's style is a bit too traditional for me I think when doing a portrait project it is important to look at the masters and take aspects of their work to improve mine.

What I like most about his portraits kind of goes against what I was saying in the previous post! Because alot of his portraits are self-portraits there is an intense stare that pierces the viewer and makes you feel like he is gazing straight into your soul. This is probably due to the fact that self-portraits would have been painted looking into a mirror and couldn't be seen in any other way by the painter. I think that the emotions captured in his gaze are ones that can only be achieved by self-scrutiny especially in the image below. You can see a slight frown on his face that is probbly his 'painting face' due to pure concentration and judgement and scrutiny of his own work.

I also really like some of his portraits of other people who all seem to have very characteristic faces, I would love to be able to find sitters like that but it is proving more diffucult than I thought!


I also really like his etchings, and after a crit with Andrew and Sheila think that trying out doing some etching might be a good idea. I have done etching a lot in the past two years and I don't think it's a technique that suits me particularly well, however in my last printmaking elective I experimented more with drawing into my etchings after I had done the etching. I also used photoetching rather than hand drawn etching, and tried out printing onto images which both worked effectively.