Update on Savannah's portrait

This portrait of Savannah is coming along pretty well now and you can see the details in the hat. Her face is nearly done, but I see some changes that need to be made. Nothing is harder for an artist than capturing the exact likeness and I could be tweaking this for weeks, but there are more paintings to do in the meantime.

Savannah in her Party Hat

Savannah in her Party Hat is in progress now---I have about 6 hours in so far and it's starting to come together. The original photo included my grandniece Savannah from the waist up, a lovely photo, but for this portrait I decided I wanted to focus on her face and cropped the photo as shown. After making that composition decision, I was very uneasy about it, even after sketching it on the canvas. In fact, I put off starting the painting for a week, just mulling it over. I don't like to start a painting feeling that kind of uncertainty about the composition. However, I decided that rather than scrapping it and going back to the half-figure photo, I would go ahead and do an under painting. As soon as the painting was washed in, I knew it would work.

The background is subtle and muted. The dress and hat pop with color and the expression on Savannah's face is what made me want to paint this one. For background on this one, several months ago I had a formal, dress-up tea party for my friends, niece and grandnieces (3!). As part of those festivities, we had a variety of hats, ribbons and fresh flowers so everyone could choose and decorate their own hat for the party. Each of the girls posed for pictures in their hats and I have in mind that a series of paintings is in order. This is the first in the "Girls in Hats" series.

In coming back to this painting, you will notice the shadows on the girl's face under the hat are not as dark as in the original photo. That's deliberate as I wanted to show more details in the eyes and upper face with color rather than contrast. My favorite art teacher Chris DiDomizio would always ask, "What is this painting about?" So this painting is not about contrast, about deep and light values, but rather it's about color and a lighter mood. After all, it's a party!

So, in the original photo, the contrast between light and dark was so great that you couldn't even see the shades of color or reflective light in her eyes. In the painting, that's visible. I also took the liberty of filling in a tooth that just exists as a budding tooth. After all, that tooth will grown in and better to have a complete set of teeth for posterity. I mean seriously, isn't that what we all want?

Another 4 hours and it will probably be done. I need to add more green to her face--yes, that's what makes flesh tones real. Her arms and hands need more color and definition. Her hair needs to be filled in, smoothed out and at the very end, I'll add some silken strands of hair floating at the edges. The hat will need more details, too, and I have no idea how I'm going to loosely replicate the weaving of the hat. After all, I don't want to spend too much time on details that draw the eye away from her face. I'll add more dimension to the flowers in the hat, too, with lights and darks, keeping the details very loose.

Sweet Savannah.

An Evolving Composition--Still Life with China, a Bird's Nest and Oranges

Sometimes I start a painting with a composition fully formed in my mind, only to discover through the process that my original idea wasn't working and modifications were needed. In this case, editing the composition was necessary to draw the view's eye into the painting without too many distractions.

The original idea was to create a simple still life with a blue bird and fruit. So, I gathered props from around the house, including blue and white porcelain, fruit and an arrangement of ferns, ivy and a bird's nest---some of my favorite decorative items. Then I set up several compostions with these props and photographed them. This way I had a variety of arrangements to consider and looked at each one with the plan to add a blue bird to the mix when I sketched the composition on canvas.

Then I ran into problems...artistically speaking, I don't like to copy another artist's work. Copying a great artist's work is a wonderful way to learn color, composition and techniques, but I want my own work to be as original as possible. Knowing that another artist in the Northwest uses a western bluebird as a signature motif in still life paintings, I didn't want to copy that. At first, I thought that using my own props and creating a more complex scene within the still life would be enough to overcome any similarities to another artist's work. However, as the work moved forward, I still wasn't happy with the overall scene. It seemed too busy for the space.

First I laid in an underpainting for the blue and white vase and then painted the design over that. Next, I painted the oranges and china leaving the bird's nest and greenery for last. I had originally planned to paint the bluebird standing on the edge of the nest, but as the painting evolved, I discovered that the composition felt complete as it stood. As in life, things don't always go as expected or planned.

To my eye, I'm drawn first to the brilliance and color of the oranges, then to the blue and white vase and finally to the bluebird eggs. Eggs are a promise of new life, new beginnings and hope for the future. So, I'm calling this one good.

Starry, Starry Night.....

