Part 1: Eyes
Award-winning artist LAURA SMITH presents the first in a new four-part series that takes a closer look at details within masterpieces to help you improve your own art
If you were an apprentice artist in a large 15th-century workshop, perhaps in Italy or Japan, you would know exactly how to paint eyes. There would be a recognised way to approach the subject and a specific method to follow. These days however, there are almost as many ways to treat painting an eye as there are pairs of eyes in the world. This is both a help and a hindrance when it comes to actually painting a portrait, because we have wonderful artistic freedom yet almost too much choice.
I believe what we are all searching for is our own way of responding to a particular problem. A good strategy for finding that unique path is to be inspired by other people’s attempts and then experiment ourselves. The exercise at the end of this article is about doing the first part with the hope that it will give rise to the second.
It can be useful to investigate paintings with regards to a particular topic. Whether from life or from another artwork, drawing to me is just a slower, deeper way of looking at something and I think we can learn so much
from the experience. Over the next four issues, we are going to look in turn at eyes, hands, animals and flowers, while comparing different ways of painting them. In this first exercise we will be looking at eyes. I have selected four depictions of eyes from four different portraits; two are from the 17th century and two are from the 19th century.
Tiny changes
People often ask, “How do I paint eyes?”. Very often the features are treated in exactly the same way as every other area of the painting. However, eyes are quite complicated. The smallest alteration to the look of an eye changes the whole expression of a face and we are biologically wired to pick up the most minute variations. If you move the pupil one millimetre the viewer will notice so it requires very precise brushwork. Eyes are also a different texture to every other part of the body, catching the light with their moisture.
Here’s a fun warm-up exercise to try. Feel the bridge of your own nose and how much it protrudes from your cheeks. Touch your forehead, bringing your fingers down towards your eyebrows and then, with your eyes closed, gently feel your eyeball sitting softly in your eye socket. When we use touch and think about the three-dimensionality of our head, features such as eyelashes appear physically insignificant by contrast. All these details – the cheek bone, the brow, the nose – communicate a deep understanding of the underlying structure of the eye sockets within the skull. It is useful to remind ourselves that the features of a face are not floating in a skin-coloured void but situated on the turning surface of a head, with light coming from a particular direction.
Looking in detail
Let us attempt to get inside the minds of these artists by comparing their depictions of a few of the key details of an eye in turn.
The white of the eye is very often not the lightest part of the painting. Just because the local colour of the white of the eye is light, does not mean it is not in shadow – and therefore darker. Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with the Red Hat, for example, is highly illusionistic and yet look how dark the “whites” of the eyes really are. In Rembrandt van Rijn’s Self-Portrait from 1659, even the lightest part of the “whites” of the eyes are nowhere near as light as the highlight. By contrast, the “whites” of the eyes in Edouard Manet’s George Moore are not even defined. There is very little differentiation between eyeball and skin.
Even in Auguste Renoir’s By the Seashore, the “whites” of the model’s eyes are not white so much as blue. There is a lighter section of the “whites” of the eyes in every depiction and that is because the eyeball is a reflective sphere and we are seeing a section of that round, wet ball which is inevitably catching the light. Often the nose casts a shadow over one eye but, regardless of this, the whole head is a form. We are not reading two flat eyes next to one another. They are within a turning surface.
Now let’s look at pupils. The Rembrandt and Renoir paintings are the two whose pupils are clearly visible, despite them being separated by so many years. There is a hint of one in the Manet, but in the Vermeer, it is impossible to make them out. In the Rembrandt, look how similar the tone of his right pupil (our left as we look at it) is to the iris. In Vermeer’s painting, the red-hatted girl has quite dark eyes, so the irises show up. This is true also of the Manet. Both painters emphasised the irises over any lashes or preconceived “eye” shape.
Highlights are important to eyes. The one, clear, turquoise highlight in the Vermeer is extraordinarily impactful and important. Without it you would lose a huge amount of the sense of what you are looking at. Sometimes it can be tempting to add equally strong highlights to both eyes in a painting, but it is important to remember that each eye is in a different position in relation to the light source – and to our own viewpoint.
This is why so often in a great painting, there is a significant difference between the highlights used in the two eyes. Sometimes, like in the Vermeer, there is only one; in other paintings, such as this Rembrandt, one highlight sparkles while the other is more like a dying star.
You might think eyelashes are an important detail yet look closely at these four masterpieces and you’ll see that’s often not the case. Eyelashes appear clearly only in the Renoir, as two arcs of gradated blue. We can guess that she wasn’t wearing blue mascara and so the colour choice is interesting. Renoir has in fact lifted the colour of her eyes and used it on her lash line in order to intensify the colour of her eyes. It is worth noting that no individual lashes are discernible.
When we imagine an eyebrow, it usually amounts to an arc of dark hair somewhere above an eye. The closest we get to that is with Renoir. Two gentle arches are beautifully connected to the hair and sit on the head in space. The biggest contrast from their clarity is the Vermeer. In his portrait, the brows themselves are invisible but nevertheless there is a lot going on. You have a subtle but distinct sense of the form of the head and an eyebrow being raised.
The Rembrandt is so much more to do with the craggy form of the brow, rather than any row of hairs. Manet does no more than suggest his model’s brows with a couple of deft dabs of the brush.
You might expect, from preconceived ideas of what goes to make a well-painted eye, that Renoir’s would be most realistic. However, I would argue that his painting is furthest away from the way we actually see another person. He has constructed a pictorial world into which we are invited; things are not just translated but reinvented.
I thought I knew quite a lot about these artists’ works, but I have learnt so much more by drawing from them and I have an even deeper respect for the precision and intelligent decision making that has taken place. If you attempt even one small drawing of your favourite of these details, I hope you will come away feeling the same.