Card players

I wanted to overcome the problem of limited access to groups of people which I might draw by searching for photos on the web, then drawing from a photo. I had a spontaneous idea to search for “card players”, and was surprised that practically nothing else but paintings came up.

The one I immediately recognized was the painting by Paul Cézanne realized c. 1893-96, which I had studied some time ago for the watercolour course. There were also more frivolous interpretations of the topic, for example this painting (undated) by Hayley Tolkin, a female contemporary painter from South Africa.

Here’s one of the few drawings I found with the search term “card players 2013” – hoping that this would yield photos I might use for the original idea. It is available in a very good quality which permits looking at details. It’s nice to see how sensitive the pencil lines were made. This is something I would like to develop for myself as well, and one of the reasons I so often use just pencil. Only that I haven’t really focused on the medium because I was too busy depicting something, and usually in a hurry because I’m so restricted timewise.

But at this point I had realized that I had stumbled across an interesting motif, which has inspired quite a few artists! So I thought I’d summarize it into a little essay before getting on with my search for a photo source, and selected a medieval interpretation by David the younger Teniers and a more modern interpretation, which looks like 1920’s expressionism, by African painter Hale Woodruff (1900-1980). The source indicated it was painted in 1978.

Surprised, I did some follow up research and learnt that this was the replacement version from a badly deteriorated original that had been painted in 1928-29 after Woodruff’s trip to Paris where he was influenced by Pablo Picasso and Paul Cézanne.

I tried many variations of the search term, but I wasn’t able to find a photograph I could use for my purpose!

Then I tried out whether I could find some royalty free photos in an image bank. But in the end, most of these images were with a watermark, which wasn’t what I needed. Often, the pictures were very polished and stylized, with soap-opera style people, and this didn’t appeal to me.

I found a nice historic photograph of a group of men playing Faro, another card game, picture taken 1895 in Arizona. But upon closer look, the picture did not have much detail of the cloth, for example folds, and I found it technically too difficult to use as a source because it was a bit blurry.

In growing exasperation, I began searching for “Arizona card players”, which yielded pictures of American football player teams in full equipment, colours red and white. I tried “French card players” (many Cezanne paintings), “German card players” (Shepherd’s dogs, caricatures, some Nazi emblems), and “British card players”.

This final option did not find card players, but a nice photograph of two gentlemen drinking a beer while talking, presumably an interview situation. Indeed, it was Kevin Maguire interviewing Nigel Farage, a UK political figure. I liked the picture but then was put off by the possible political connotations, which I did not want to have in my sketchbook of moving people.

After all, I’m a bit disheartened whether the photograph idea will get me any further. I might search for pictures of people in general and take what I happen to come across, but card players seem to be too rare. It’s so difficult to get on with this task of depicting people!