#painter legend

[subnocteperumbras]

Carel Fabritius ( 1622-1654) paintings

[worldartspics]

Art by Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus (c. 1484–1486). 🔍

[ithinkimaphtographer]

i hope you call...

[josy72]

The Brush Behind the Film: How Painter Hélène Delmaire Created Our Portrait of a Lady on Fire Cover

By Benjamin Mercer

Art speaks volumes in Céline Sciamma’s rapturous eighteenth-century love story Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and much of that is thanks to painter Hélène Delmaire. It is Delmaire’s vividly lifelike canvases that grace the film from start to finish, standing in as the work of Marianne (Noémie Merlant), a painter who travels to an isolated French isle on an unusual assignment: to complete a wedding portrait of Héloïse (Adèle Haenel)—a troubled, well-to-do young woman destined for a marriage she desperately does not want—without her gaining knowledge of the project. Delmaire’s lavishly meticulous brushwork seems to channel all the quiet intensity of the passion that gradually emerges between Marianne and Héloïse. And so, when it came time to commission a cover image for our release of the movie, Criterion art director Eric Skillman knew right away that there was only one artist for the job.

As Delmaire explains in the clip above, excerpted from a supplement on our new Portrait edition, it was after discovering her paintings on Instagram—particularly a series of portraits with the subjects’ eyes crossed out by a defiant, censor-bar-like streak of paint—that Sciamma approached her about making original artwork for the film. (By that point, the classically trained Delmaire had already shown her work in galleries throughout Europe and the United States.) Thus began an intensive collaboration between the two that produced a wealth of preliminary studies—studies that came in handy again once the Criterion assignment rolled around. It wasn’t long before Skillman and Delmaire began discussing the possibility of creating a new image for the cover, one that would be based on a preparatory sketch of Haenel that Delmaire had made in that early back-and-forth with Sciamma, and also be able to convey the timeless quality and immediacy of the film’s romance. “Eric and I chose an approach that would allow my own style to be more prevalent than in the film paintings, a bridge between eighteenth-century Marianne and contemporary me, so to speak,” Delmaire says. “The idea was to obscure the face of Heloïse with a brushstroke, a process I use in my personal work and that happens to play nicely into the film’s narrative.” (At a pivotal moment, Marianne lashes out by defacing her own finished portrait of Héloïse, after the subject says she fails to recognize herself in it.)

[art-for-every-heart]

If i can't bend heaven!

I'll raise hell❤

[phyleaspace]

LA BOMBA

[eternalyouth18]

The Australian painter John Peter Russell got to know Vincent at Fernand Cormon’s studio. He painted this portrait of his friend in 1886 in a conventional, realistic style. It is clearly influenced by photography, although the face and the hand still show Impressionist touches.

[mrbadhairday]

Update:

Mothra Figure

I finished 3D printing the wings but forgot the details of veins near the eye spots (I had two models to look at and a bunch of references but I still missed it). Thankfully plastic wood takes care of those little details and I really do like the texture it provides to the model. I’m just waiting on my large tracing paper to come so I can transfer the details from a previously painting wing onto the new ones (you can see the unfinished piece in the background of the back shot).

A few coats of paint and some finishing detail work and I’m pretty much done with the body (thank goodness for an awesome clear coat). I’m really digging the colors of the model and the contrast between the dark brown and the white against the face.

Overall the wings are a little above 2ft wide and still somewhat heavy (this is probably the fourth iteration of wings and at 25% fill (still forgot the veins D;)). I’m going to model and print a dedicated stand for this bad girl since the weight overall means the limbs can not support it.

I’m pretty happy with this prototype :D