Painting Tim Page

Friday 23 January 2015, 6pm

Finished Tim’s portrait today. I thought it might have been finished yesterday, but it was a bit subdued and I thought if I had the guts to push it a bit further, I could bring it to life.

I changed the title. It only became apparent to me in the last few hours what it was all about….Alfie.

At Billy’s request, I kept a track of all the layers. This is how I arrived at the finished work. I’ll start with the charcoal again –

The first coat was laying down the ‘dead’ colour. This is a layer of cold colours, mainly cobalt blue, lemon yellow, ultramarine and indigo. The cold colours neutralise the warm colours in the next layer. I wiped away some of the pigment after laying it down. It looked a bit straight. All transparent pigments –

Next a layer of mainly warm colours, all transparent again. Once again, wiped some of the colour off to let a bit of the underpainting through –

The third coat stated to introduce some realistic colours and push the lariness back a bit. Some opacity (zinc white) introduced at this stage –

At this stage the portrait was still a bit fractured by the abstraction and I next pulled it into a more realistic realm –

It wasn’t a bad portrait at this stage and I was 50/50 about leaving it, but I knew it wasn’t jumping and could benefit by being dragged back into abstraction a tad. What it needed was a touch of primaries and secondaries to lift all the tertiaries. Five hours of struggle in the wilderness, adding highlights and taking some of them off when I went too far, produced this result –

“Memories of Schrapnel - A Portrait of Tim Page”

As I said, I didn’t realise until the lines emerged in the last few hours what it was all about, namely his frequent interactions with schrapnel in Vietnam, and that gave me the title. Tim was badly wounded on four occasions, once by friendly fire. He’s died twice. When I was drawing him, he said ‘Death is like being burnt in a fire and drowned at the same time’.