What Can I Learn From Rembrandt - Wednesday, Week 38 (14/10/2020)

We continue today with our day 3 of our "What can I learn from..." Rembrandt Week! Today we're going to focus not on an aspect of Rembrandt's painting, even though we ARE going to do a painting, but one that is prevalent in his drawings. Rembrandt was a strange artist. He could be the most sensitive human being to ever depict nature through paint, and at the same time he could be very sloppy. His drawings "suffer" from the same predicament. To me he is, no doubt in my mind, one of the most accomplished draughtsperson in history. His sketches and etchings are more than enough proof to make that affirmation. But every now and then you can spot the "careless" Rembrandt drawing or painting a terrible hand or just wonking out completely with the features in a portrait. Now to me, and I want to make this clear, these liberties subtract nothing from the fact that I find him to be an absolute genius. I even find them charming in a way. It just solidifies the fact that this was no godly genius, but a simple human being. An extraordinary human being, but human being nonetheless. So for today we look at his sketching ability, the loose yet committed mark-making skills. How can we apply that to painting? How do we make our painting feel lively and effortless? Well if today's exercise can shine a bit of light into this question, I'd say the answer is by suffering tremendously and searching constantly throughout the painting. Because the end result may seem spontaneous, but that tiny moment of the burrowed head kicked my butt. I don't know how many times I had to paint and scrape and paint and scrape... It was awful. But it just reminds us that effortless does not come without effort. And once in a while, a tiny little moment of a painting that can be so humbling, that we realize how wonderfully far we are from understanding drawing or painting. Thank you ALL for your incredible support. Dani and I could not be more grateful. If you like what we're doing, please consider donating :) If you're in a rough spot, no worries, we TOTALLY get it! Just know that our content will ALWAYS be here, and our only sponsors are YOU, the wonderful generous people that choose to support us in some way or another. Thank you ALL!!! http://www.ourpaintedlives.com/donations