Any Human Heart

William Boyd’s Any Human Heart tells the incredible life story of Logan Mountstuart and is one of my favourite books as it tells the story of a man who finds love again and again, but always remembers his one true love – Freya Deverell, who sadly dies with their daughter in a V-2 attack during the Second World War when Logan is being held in a Switzerland prisoner of war camp.

Figure 1 Any Human Heart

My intention for this piece was to paint a picture of the time Logan Mountstuart and Freya Deverell first met in William Boyd’s novel Any Human Heart. It shows the man already married and had son, into a rich family no less, ready to risk everything for that one woman who he thinks is her soul mate. And he in fact does practically lose everything. He goes from riches to rags, but his rags are a happier life with the woman he loves and daughter he treasures.

The research I have done into the artists Arthur Hughes, Josef Kote and Paul Hedley have influenced this piece, along with my own pieces like Sophie Portrait and Pride and Prejudice have influenced the way in which I have painted this piece. First, as I have said before, the artist Arthur Hughes has a huge influence on the whole of my project as he created paintings that were inspired by literature, and that is the direction I have taken in this project. Second, the artist Josef Kote and my painting Pride and Prejudice influenced the way in which I painted the skin, as by studying his work and trying out his techniques had a strong influence and gave me a technique that I could use to paint the skin of people successfully – using one base colour and then dramatic and bold colours to add some of the other skin tones that really stand out. Josef Kote has also influenced me in the way in which I paint the background in my pieces. Before this piece, I felt that if I were to paint a background that had buildings in, I would use a naïve art style like Helen Elliott (as in my Dancing In The Street At Night paintings), and if it were a landscape, I would use techniques like Josef Kote (as in my Pride and Prejudice painting). However, now having done this piece, I feel that I am going to use the techniques I have used here for the background in my final piece. Finally, the artist Paul Hedley has sort of influenced the way I paint the clothes and possibly the hair, however, the bigger influenced of this is from the experience of painting my Sophie Portrait where I found that I liked and preferred to paint the hair and clothes in that way compared to the other techniques I have used.

I feel that this piece has been incredibly successful, and I probably the most successful painting I have done in this project so far, as I have been able to find different techniques of painting that work for me and are effective when I use them together. The blurriness of the background created by the harsh and loose brush strokes helps to not distract the viewer’s attention from the main part of the painting – the two people. Then contrasting this with some very different techniques of the defined controlled brush strokes in the hair and clothes, and sort of in the face creates definition and holds the viewer’s attention. I believe that these two contrasting techniques work very well together and I plan to use them for my final piece.  

Figure 2 Screen shot from the TV series Any Human Heart that
I based my painting on.

From this experience I have learnt that I can take two very different styles and use them together to create an even more effective piece than if I were to paint a piece using one technique – this painting is more effective and successful than any of my other paintings as I have taken what I have learnt from each and put all of that into one piece. And I will carry on painting like this when I use acrylic paint.

For this painting, I firstly gridded up a screen shot from the TV series of Any Human Heart into 2cm squares, scaled it up onto an A1 sheet of paper, and used this grid only as a guide to draw from. For the background, I chose one main colour – light blue – to paint the entire background and then painted the other colours to create the actual background on top using harsh and lose brush strokes. In fact, for each part of the painting, I painted a base colour and then added the different colours and tones on top to get the depth, shaped and colour of each part.