{"id":4697,"date":"2011-09-21T14:58:00","date_gmt":"2011-09-21T14:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kaisercaimo.com\/blog\/2011\/09\/21\/sometimes-a-painting-goes-well-sometimes-it-goes\/"},"modified":"2024-02-01T17:32:40","modified_gmt":"2024-02-01T17:32:40","slug":"sometimes-a-painting-goes-well-sometimes-it-goes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kaisercaimo.com\/blog\/2011\/09\/21\/sometimes-a-painting-goes-well-sometimes-it-goes\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<div id='gallery-1' class='gallery galleryid-4697 gallery-columns-3 gallery-size-thumbnail'><figure class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<div class='gallery-icon landscape'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/kaisercaimo.com\/blog\/2011\/09\/21\/sometimes-a-painting-goes-well-sometimes-it-goes\/attachment\/4698\/'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" src=\"https:\/\/kaisercaimo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/09\/tumblr_lrvo9yQfU01qcztaao1_1280-150x150.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https:\/\/kaisercaimo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/09\/tumblr_lrvo9yQfU01qcztaao1_1280-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/kaisercaimo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/09\/tumblr_lrvo9yQfU01qcztaao1_1280-250x250.jpg 250w, https:\/\/kaisercaimo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/09\/tumblr_lrvo9yQfU01qcztaao1_1280-100x100.jpg 100w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 150px) 85vw, 150px\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div><\/figure><figure class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<div class='gallery-icon landscape'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/kaisercaimo.com\/blog\/2011\/09\/21\/sometimes-a-painting-goes-well-sometimes-it-goes\/attachment\/4699\/'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" src=\"https:\/\/kaisercaimo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/09\/tumblr_lrvo9yQfU01qcztaao2_1280-150x150.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https:\/\/kaisercaimo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/09\/tumblr_lrvo9yQfU01qcztaao2_1280-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/kaisercaimo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/09\/tumblr_lrvo9yQfU01qcztaao2_1280-250x250.jpg 250w, https:\/\/kaisercaimo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/09\/tumblr_lrvo9yQfU01qcztaao2_1280-100x100.jpg 100w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 150px) 85vw, 150px\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div><\/figure><figure class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<div class='gallery-icon landscape'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/kaisercaimo.com\/blog\/2011\/09\/21\/sometimes-a-painting-goes-well-sometimes-it-goes\/attachment\/4700\/'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" src=\"https:\/\/kaisercaimo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/09\/tumblr_lrvo9yQfU01qcztaao3_1280-150x150.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https:\/\/kaisercaimo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/09\/tumblr_lrvo9yQfU01qcztaao3_1280-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/kaisercaimo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/09\/tumblr_lrvo9yQfU01qcztaao3_1280-250x250.jpg 250w, https:\/\/kaisercaimo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/09\/tumblr_lrvo9yQfU01qcztaao3_1280-100x100.jpg 100w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 150px) 85vw, 150px\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div><\/figure><figure class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<div class='gallery-icon landscape'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/kaisercaimo.com\/blog\/2011\/09\/21\/sometimes-a-painting-goes-well-sometimes-it-goes\/attachment\/4701\/'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" src=\"https:\/\/kaisercaimo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/09\/tumblr_lrvo9yQfU01qcztaao4_1280-150x150.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https:\/\/kaisercaimo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/09\/tumblr_lrvo9yQfU01qcztaao4_1280-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/kaisercaimo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/09\/tumblr_lrvo9yQfU01qcztaao4_1280-250x250.jpg 250w, https:\/\/kaisercaimo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/09\/tumblr_lrvo9yQfU01qcztaao4_1280-100x100.jpg 100w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 150px) 85vw, 150px\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div><\/figure><figure class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<div class='gallery-icon landscape'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/kaisercaimo.com\/blog\/2011\/09\/21\/sometimes-a-painting-goes-well-sometimes-it-goes\/attachment\/4702\/'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" src=\"https:\/\/kaisercaimo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/09\/tumblr_lrvo9yQfU01qcztaao5_1280-150x150.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https:\/\/kaisercaimo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/09\/tumblr_lrvo9yQfU01qcztaao5_1280-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/kaisercaimo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/09\/tumblr_lrvo9yQfU01qcztaao5_1280-250x250.jpg 250w, https:\/\/kaisercaimo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/09\/tumblr_lrvo9yQfU01qcztaao5_1280-100x100.jpg 100w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 150px) 85vw, 150px\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div><\/figure>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n<p>Sometimes a painting goes well, sometimes it goes badly.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>This one is not going well. Here&rsquo;s a record of my attempts thus far to make this lovely model&rsquo;s face look less like a burst football and more like the girl I know.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>(Oil on canvas, 34&quot;x40&quot;)<\/p>\n<p>I&rsquo;m really bad at portraits. Really bad. I don&rsquo;t know why. It&rsquo;s not that I can&rsquo;t draw faces, I just can&rsquo;t draw the faces of people I recognise. I&rsquo;ve discovered that the mental image I have of people I know actually bears very little resemblance to their physical form. If I try to draw someone from memory, I don&rsquo;t even come close. If I try to draw from a model or a photograph, my preconception of what they look like steamrolls right over what my eyes are telling me. <em>I don&rsquo;t know why this happens.<\/em> I cannot shut it off.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The discrepancies are not huge ones; I don&rsquo;t give people extra limbs or change their ethnicity or stick a spare ear on or anything. It&rsquo;s just a combination of tiny oversights and little, subtle alterations that build up into <em>completely the wrong face<\/em> and it&rsquo;s really frustrating.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>All this might go some way to explain why I am terrible at remembering faces in daily life. When I&rsquo;m introduced to someone, my brain accepts their face as a sketch and then doodles all over it and files it away, probably under the wrong name. So when I meet them again, they look only vaguely familiar and I call them the wrong thing. Even if you are ridiculously good-looking, all I will keep is the word &ldquo;good-looking&rdquo; as an annotation in the margin. I might have fond memories of things we did or conversations we had but&hellip; your face. I just cannot recall your face.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>This is also why stories of love-at-first-sight make me raise an eyebrow.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The painting above is still a work in progress, with so many things wrong with it I wouldn&rsquo;t know where to begin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sometimes a painting goes well, sometimes it goes badly.\u00a0 This one is not going well. Here&rsquo;s a record of my attempts thus far to make this lovely model&rsquo;s face look less like a burst football and more like the girl I know.\u00a0 (Oil on canvas, 34&quot;x40&quot;) I&rsquo;m really bad at portraits. Really bad. I don&rsquo;t &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/kaisercaimo.com\/blog\/2011\/09\/21\/sometimes-a-painting-goes-well-sometimes-it-goes\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[72,156,42,130,68],"class_list":["post-4697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-gallery","hentry","category-uncategorised","tag-figure","tag-oil","tag-painting","tag-portrait","tag-work-in-progress","post_format-post-format-gallery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kaisercaimo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kaisercaimo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kaisercaimo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kaisercaimo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kaisercaimo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4697"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kaisercaimo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4697\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4703,"href":"https:\/\/kaisercaimo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4697\/revisions\/4703"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kaisercaimo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kaisercaimo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kaisercaimo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}