Nils Hadamovsky

fine art

Nils Hadamovsky

fine art

I was born in Germany. When I was three, my parents decided to sail around the world, so for the next five years, I sailed around the world. After that, I went to school in Greece and then Germany. Later, I attended boarding school in the UK for high school. After that, I came to the Florence Academy of Art, where I just finished my studies.

Painting Process for My Final Project at the Florence Academy of Art Size: 130×80 cm, oil on canvas, life-size.

For me, it starts with an idea of a certain feeling I want in my painting. I was looking for a serious representation of a military man who is at the same time melancholic and shows his inner child. Next, I need to find a model that represents what I am looking for; for me, the models are a significant part of a successful painting.

1. Once I had everything planned, I started with some sketches in charcoal, working to find the best composition with just simple values. Next, I did a colour sketch to spot any problems in the composition.

2. Then, I began sketching the entire composition in life size. This allows me to move things around and find the exact canvas size that best suits the painting. In this stage, it’s important to be flexible and keep adjusting lines until I achieve the best composition.

3. I transfer my drawing onto the canvas with raw umber. After that, I start mapping out the shadows and light, striving to make the drawing accurate.

4. Once satisfied, I start with colour, trying to keep it simple with three values for the skin and clothing. I cover the canvas as quickly as possible to see the overall impression and assess the values in relation to each other. I hold back from any details, focusing only on the big impression.

5. It’s important to work slowly towards details. I gradually add more accuracy, focusing on temperature and texture. This is the stage where I might repaint an eye three times or more.

6. At this point, I try to finish the painting, working on subtle details like making the eyebrows softer. I enjoy playing with warm shadows and green halftones, balancing the subtleties of cold and warm tones. I slightly push some areas into the shadows and light, glazing parts down, like the sword, to direct focus. I achieve this also by increasing contrast in the face.

7. There is always a moment when I realise I am working backwards, undoing previous progress. It’s challenging to recognize, and even harder to decide whether to push through or finish the painting. When I reach that point, I give myself two days to continue. During that time, I look for improvements, but each time I consider a change, I ask myself if it truly enhances the painting or if I’m getting lost in details. In my opinion, too many details can break a painting. After two days, I stopped painting, even if I thought more could be done. I might return to it later, but mostly I don’t.

The art of not knowing

Nils Hadamovsky’s art portfolio

This is the attempt to put into words what my journey in art has been, and what it is becoming..
The idea of describing painting troubles me; I paint because I believe it is a way to express what can’t be shown/told/conveyed through words.

It is a direct conversation between the artist and his subject. This sounds really fancy. But I feel this in my daily life, for instance when I was painting my best friend, with whom I’d spent the last two years. First as lovers and now as friends, she means the world to me. Painting her took me back to all the times we’d spent together, and in moments like this her and I became the same.

It‘s a strange feeling – it’s like you can feel what you are painting. Once I started to smell her, which confused me. I had to check twice that she wasn’t there. It is this intense relationship with my art I strive for.

But I have learnt that this feeling is something that I can’t force.

I tend to treat paintings like they are alive. I always paint the eyes last – the eyes are what makes a painting feel alive and I can’t give a person life without their body being done. It seems really silly even to me but I still do it every time.

This painting tells a really personal story. It symbolizes the struggle between the idealist version of things and reality. The person on the left symbolizes reality for me; she is naked because it’s just her there is no idea added on to her. She is resting her head on my shoulder and is supporting my painting palette. This symbolizes a healthy relationship of supporting each other.

The girl on the right symbolizes the idealist version of things. She is all in red –
the colour of love, the romanticized version of love. She is also wearing a lot of jewelry to add the appeal of money. She is pulling me away from reality.

I am torn between them, one foot steady, one moving towards the idealist version. I feel the pull of the idealist version in my everyday life. It is a constant battle I have.

I am torn between them, one foot steady, one moving towards the idealist version. I feel the pull of the idealist version in my everyday life. It is a constant battle I have.

It is an honour for me to get to know the people I paint. This painting is a special one: my model was my teacher and my friend. He passed away half a year after I painted him. He died in a diving accident.

This made it clear to me what a responsibility I have. Paintings are something that outlive people. My paintings are representative of my model but they are not the truth, they are only my view of the person.

It all started with a self-portrait.
I was the first person I really studied, not because I am madly in love with myself, but simply because I was the only model that was always around. Now my yearly self-portraits are a measure of my development. It is now a tradition for me to do a self portrait every year. Every self portrait covers something I have not done before.

I never like the way my paintings look at the beginning. It takes a lot of imagination and vision to see what they will look like at the end. I have to see the whole picture and trust that it will all fall into place in the end. Just because something looks horrible at the beginning doesn’t mean it will at the end. But I tend to forget this quite often and have to constantly remind myself.

Over complicated ideas.
Our reality is as simple or as complicated as we make it. This comes through while painting.
We can see the simplest thing and interpret the world into it. This tends to get in the way of actually observing reality and our surroundings.

It is fascinating how we see people for our preconceptions of them, not for what they really are. I now try to look more carefully at people, but I realised that I rarely actually looked at the people surrounding me.
Really looking at them I discover that they are completely different from my perception of them. To me, this is a fundamental problem of humanity- that we inject our ideas into everything, trying to define it all, and in the process we lose reality. So my art is just some paint on canvas; everything else is my preconception, or yours.