People in context. Backgrounds. A daunting and unpleasant prospect, thoughts of a completely new set of complications with something I always feel very uncomfortable with.
A very negative response but a also a truthful one.
Of course people are never without context, even if all background is striped away a persons clothes still put a person into some small context. If the technical difficulties ie perspective and proportion aren’t hard enough already, there are then so many choices to make, what to include, what not to include, how an item or room may reflect against the figure and influence it.
A figure to me is so much more important and necessary to me than the incidentals of things around us that I really dislike trying to place my figures into their surroundings. I’d like the viewer to just See the person they are looking at, with all its own stories in a face, influences through their clothes, the attitude of a pose. I may not yet be able to portray many or all of these things in my paintings but these things are becoming more and more all important, the background fading more in to un-necessity as time goes on.
However, this section calls for background so I looked at Matisse, one of my all time favourite works, Interior at Nice.
This is such a clever painting, the angles and perspective used un-representationally, done extremely cleverly portraying a sense of great depth & distance, looking down, looking in. This is a striking piece. Also used a dark outline.
I went to look at Edward Hoppers ‘Summer Interior’ 
and ‘Morning Sun’ 
both in a style I could only hope to begin to emulate. Both works are clearly figures in interiors but little or no detail included. The simplicity, the angles of light, their clear origins as well as a strong painting style are used with force and extreme effectiveness. I could only hope to achieve a small fraction of what these masters obviously did.
I ended with a look at a painting by Lucien Freud, ‘Leigh on a Green Sofa’. This is a such a simple pose, deceptively, the painting has enough emotion to pack quite a punch. And for all the lack of detail, given both the title and green of the sofa this painting is still a figure in an interior.
OCA Painting 1 Learning Log 