Grand Central Terminal at rush hour after a Metro North "service disruption"
A composite photograph I assembled of the mid-day action at Times Square in Manhattan
For a long time I refrained from including faces and figures in my paintings, but eventually I realized that this omission wasn't so much an intentional one to emphasize the mood, as it was my inability to paint them as convincingly as I was learning to paint the inanimate world. We're biologically tuned to the facial expressions and gestures of our bodies, and we learn to use them to communicate universally across languages and cultures intentionally and otherwise. I knew as I looked at the scenes full of people that excited me I was going to have to face up to the challenge soon.
Painting faces and figures is difficult, and learning how can be approached in many ways, the most common being the classical route of life drawing and anatomy studies to build an intuitive understanding of the underlying structures and their interaction with light and shadow. While I did some of that in my foundation year at RISD decades ago, I still haven't managed to return to it in my recent efforts to develop a host of other skills to serve my ideas of how I want my paintings to look. My initial path to painting faces and figures has been through creating compositions by assembling elements from a series of photographs into a single image to serve as the framework for a painting. I've got a lot more to learn, but I'm sure enjoying my progress so far.
It's rare that everything in a scene is perfectly captured in one reference photo, especially in a dense image packed with random objects, people and action. When a location captures my interest, I'll frequently return to it when conditions are right and set up my camera on a tripod to preserve the framing to enable shooting many iterations of the same scene as people (and their conveyances) come and go. With the framing constant I can select, add, and change anyone and anything in the view with relative ease in post-production. The photos above are in my queue as source material for new paintings. Have another look at my latest street scene painting, Lafayette & Canal http://www.sethtane.com/work/lafayette-canal to see a montage that was created by changing the cast of characters to suit my intent.
My central interest in these complex images is to create the entire scene in what would normally be many individual paintings all rolled into one. I'm after causing the "experience" of these locations to re-occur for the viewer, and to that end I've been experimenting with audio recordings I've made on location that are played while the paintings are viewed. The conversation fragments in multiple languages backed by the dynamic movement of sirens and street traffic certainly add a bit of appropriately low-tech virtual reality to the program...
My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram