Raw Nude

What a nude of mine looks like before I work it over? I already showed you one or two... Here is another one, of a model called Marie Lise, not a perfect one, physically (some small spine defect and getting fatter) but nice and with sad eyes and a nose that French call "un nez retrousé" (snub-nosed?)... In all, a pleasant enough model to draw - and then to paint...

Right now, I'm experimenting with mixing acrylics, watercolors and oil pastels (I made a hole in my budget and bought a few Rembrandt and Holbein oil pastels) but the results aren't yet that conclusive (they usually aren't at the beginning... You can see one sample at my other site "Danu's Small World" This combination, acrylic colors and inks, watercolors and oil pastels (or dry pastels - but with then it's a bore to fix...) is a very promising one and I think Degas would have loved it. I often fantasize what some great artists like Manet, Renoir, Monet, Cézanne or Van Gogh would have done with today art materials... acrylics especially...

Bloody allegory...

A sample of what I did in "hostile" conditions... I mean, when the model (upon whom I have no control, being just one of the many sketchers...) took "ballet" postures... No comments...Of course, it's an acylic ink + watercolor on Strathomore 300 g.

2005 Nude...the beginning...

Maybe this Nude is not the very first one where I started to mix acrylic inks with watercolor, where I've started to define my technique to paint the nudes... But it's one of the first...Rapid sketching was always, since my childhood, one of my greatest pleasures and if I did not have often the chance to draw after a nude model it's only because there weren't a lot of models in Romania of my youth... In fact, it was a very prude (apparently) country and to find a young, well proportioned "model" was very difficult even for the Art Schools (I remember that ours had to employ one of the young secretaries, who needed badly the money).Here, in Québec, after the "révolution tranquile" doesn't seem to be a problem and the models are almost always good enough and young enough. But in communist Romania, model would very easily translate into "whore" or "person of lewd conduct"...When I was in the last year at the ART School I remember that a group of us, preparing for the University, managed to convince (sacrificing a lot of our economies) a lady to pose. But she was fatish and oldish and not very clean and that wasn't an experience either of us - four boys and two girls - remembered with pleasure. Sure, we laughed a bit (cruel as teenager can be) but it wasn't a pleasant experience... Not even a good occasion to exercise our draughtmen/women talents since the lady was even more jumpy than ourselves and emphatically FORBAD us to draw her face... All we got were some headless (or faceless) sketches of a poor, scared, fatish woman...(Now, I understand her: I wouldn't wish myself to pose for 6 teenagers!!!) Something like the "Sorrow" Vincent Van Gogh did after Christine, the drunken prostitute... I will post something alike and a 2005 nude (where I started to use color in my nudes).