This alla prima sketch was done from life during a stay at the Southampton City Art gallery, and features ‘Eve’ by Rodin. It is a life size bronze cast from 1882. The painting is done in oils on an A3 sized piece of mounting board during June 2022.
Eve, together with a matching Adam, was to be part of a colossal decorative entrance for an arts museum being constructed at the time, in Paris. The collective artwork, called ‘The Gates of Hell’ was to consist of almost 200 figures, but never completed.
This post shows a number of faces plucked off the internet and painted for this exercise. Some are famous and some not. The task is just to practice painting faces. They are done on pieces of paper and board sized at 10" x 8", primed, and then done in a period 3 hrs of so, working wet in to wet. The images are not drawn with pencils in a careful way, but drawn with diluted oil paint in a rough manner, and then painted over. Often the proportions are refined as it is painted until it looks reasonably right, in the one sitting. One other important element of these exercises is that they have been done using a limited range of colours, called the Zorn palette. It is named after the Swedish artist, Anders Zorn (18 February 1860 – 22 August 1920). It consists of just 4 colors being yellow ochre, ivory black, Cadmium red and titanium white. These colours suit faces very well, though landscape subjects would not work so well as blues and greens cannot be mixed.
