The site size process is a tradition of painting directly from life, to the scale of life and under natural light, passed down from the great masters such as Van Dyck, Velázquez, and Titian to name a few. It is the process of standing back and viewing the subject as a whole, so as to get the impression first and foremost. Through this technique we are able to learn in the footsteps of these great painters. Charles Cecil, founder and great artist of the atelier in Florence where I learned the sight-size method, passed down his knowledge of the craft to us with great inspiration. His teacher Ives Gammel, was taught by John Singer Sargent, who continues to inspire.
The process of learning this tradition allowed me to understand the nature of seeing in a new way, changing the way I look at the world I see. After nearly four years of inspiring training from Charles Cecil and wonderful teachers at the studio using this method, the passion for light and seeing enveloped my approach to painting. A key moment for me was grasping how the process of viewing nature didn’t depend upon what I thought I was seeing, but rather training my eye to see without trying to conceptualise nature, thus allowing for the overall impression, at a distance. One could argue the same is said for how we project our own impressions of thought in our day to day lives, which makes me feel there is a similarity between sight size and pure states of consciousness.
For example rather than drawing the outline of an eye with details eyelashes and a dark iris, a line for the form and so on, the overall connection between each value becomes the area of focus. The impression the subject reflects while viewing it at a distance (or if up closer with blurry quick overall squinted eyes), via movement and light, there is something almost mystical in the impression we receive without trying to find a definite hard line to grasp onto. To me this also felt like a way to surrender to the present moment, and be totally immersed in the flow of life. The concept of the language of visual grace is more likely to occur without effort of breaking down too much analytically. It feels like the spirit of the subject, or person, is able to come through onto the canvas. Nature and landscapes also dance with light and movement when seeing it as a whole picture and allowing for what we see to be expressed. The mysterious becomes expressed through the catalyst of the impression, giving form and expression to the invisible on the canvas. The artist Alberti wrote “know that a painted thing can never appear truthful where there is not a definite distance to seeing it” which really embodies the notion of sight size painting.
After my training at Charles Cecil Studios I started painting in a beautiful old Florentine studio with other painters, under a large north facing window and playing with the light using giant sails of fabric. I am currently working on still life paintings, and portraiture in the studio and love going outside to paint en plein air. I also love sculpting which I learned hand in hand with painting, in the historic Romanelli Studio Gallery taught by the very talented sculptor Raffaello Romanelli, who also teaches using the sight size method. He is a portrait painter and sculpts in his atelier, as well as creates other projects and commissions for clients. His brother also a talented sculptor taught students how to sculpt animal figures and I learned a lot about the process of creating via a 3 dimensional perspective and fundamentals and subtleties of sculpture. I continue to sculpt and learn in the beautiful studios there and working on some sight-size portraits in clay.
Here in the image below is fellow artist and my close dear friend Josie who let me paint her in the cast room at Charles Cecil Studios, one of the last (and most fun) portraits I would paint there.
