Story of "The Poker Players"
Story of “The Poker Players”
My inspiration for this painting is Georges de La Tour’s “The Cheat,” which hangs in the Louvre.
I liked the composition, values and suggested “story.”
Knowing that there is a weekly poker game played at Oak Hammock, about 1 ½ years ago I went a few times to observe how the people behaved while playing and sketched their various behaviors. That’s me in the red shirt, playing a fly on the wall.
During these times only men were coming to the poker game, although I heard that a woman participated at other times.
One guy raked in his winnings by leaning over the table with his big body and swept in the chips and dollars with his hands. I decided he would play the role of “the big winner” in my painting. At different moments, a player raised his hands into the air, another pointed at someone or something, and another leaned his head on his hand. About midway through their afternoon poker session, a waiter would come into the room to bring their drink orders along with the ‘Gold fish” snacks.
The room where they usually played poker was moderately lit.
Through these observations I gradually developed a concept of what the painting would be like. Below are a few behaviors I quickly sketched while observing the games.
This painting was a significant challenge as it was entirely made up by me rather than relying on modifying one or a few photographs of a game in progress.
Based upon these early observations, sketches and preliminary photographs, I drew different possible compositions and made color studies. Below is one of these early quick studies:
I decided that the painting should have a perspective of looking down on the table so that the players did not obscure each other from view. A photo session was scheduled where my husband took the photographs while standing on a ladder. Before the photo shoot I asked each selected player to wear a particular color shirt – one that I had observed them wearing during my earlier visits.
When the day for taking photographs came, the players had relocated to a different room than I planned on. It had a totally different background that included a fireplace and was well lit with lots of light from windows. Also, one of the original selected players did not show up, but he was replaced by someone else (who I hadn’t seen there before).
We decided to go ahead with the photo session.
I covered the windows and reduced external sources of other lighting as much as possible. My composition changed with the new person in, the only woman who also played poker with the group. I moved people around to play different roles because of the change in people actually present. Based upon these observations I made some changes to the original composition.
After reviewing the many photographs, I decided to use multiple ones for the total composition. In some cases one photo was used for one of the arms of an individual and a different one for the other arm/hand. Also different ones for the facial expression from the rest of a body. I didn’t like the position of one arm/hand and took photos of my husband’s arm to substitute. My husband took photos of my arm to supplement for one of the woman’s arms in addition to taking photos of me in different color tops to substitute for the original. These were of course taken with the same kind of perspective looking down. The waiter’s position was changed by rotating his image 180 degrees horizontally and changing his physical location and head position.
Additional changes to the composition were made. This new room had a fireplace which was not in the earlier room. It actually looked good, although I moved it significantly to the left in the painting. The “French door” beside the fireplace was eliminated. The walls of the photographed room were a highly lit very pale green, which I changed to make the whole background a dark warm brownish color.
In order to convey a more intimate feeling I made the table smaller and placed the players closer together. Then of course, there had to be cards on the table in addition to the chips and money. So we went back to do another photo session, this time focusing on the different possible card arrangements and what a good winning hand would look like.
You can barely see that the winner has a royal flush.
“The Poker Players” by Jane Polkowski
And that is my story of “The Poker Players.” Although I would like to continue working on it, I had a deadline of January 23 to get it done to this point so that an image could be sent for consideration in the Oil Painters of America National juried and judged show which this year is in St. Augustine, Florida. Here’s hoping that it or "Me and Toulouse-Lautrec" (self portrait with my cat) gets in. I won’t know until the end of February.
Stay tuned.
