On the cusp of a new direction

I've been at a roadblock lately, looking at my own art with a different viewpoint.  It just doesn't seem to work for me anymore! Not that I've given up painting and drawing, but I've been mulling things over and figured out what the source of my dissatisfaction is...

I seem to have descended into the gloomy depths somehow and lost that bang of colour!  Maybe too much overworking of detail, a loss of freshness and verve somehow.

So, I took a step back to figure out where I'm going and how I want to change my direction to point there...

It's like learning to zig when you normally zag...  I've made a bit of return to glass painting, because that particular medium forces me to more simplicity. A return to the roots of my own painting style in some ways, I believe.  It will be an interesting experiment anyway!

Peggy's Cove Festival of Arts opening night

Well last night at the opening was loads of fun!  We had six artists doing their art for people to watch (live!) and they called us 'Fresh Fish Artists'.... Which is pretty funny, because I found out when I was doing a bit of preparation practice that I cannot do a fish to save my life!  Hahahah! 

So I did the closest I could come, I painted a mermaid.  What?  She may be imaginary, but she is half fish!  LOL!

Here's the painting I worked on during the opening night. It's only about two thirds done, but people at the event got to see me paint this from the barest of underpaintings to the current state over the course of a few hours.

Beauty In The Face Of Age

 

Having started my art career with portraiture, I'm constantly fascinated by the faces of the people around me...

And seeing faces age and change as people grow older is quite interesting in itself...

It's almost like our lives get written to our features like a computer writing something to a disk...

The old saying goes that the eyes are the windows into the soul, but ironically enough, the eyes themselves are the one thing in our features that stays constant as we age... 

As any portraitist can tell you, the eyes are always drawn the same size and the face grows around it. Which is why our eyes start out looking pretty large in proportion to our face and then smaller when we are in our late childhood and finally, our adult sized eyes are small in comparison to the facial structure around it.

 

But it's the rest of the face that's really interesting...

The eyes might have 'it'... but the rest of the face tells a story! 

 

If you frown a lot, you will develop deep lines going from your nose down to the corners of your lips, and they will look different than the wrinkles that you get if you laugh a lot.  (I know they shouldn't as they are in almost the same spot as laugh lines, but there it is.  They look different as an end result!)

Frowners also have wrinkles in the centre of their face just between their eyebrows, which makes them look stern and tightened up like a bowstring ready to shoot...

People that laugh a lot tend to wrinkle differently, more like they are still laughing somehow.  Their faces can be just as wrinkled as the frowners, but the lines have a softness that is hard to quantify.

But if someone is perpetually sad, they seem to still get the frown style of wrinkles, but it's a softer look, like sadness itself... 

There's almost poetry or a different style of beauty in how wrinkles form...

They are actually something that can be quite beautiful, if you are aware of beauty in the form of lines and patterns.

 Not to mention the fact that wrinkles are much like accents around a subject!

 They can sharpen and highlight features, and can truly bring to the forefront beauty that can't be seen in a smooth face.

Over the years, I've drawn hundreds of faces.  The ones I remember aren't young, but older, more defined...  And the more defined the face, the more challenging it is to capture.

But it's not just me, throughout the centuries artists have always been fascinated by the beauty of the older face. There are good reasons for this, an older face is unique. The lines are different in every person, much like a fingerprint, no two people are alike. Because we all have different lives and experiences, our faces age differently.

Sadly, as I look around at our media and culture I see beauty represented as being typified by only the young face...  And I find this pretty strange because of the demographic of our population!

A large proportion of our population now is older as the baby boomers head towards retirement.

That means we have a unique opportunity to celebrate the beauty of aging by changing our cultural definitions of beauty.  Maybe we all need to be artists in some small way so that we can see it.

Just think 'Beauty in the Face of Age'!


Photos and images by Teresa Young:
1.  Playing Dominoes with Fred Ervine,  2. CloseUp-Portrait Of Diehl Children-Nov. 2009,  3. Grief For A Small Boy - Nov. 1997,  4. Eileens Eyes-Nov. 2009,  5. Daryls Frown - Nov. 2009,  6. Eileens Smile-Nov. 2009, 7. Barb McLean-Dec.2009,  8. Unnamed Abstract-Dec.2009,  9. Unnamed Surreal - May 1998.