Portrait in a Trompe-l'oeil

[Thomasin Dewhurst]

Hello Marina - well, that's just marvelous. The trompe-l'oeil is a very clever idea and works beautifully in this one, but the drawing and the painting of flesh is what I really, really like. The subtle changes in brightness of the white from the near shoulder to the far one, and from the chest to the belly and also to the head. And the use of blue in the light areas and orange in the shadows. And the marvelous foreshortening on the near arm - thrilling.

I had an idea when viewing my son's pictures in his viewfinder (the thing you look through and see two images of the the same picture but each one from a slightly different angle for each eye - so you see the picture in binocular three-dimensionality). As I saw the pictures binocularly I was really urged to paint the shadows and light, but, funnily enough, when I closed one eye I lost that urge to paint them. I was convinced that that is what painting realism was about - to paint reality seen binocularly, i.e with either side of a 3-d object seen from a different eye and subsequently a slightly different angle.

You have that in this picture, and that's what makes it thrilling. I presume you painted it from a photo and so have been extra good at creating a binocular reality because you've had to use your instinct and imagination to bring in what photos lack. There's a sense of movement when you create this binocular reality, and you have that here. The child's arm seems to be shifting slightly up and down and back and forth. Lovely, wonderful. You deserve a stream of first prizes!

[Lisa Gloria]

Marvelous! Marvelous! What a treat! Thank you so much for sharing.

When you say the wire is "real," what isn't real? Is it a rectangular painting with a crescent removed?

[Marina Dieul]

Thank you Steven,
yes trompe-l'oeil have always something fun to watch, even if the subject is serious: it's the pleasure of being fooled by a painting.
I love, when I finish a trompe-l'oeil that people don't notice it at the begining ,then come closer and closer and don't dare to ask, and finally finish to put a finger on it to see if it's real or not. If I had been less honest, I think I would have like to be a forger.

Thanks Ilaria!

Hi Thomasin,
it was the first time I painted a figure on wood panel, and I felt more comfortable than on canvas. I felt that the very smooth texture allowed me more subtlety in the tones and values. ( and a baby skin IS very subtle)
When I began to work seriously from life : I did as I had read in books : close one eye and mesure, but the more I worked, the more I realised that my intuition was telling me something different from the mesure I was taking. When I was folowing the mesure, the drawing was bad, and when I was folowing my intuition the drawing was better. These last months, I joined a group of quick drawings from life, and we were making some 15 seconds, 30 seconds portraits( so really no time to mesure!), and when long poses of 3 or 5 minutes arrived, I could catch good proportions and likeness: it was very revealing to me...
Ted Seth Jabobs wrote something about this:
"We will not use any mechanical props, such as sticks and plumb lines.
Their use leads to inaccuracies. To begin, in order to use them, it is
necessary to close one eye. Monocular vision (as in photography)
diminishes the noble amplitude of forms."

The trompe-l'oeil is even something slightly different, you have to change some perpective and some values to make it more real. With objects, you often have to push the contrasts and the edges, and I was very interrested to see how it could work with a figure, because you can not treat it the same way as a book...
I'm glad you saw a movement in it, it means my experimentation works...
Thank you for your kind comment!

[Marina Dieul]

Hi Lisa,
Thank you!
I'm going to take a photo from the back of the painting, so you will understand better than with words.