Took some time in the studio for this little portrait of Scotty. I have had this seamless around for awhile and I tend to use it more in lengths for painting more stark white paintings on black. For the purpose of painting, its fine, i staple it to the wall and it goes flat. But damn, it needs a ton of help as a backdrop. For these quick prints I did not bother, but I have to blur the background in Photoshop to get the cellulite texture out of the thing. Argh.
Anyways, Scotty came in with this ochre coloured zip up and this seemed like just the right colour mix, the blacks, ochres and browns of coffee on his jeans.
I was trying out these Kino flo knock off constant lights and I have to say I was really happy with the quality of the light, they are neat, 4 independently operated lights in each unit with barn yard doors, not to be a geek but they were cool, and not too heavy.
The fall off of light here is pretty dramatic and I like that a lot. It reminds me of 16th century full length Spanish paintings, not to draw any parallels between this hastily shot image of Scotty and the meticulous work of Diego Velazquez.
Nor am I trying to compare the actor Montgomery Clift like handsomeness of Scotty with famous the deformed lipped royalty of the Hapsburgs, whose portraits by Velazquez and others, now after 300+ years are just a testament to their mad money, vanity and mostly their weird looks.
This Hapsburg ain't the weirdest looker that is for sure but they got 'em.
But seriously, they looked crazy. I remember walking through the Art History Museum in Vienna and being just amused at the heroic portraits of the most inbred and fantastically ugly (and wealthy) people ever. I looked it up online but could not find anything, I have the catalogue for the Kunsthistoriches Museum so I'll put something up when I have a chance to scan the book.
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