Painting the Jazz Blues

A few years ago, Deb and I spent a weekend in Idyllwild, CA while I was participating in a plein air contest, painting in oil. While there I took a number of photos of a jazz band, but had never used them for a painting, until now.

This is the reference photo. It has potential but is not well composed.

Above left is the cropped version. I added a third musician in the upper right, relocated from the original photo using Photoshop. As a composition, I’m happy with the location of the figures, but its dark, dark, dark. I’d like to see large lights somewhere to give the composition more punch.

Played around with a few ideas and this (right) is what I selected. It’s just a small value study painted on 8 ½” x 11” typing paper. As I painted it, I added a few select warms (red/yellow portion of the color wheel) so it’s really a combined value and temperature study.

I liked it so I painted this full color study (below) on 9” x 12” watercolor paper.

Again, I liked it so I painted this larger version (16” x 20”).

Yikes, not nearly as good as the smaller study. What was I thinking? So … the obvious solution is to repaint it – only much better. But as I was rethinking my approach, I also came up with a few ideas that I thought would improve the design.

I liked the full color study for version 1, even though I had botched the full size painting, but I felt it could be improved. The big guy on the left is really big and I felt if I showed his legs “correctly” they would look wrong. I had camouflaged them in the initial studies, but the result was a bottom heavy design. I thought it would help if I put a few darks in the upper portion of the painting and a few more lights in the lower portion. I liked the “lost” aspects of the faces in the initial studies so I wanted to exaggerate the lost aspects and play with abstraction – maintaining just enough realism to show what’s happening – and no more.

So the study at right, full size this time (16” x 20”).

I was happy with the general approach but I didn’t think it was sufficiently worked out so I painted one last study (9” x 11”)

which I used for the final painting below (16” x 20”), and which Deb named “Jazz Blues”.

For those interested in the evolution of the thinking process, you can get a good idea by noting the changes to the saxophonist’s shoulders and adjacent background. I’ll just point out that all those changes are deliberate, including the little dots of paint that appear in some versions.

Hope you like it.

Keene