It's possible that this is not his normal work style, but that the director asked him to move the head a lot to add some action or to conform to some preconception of "what painters normally do".
really? half of the effort in painting is the actual 'seeing', not putting the paint to the canvas. In fact in art school we would do exercises where we drew from life without ever looking at the paper at all
Yes, but normally he might have pointed his easel at the subject and just leaned or looked over the side to see the subject, for example. Although some of his pieces are very large. The point, though, is that you can make looking more dramatic without increasing or decreasing the amount of looking.
