I decided to make this second study from the film Dallas Buyers Club because I think it defines the culmination of a sense of desperation that keeps the character in a general sense of unease throughout the first half of the movie. He has been given a fixed amount of time to live, and the time grows near for him to die from his diagnosis of HIV. Trying to put myself in his shoes, it must have been a scarier period for people like him to contract the virus during the 80’s because its effects in the body were largely unknown. This scene of him crying alone in his car definitely conveys a sense of release from a building up of emotions.
I painted the scene with the intention of showing as muck of the expression that Matthew McConaughey conveys as possible, with the biggest factor in my opinion being the wrinkles that cross his face in all sorts of directions. As always, the eyes are a great conveyer of emotion, in this case having a very important part in defining the sadness and perhaps desperation that he is feeling in the moment. It is evidently a moment of vulnerability that we are able to see as the viewers only possible because he is sitting inside his car by himself, and feels no pressure to be a certain way in front of another human being watching him.
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