Little Green Apples, study

Green apples painted on a grocery bag.

Westward Vision

One day, I was at the grocery store and I met a vision that took my breath away. Literally. Her name was Esther and she was behind the deli counter. Her mysterious hair was hidden in a paper wrap and her lilting accent mesmerized me. I wanted to paint her immediately but did not have the courage to freak her out by asking, so I asked for some baby swiss instead. Our paths would serendipitously cross again and she would become the subject of more than one painting. In this one, I am depicting her story, which she told me during a long sitting. She said that when she was a preschooler in Nigeria, she told her mother that she would one day go to America. She could not recall how she knew of America, but she looked westward from Africa from her earliest memory. I'm so thankful that she came all the way to Texas. Westward Vision was in the Richeson's first Top 75 Portraits international competition.

Stage One

I have so many paintings at various stages of incompletion right now, including this one. I have two unfinished paintings of this model, as a matter of fact. She sat for us 2 weeks in a row and most people took advantage of that, painting on the same painting for 6 hours. Since I wasn't too crazy about my first start, I chose to start another one. I plan to finish both of them and will share the results with you. At this stage of the painting, all I've done is mark critical lines and begun to put in brightest color spot, lightest light and darkest darks. My support is cardboard.

Quilt Cottage

This painting was begun on a misty early morning in Old Town Spring. After about an hour and a half of painting, this cottage opened for business. It's a quilt cottage and quilts were hung from eaves and laid across rails; I had to do a lot of painting from memory! My favorite part of this is the light was bouncing from the front wall to the ceiling, making it very warm and inviting. This painting is 8x10 oil on linen in a gold frame and is hanging in the Richeson Fine Art Gallery with a price tag of $650. If this painting is for you, call the director Terry Stanley at 800.233.2404 and claim it. I hope you like it.

Altogether

*sold*

Half Figure Seated

The Face of Grace

The canvas is 60x42" and only a few of the inches are showing here. They were the most challenging inches of all. To me, the subject looked happy, hopeful, calm and poised to move into the future. She's not afraid of looking you right in the eye, but it's with the twinkle of kindness. Sometimes during the process, I lost her altogether, sometimes she looked sad or sleepy or surprised. It's really remarkable how much a tiny line can influence a person's face. Tomorrow's post will show all the inches, all at the same time. Or just the torso.

Yellow Rose

This is the Yellow Rose of Texas and it's usually the show-stopper, but not in the hands of this beautiful lady.

Progressive Reveal

Across the top of the portrait that I've been working on is a painting of a painting, revealed here in one strip.

Upper Left Landscape

The upper left landscape shows the lighthouse, a shore, and a wee bit more.

Enrobed

This was a cold day and many of the poses this day involved the terry robe. There were also space heaters on the model and the artists stayed in jackets, many with gloves. The studio is a cavernous warehouse, the same one that Sherwin and I roasted in during the summer (a story from an earlier post). There's something about suffering for your art that makes an artist feel like he's earning his stripes. It also draws artists together in common bond. When you're in a situation like this, though, you cannot complain about how cold you are. I mean, there's a young woman right there with you who's, well, suffering a little bit more than the artists and not complaining one bit.

Ingrid

Usually, the model comes out of the dressing room with a robe on, which then becomes a drape of sorts once we start working. Occasionally, the model will freeze poses in the act of toilette, as Ingrid has done for us here. I like it because it puts the body in an attitude that is not pose-like but rather familiar.

A line/contour drawing may seem like a continuous, 2D outline of a positive shape. One secret to capturing a figure quickly and accurately, though, is to notice and record the negative shapes. They tell you so much truth about the figure that your mind is trying to trump with all its knowledge. If you believe the shape of where the body isn't, you can capture the shape of what is easily. Even if you only have a few minutes.

Hannah

This is Hannah, a strawberry blonde professional model.

Gretchen

Yesterday, I said that underneath every good painting is a good drawing. It is also true that underneath every good figurative work is a good nude. Clothes in a painting have to cover a true form and the best way to understand the form is to study anatomy and the nude figure.

Once when I was painting a portrait, my son brought his girlfriend into the studio and I said, "Whew! I just finished painting his clothes on him; that could have been embarrassing!" and she said, "Really? You paint them naked first?" It was funny, but then the next time she visited, I was painting a nude. She said, "Will you get her clothes finished today?" I had to look at her and see the twinkle in her eye before I knew that she was teasing me back.

Faith

Why are there drawings on the "Paint Your Joy!" blog? Well, underneath every good painting is a good drawing. Even if there is not a literal drawing, good paintings must be structurally sound in order to work well. Drawing improves one's ability to paint and good teachers recommend that painters draw every day. I just read a quote on The Painters Keys from Irwin Greenberg's "Words to Paint By." It read, "Draw everywhere and all the time. An artist is a sketchbook with a person attached."