Quent Cordair Fine Art

The next step was to paint the cliffs. While I wanted some photographic reference to base the cliffs and rocks on, the overall form of the landscape was determined by my original compositional drawings. The diagonals and value ranges were important to the structure of the composition. So, working from several different sets of photos of cliffs from the east coast of the US, from Great Britain, and from some details of smaller cliffs in Little Cottonwood Canyon neat Salt Lake City, this is what I came up with:

This kind of work is by far the most difficult, in my opinion. I would always rather have some direct reference, either live or photographic. However, I find that quite often, my compositions require either architecture or landscape that is simply not available. This is why, over the coming years, in addition to constant study of the figure, I will be working hard on landscape studies, architectural studies and still life painting. The more familiar an artist becomes with various subjects, the more effectively they can be integrated into larger compositions. I am really pleased with the way these cliffs turned out, but in ten years, I better be able to do better or I am stagnating as an Artist.

I used a grid to transfer the final to-scale sketch onto the canvas.  The grid should be pretty hard to spot in these images, thanks to a handy little trick I picked up in the Artist’s Handbook (by Ralph Mayer).  Incidentally, if you are an Artist yourself, or an aspiring Artist, or a really serious, geek-level art enthusiast and you don’t already have a copy of this hefty tome of art-related information, you should really consider picking one up.  Anyway, the trick is to draw the grid with water-based color pencil, and then sketch the cartoon on to the canvas with oil-based pencil or charcoal.  Once the drawing is complete, the grid can be carefully removed with a warm washcloth.  This may sound ridiculously anal, but oil colors have a tendency to become increasingly transparent over time, and the last thing an artist wants for a carefully planned and painstakingly executed painting is for a nice set of grid lines to mysteriously appear in it after several years.  For this same reason, I sketched the composition onto the canvas with white colored pencil, which seemed the least likely to ever make an unexpected appearance down the road.  I have seen original paintings by Bouguereau, one of my personal favorite figure painters, in which the sketch for the composition has become easily visible over the lifetime of the piece, sometimes even revealing alternate positions for arms, drapery, etc.  This makes for really interesting viewing for anyone curious about the methods of as competent a craftsman as Bouguereau, but I guarantee he (Bouguereau) never intended for it to happen.

Once I had the canvas sketched, I began working on the sky.  The idea was to set the scene at sunrise, symbolizing a beginning.  I spent a fairly long day blocking in the sky in the image below.  I was referring to a set of photos I took in St. George, UT a few years earlier, and thought the colors and angles would create a real dramatic backdrop for the painting.

The next morning, I walked into my studio and realized the sky was far too busy.  There would be so much going on with the cliffs, water, and house, that it would be overkill.  Besides, who needs all the negative press associated with one of their paintings causing a series of seizures in unsuspecting viewers?  Not me.  I spent the next two days re-painting the sky.  This is how it finally turned out.  Did I mention these images were dark and grainy?  When you see the photos of the finished painting, you will see what I mean.  Oh, yeah…did I also mention that I had a sizable number of images vanish into the ether of a computer meltdown?  Consequently, the water is also finished in this second image.

The end result of all the back and forth was a sketch for the design of the house that looked a little like this:

Ok, exactly like that.  At last I had final approval on the composition, and was ready to actually begin the painting.  The first step was to stretch and prime the canvas, which was to be 55X34.  This sounds like an odd size, but it was based both on measurements of the space in which the painting would eventually hang, and on the Fibonacci ratio (A.K.A. the golden mean or Devine Proportion) of 1.618 to 1. For those of you who may be interested, the Fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers given by starting with a zero and a one, and then adding the two consecutive numbers to get the next one.  0+1 is 2, 1+2 is 3, 2+3 is 5, 8, 13, 21, and so on.  The result of dividing two consecutive numbers in the series converges on 1.61803 as the numbers get larger.  This ratio is also the only number that differs from its inverse by exactly 1 (1/1.61803=0.61803).  So there’s today’s fun math fact.  Of more interest aesthetically is that the ratio shows up everywhere in the real world from the spirals in nautilus shells and pineapple skins to the relative lengths of the sections of a finger or of the upper arm to the lower arm.  And the Greeks thought it was pretty cool. Cool enough to declare it the most aesthetically pleasing ratio around.   I’m not claiming that I believe there is any superiority of this proportion in putting together a composition, but I do find it interesting. Incidentally, the horizon line is also placed based on a multiple of the same ratio.  I should mention that I didn’t set out to design the composition based on the Golden Mean, but when I checked the proportions in my comp sketch, they were so close that I decided to tweak them into compliance for the final painting. 

