During the Corona pandemic period, I was fortunate to have time to discover the Genius Rembrandt.

After studying the underlying principles of rendering a portrait, a great desire arose to learn this myself. The first attempts seems ok, but something essential was missing. To explain this properly

I will take pianomusic  as a metaphore. You choose for example a piece of music by Mozart.  With a lot of practice you learn to play every note of this piece and the result unfortunately sounds like nothing. The next step is to make it your own, focus on timing and cohesion. However, it still isn't music. Then, hopefully, you discover that last piece, to make the music your own, to play it from your soul.

 

In painting, I see similar processes. First you learn to paint tones and get a nice colored picture. Then you discover that you can paint better in “chords” with nice interactions. But at a certain point you have to go to your heart and you have to find the soul and the harmony.

You can also explain harmony with satisfying all the recognition algorithms in your brain.  This is best reflected in portraits, because everyone is specializes in facial recognition. Each face is fully assessed on at least 400 features in a second. The art of portrait painting, for me, is meeting these judging algorithms. A few algorithms also assesses the emotions, this is not the most important part but certainly the most enjoyable. So I pay the most attention to the emotions and this is how "Soulpainting"was born. The serie actually consists of "tronies" a Dutch expression for portrait studies with a so-called character head. The models themselves are secondary. I just took some pictures from the Internet, with promisses for an good exercise. The result of this project will be 100 tronies showing how wonderful, beautiful, unique and precious people are.

This could be a nice contribution to the world of today.