Charles started the day with a portrait done from a live model. He carefully did his drawing, once again drawing a rough outline on the paper where he wanted the head to be (this line is largely erased as he goes along). He started with the left eye, which was only a small triangle shape as the head was turned away looking to the left. He usually takes a pencil line across the bridge of the nose to find the other eye and then works on all the features of the face until he is happy that they are correct. He does point out that he makes mistakes as he does his drawing and he just draws another line alongside and either erases the bad line or just leaves it in. If you look at CR portraits there are always a lot of extra lines which have been left. He started the painting by defining a very dark shape under the nose which he softened down towards the lip and put a stroke of colour across the top lip. He then went up to the right eye (the one you could see most of) and painted a dark shape around the socket in raw sienna/cad red light/touch of cobalt (the cobalt is to add some coolness to the warm tones of the cad red and raw sienna - Charles like to incorporate warm and cool tones throughout a painting). It looked horribly dark to me but I knew that when he added the tones on the rest of the face, it would become less prominent and scary. He painted the small triangle with the eye that was less visible in a very indistinct blue/grey (probably cobalt and raw umber) and then faded that into a patch of background which was done in a slightly stronger tone. The right eye (slightly side view but very visible) was painted much more strongly. He was very careful to leave touches of white paper where he wanted the highlights, like on the eyelid. He manages this by manipulating his brush quite differently to many artists. If he is to paint a large passage (say the shadow side of the face) he puts his loaded brush on to the paper and then moves the paint this way and that, rolling the brush within his fingers, but never taking the brush off the paper. This he is most emphatic about - don't lift the brush until you need more pigment!! He didn't paint the bottom lip but defined it by a darker shape under it with a flash of light of white paper down to the point of the chin. He did the ear quickly and it was really just some patches of colour where the darker tones would have been. The hair he treated by large sweeping brushstrokes - he probably only did about 6 strokes in total to suggest the hair. He never does individual hairs or puts lots of detail in the hair. The model wore glasses and these were suggested with a few dark lines and then a sweep of a brushstroke to give the arm of the glasses. A few dark marks describing the top of the model's blouse finished the portrait. Charles then painted the same model but from more of a front view. He started with the shape under the nose pulling the paint down towards the top lip, which he then applied cad red light to. Much of the right side of the model's face was in shadow so he used a great sweeping brush stroke to paint that in, going right over the eye and down around under the chin (never lifting his brush). He swept some of the skin tone colour (cad red light/yellow ochre/cobalt or cerulean) right out into the hair. The ear, hair and girl's top was treated the same as the other portrait. In the afternoon, Charles did a demo of a still life. It was his usual combination of the vase of flowers with various artifacts and fruit dotted about. He says he never arranges his still life subjects as he wants them to look as if they have just happened on the table. He started by doing his drawing. He roughly penciled in where he thought the vase would be and then he related all the other objects to that shape. When he drew the flowers he didn't draw individual flowers but large massed shapes. You couldn't actually see that they were flowers and I did wonder how he was going to make sense of it all. When he started his painting he said he was looking for the negative shapes as he wanted to paint some of them first. There were quite a few white flowers in the arrangement so negative painting was the only way to show them up. To describe white flowers he just used a light tone of cad yellow orange, cobalt and a little raw sienna - very, very light. He worked his way through the flowers applying dark shapes in greens (oxide of chromium/viridian/cad green dark - and some mixed greens of his own) and also shapes in blues and burnt sienna. It all looked very casually done but nothing could have been further from the truth. Charles says that every brush stroke must count and add something to the painting. He has a habit of puffing and whistling through his teeth as he works (plus always wearing his baseball cap!) but in difficult passages, he goes very quiet as he concentrates very hard. The roses (pink) in the arrangement were done with three of four quick strokes and then left alone. The effect of the flowers was that you got an impression of a mass of white and pink flowers described in a very light and airy way. Charles then painted the glass vase. Now when I say he painted it, he didn't do it as many artists would and try and paint glass - he just put a few strokes of cobalt and yellow ochre and then marked in some stems and that was it. He is always very careful to leave the white paper (sometimes just a sliver) where he wants to show light. He moved on to paint the duck (that has featured in so many of his paintings) using ivory black/cobalt/utramarine violet getting some very dark tones in shadow places. The wine bottle was painted quite lightly in greens/blues with ivory black for the bottle top. He then moved on to the blue bowl containting several fruits. The first thing he did was find the negative shapes behind the fruit and painted those in with a strong mix of burnt umber and burnt sienna. This showed up the light colours of the lemon and red pears really well. When Charles paints fruit he loads his brush and then puts it on the fruit shape and uses a sweeping stroke which moves back and forward in a circle or figure of 8 distributing paint dynamically. He never uses his brush or holds it like a pencil, making up and down strokes - he says that is a horrible way to paint and also the best way to ruin the point on your brush. He uses his brush upside down, on it's side and a lot of other ways - just never like a pencil! He never paints shadows on objects with blue or purple but he uses local colour in varying tones. Local colour is the colour the object actually is and you make it lighter on the light side and darker on the dark side. So if you were painting a lemon with the light coming from the right hand side, you would start on the left with a stronger mix of cad yellow deep and paint that section in one stroke lifting your brush to go to a lemon yellow and then complete the light section. Charles does go back into the dark section if the tone isn't quite right and he might apply some yellow ochre to darken the tone. So his policy is to use the same colour that the object is but use a darker tone of it rather than paint a lemon in yellow and then try and put a purple or blue shadow. He does paint cast shadows in cobalt or raw umber, but they are just a shape under the object or fruit. Often some of the colour of the object runs into the shadow which helps to link the two together. All the time Charles was tying the still life shapes to the background by adding some tone and splashes of paint. Also if he feels he is tightening up he will splash some paint onto a section and then go in and tease the splashes out to make pleasing shapes. He completed the still life by carefully suggesting the striped cloth the arrangement had been placed on. He was careful to press the brush down in places and then have it skip a beat as he made his way down a stripe - to give variety and a change in tone. It was fascinating to see him paint all day for us. The group sat there, almost unblinking, trying to absorb what we were seeing and what we were hearing. What came out of the day was that Charles considers his paintings very, very carefully. He makes every brush stroke count. He makes mistakes!!! He often said, in his lovely Connecticut drawl, 'I screwed up there'.......! It is so comforting to know that a great artist like Charles 'screws up' - and also is confident enough to admit it. However, when he does 'screw up' he doesn't try and correct it beyond putting more pigment on or giving the offending area a scrub with a bit of paper towel. By the time he has completed the whole painting, the area he doesn't like becomes much less of a problem and that it the attitude he goes with. So I learned today that - cast shadows have hard edges, you should aim for 50% hard edges and 50% lost edges in a painting, it is important to balance a painting with warm and cool colours, leave carefully considered highlights of white paper, paint large sections without lifting your brush, don't use your brush like a pencil, don't worry if you 'screw up' and don't try to correct beyond using a bit of stronger pigment or dab lightly out with paper towel, draw carefully - very slowly in places - to get your drawing right, contour draw as much as possible (not lifting the pencil off the paper), always go for your dark tones first and get them in place. I've probably missed some things out but by this point my brain was in overload! I will remember more as this diary progresses.