The next step was to find a model.  Oddly enough, after a few weeks of looking specifically for someone who fit the bill with no luck, the Greeks became involved in the painting for the second time.  Sort of.  Sara and I were enjoying a lovely lunch in a little Greek restaurant in Salt Lake, when Sara suddenly pointed out that there was a guy standing in line that looked exactly like the figure in my sketches.  Being my best model recruitment agent (and being a woman and therefore 75 to 80 percent less likely to get maced when approaching potential models), she immediately cornered the guy and made the pitch.  Not only was he interested in modeling, but coincidentally, was an actual architect and volunteered to bring a set of blueprints to the scrap shoot for use as a prop.

I put together this little combined image of the approved composition and the new house design to give myself a reference and the model some idea of what I was after.

Once I had all the reference photos, I sat down and worked out the final details of the composition incorporating the actual figure, all the perspective work on the house, and the final layout of the cliffs.  The image below is a scan of the resulting scale drawing which I then transferred to the canvas. 

On the condition that I continue design work on the house itself, that sketch went over well.  So, the basic layout and proportions of the composition were finalized, the pose of the figure and his position in relation to the house were decided on, and I was beginning to form a much clearer idea of the color scheme and mood I wanted to achieve in the painting.  I began to keep my eyes open for a suitable model, and started gathering potential reference material for the sky, ocean and cliffs in the background.  But more importantly, I put a lot of time into the design of the house.  I did scores of sketches, most of which ended up in the trash, many of which I don’t have images of, and some of which were really pretty silly…though a legitimate part of the brainstorming process.  Most of these design drawings were done just of the house itself, though occasionally I would include the figure just to get a feel for how the whole composition was working together. I sent many of these quick drawings to the client to get feedback, and incorporated new ideas or deleted parts of the design based on his reactions.  Below are a few examples.

This one was pretty stylized, and very angular.  Maybe a bit too futuristic…but I kind of liked it.  A lot of these design features ended up in the final house in one form or another.

I think this one was mainly a counter to the sharp angle of its predecessor.  It felt a little like a concert hall to me for some reason.

Here the Architect makes a showing.  There were a lot of things about the house that the client really liked, including the general layout, the curved sections of glass and the lower left side built into the face of the cliff.  But, the pointed peaks of the roof, which I included in an attempt to mirror some of the shapes in the cliffs, just weren’t working for him.  In retrospect, I agree.  He also wanted to lose the pointy prominence of the cliff face centered under the house, and bring a little more of the living space down the right side of the rock.

This is a slightly better version of the previous design.  I really liked the angled balconies on the lower portion of this one.  It still needs some of the changes mentioned above, including the roof sections which I believe were occasionally being referenced by this point as the ‘tongues’.

It turns out I wasn’t on the right track, but after an actual phone conversation with the client I had a much better idea of what direction to work in. The Architect would be looking at the house from a vantage point across from the cliff, the house would be newly completed as opposed to under construction, and the scene would be set at sunrise to suggest a beginning and provide for more dramatic lighting. I worked out a new composition (below). I set the house in the distance, trying to keep the sense of height above the ocean, and put the Architect in the foreground, looking over at the house and sort-of gesturing to it. The pose was incredibly rudimentary, as was the design of the house, but I needed to know if I was getting any closer to what the client wanted.

The response was good. The client liked the general idea, but wanted the house to be more prominent. While I was working on the sketch below, I was beginning to recognize that I would have to eventually come up with a design for the house. This version is drastically different from the one we finally settled on, but there are a few elements that survived through to the finished painting.

Closer. The pose was now more of an issue. The gesture was, admittedly, a little vague. After some discussion, we hit upon the idea of the Architect holding the plans for the house to indicate both his having designed it, and its recent completion. I did a very similar thing in A New Height.

At this point, most of the exact details of the composition were still very rough, the house had not been designed, I had no real reference material for the cliffs, and I was working without a model for the figure. Although I can often move forward with an idea this way, a clearer picture of the final painting forming in my mind while some very general spatial issues are worked out in the thumbnail sketches, all the client had to go on at this point was the drawing above. Now that the overall layout of the painting was beginning to concretize, his major concerns turned to some of the specific details. The house still needed to be bigger, the Architect needed to be more physically fit, more muscular and represent a more mature age closer to 40 than 18, and the house needed work. I was sent a few images of houses designed by John Lautner, a student of Frank Lloyd Wright’s, and a favorite architect of the client’s. After at least a dozen iterations, I sent off the sketch below.