Life Art


American Gothic Friends was painted in June and altered in July 2018 in acrylic on to a base drawing using coloured pens. Image is 1600 by 1560 and displayed reduced (some 37%). The location is from the Dingle House, Iowa, using a side photograph on the World Wide Web (see below).



The version corrected is from below. So the mouth was moved left and raised a little, the nose was lengthened, her left shoulder was raised, the face lines were reduced, more hair was dropped, and the chin was stylised with the face and neck receiving various coats of paint, as was the flesh all round. The strap on her left shoulder was extended upwards and the necklace rests on her shoulder rather than gripping the neck. The left hand was re-emphasised and her index finger now points to him. The idea is still the grim 'American Gothic' but she looks a little sweeter. Also, in photographing this (above), I introduced (for the very first time!) a little bit of 'de-barrelling' where the bow on a painting's edge is straightened, in addition to parallel lines made parallel by tilting back.



This was another rescue job from the start. This time the house was painted first and then the two people. In initial paintings, the lines simply kept coming through. White correction fluid proved very useful. However, in much of this painting, the sheer quantity of paint used would have covered the lines. The worst part was doing her dress. It is now caked with paint. It has gone from yellow to gold to yellow to more orange. It was semi-see through to no see-through to hint. It went green, and this seemed better. It went to no view through. Better. Dark green was best, then it went more lighter green again, then black green again. The problem was the paint was now forming a sheen and putting out unwanted under-patterns. In some light, it looked odd. In any case, which dress is ever 'flat'? So I but in pleats and material detail, to force the eye away from patterns underneath. This process took days because a hair dryer was not enough to prevent shoving layers of paint around: the paint started to collapse to moving lower layers. The necessary effort was to remove a drainpipe that seemed to curl up to nowhere, to discover there was no drainpipe in the first place - one illusory line made it look like this. I should get my eyes fixed. Still, the dress looked dead: the final tweak was to add hints of orange and the tiniest amounts of blue and pink - multicolours as elsewhere. Below is the initial drawing, shown also around 37%.


The upshot is I have to finish paintings more quickly and not to hammer the paint, and perhaps to have a better idea of the end result wanted. This was painted after Cornish Gothic and then Naked American Gothic and was intended to avoid the latter's pitfalls, but instead replaced them with others.

Adrian Worsfold