Those of you who know me well know I'm a big Tibor Nagy fan. So I recently bid on a small study (8 x 8 inches) that he put up for auction. The bidding quickly went north of my budget. So I decided I'd do a larger study of it. Here it is in process.
Mine is 20 x 16 inches. Even though it pales in comparison to the original, I enjoy trying to figure out how phenomenally talented painters achieve certain colors, textures, and styles. Side benefit: if it turns out halfway decent, I have something to hang on my wall until I can afford to buy the real thing.
Doing a larger version of a smaller piece creates its own problems I hadn't really anticipated. For example, there's an abstract area between the cars that Nagy represented with a few strokes of white and gray paint. I tried to do this, but in my larger version it just looked like big blobs of misapplied paint where I should have tried to put something. I compensated for this by adding some blue and orange. It kind of gives the illusion of people crossing the street, except for the other problem.
You see the man who appears to be getting into the car on the left? In the Nagy painting he's very faint. In fact, he appears to just be standing next to the car. But as I painted him, he wanted to take this form. I like the way this turned out. Problem is, I now think the pedestrians crossing the street should have more structured forms, similar to the soon-to-be-passenger.
What do you think? Do I need to go back and define the pedestrians? Leave them as they are? Or blob back over them in keeping with the original?