We recently visited the Monastere St. Paul de Mausole in St. Remy de Provence, France which was an insane asylum in the late 19th Century and is presently a psychiatric hospital. The most famous patient there was Vincent Van Gogh and today you can walk the beautiful grounds and see the room where Van Gogh lived for a little over a year. During that brief time, he painted over 140 paintings---one of which is the now famous "Starry, Starry Night."

http://www.avignon-et-provence.com/saint-paul-mausole/

While his bedroom is small and sparsely furnished, the view from his window is beautiful, overlooking the gardens, fields and Provencal countryside, complete with the twisted trees shaped by mistral winds. So, considering the bleakness of psychiatric care in the late 19th Century and treatments that Van Gogh endured, I couldn't help but think about the paintings--the many, many paintings he created here. And I couldn't help but think about what that process must have brought him intellectually and emotionally.

There's something transcendent about the process of making art. Virtually every artist I know has experienced being in that very different state of mind. The creation process is invigorating and absorbing. The level of concentration is so complete that you can lose track of time. Someone can talk to you and you miss what they're saying.

Once a friend and I painted en plein air five days in a row, morning and evenings each day. We were so immersed in the process, that we found ourselves having trouble expressing ourselves in words. How weird is that? We concluded that we were spending so many hours per day in the right brain, that our left brains were having trouble connecting.

So while we walked through the Monastere St. Paul de Mausole, I found myself absorbed by thoughts of Van Gogh's process. I don't think of his paintings as an expression of his mental illness, but rather as an expression of the part of him that was whole. While you need determination and practice to create the paintings you imagine in your mind's eye, there's also tremendous satisfaction in completing a painting that meets your own expectations.

Because of the brilliance of his work, there will be speculation about Van Gogh's mental state for centuries. Books will be written and dissertations published--all about a man who never saw success in his lifetime. I like to think that the process of painting gave him the best moments of his life.

The Boy with the Spoon on his Nose

Art should give the viewer something to think about, but sometimes art can give you a laugh, too. "The Boy with the Spoon on his Nose" does that for me.

Susie Burch is a fellow Atlanta painter and good friend of mine who painted an hilarious painting of a chicken and chicks running. The title? "Run for your Life!" The motion in that little painting is so real, you can practically see feathers floating into air as the hen and chicks scurry across the canvas. Check it out here: http://www.susieburch.com/assets/gallery_oils/index.html by scrolling down the series of paintings on the left. Makes me smile every time I see it.

I love the expression on the face of the boy with the spoon on his nose. He's clearly delighted with his balancing trick and so is the viewer. It makes you want to pull a spoon out of the drawer and try it for yourself.

The boy was wearing red in the original photo. Somehow, I think the overall impact would have been lessened with a more subdued color. After all, this painting is about spontaneity and youth and happiness. I seem to be using red consistently in my paintings these days. I even put splashes of red in the background to move the viewer's eye around the painting. The people and furniture in the background are pretty loosely painted and I used some cool grays to balance the warmth of the red.

Overall, it's working for me, but you never know....I may come back to it in a few weeks and see fifteen things that need tweaking. I have one particular painting in my home that I've been tweaking off and on for two years. Enough already!

The Completed Painting

The painting of Ava at the Rock of Cashel in Ireland is finished. This painting's quiet moment is a rarity in Ava's life.

Ava is now three years old and has recently moved to Sydney, Australia. While she still declares herself "a Boston girl," her Boston accent is turning to an Aussie one. No more talk about "boids or Hahvid." Her Australian grandmother writes that Ava "has grown in height and language skills, gathering enormous speed and can gallop with the pony tail flying out the back."

When I last spoke with Ava on Skype, she was wearing her pink and white polka-dotted bathing suit and jumping up and down on the bed while we talked. She was a pink and white polka-dotted blur. This is what life is like when you're three.

Thoughts on Composition

My current work in progress is a painting of Ava at the Rock of Cashel in Ireland. As seen here, the painting is about 90% finished. Even as I compare the original image with the painting, I'm pulled in about ten different directions thinking about how I'm going to finesse this. "Wait, her cheek is too rosy and the top of her head too pointy. Oh no! I need to put more tinted raw umber in the background....and that shade of tealy blue in the rock can not possibly ever occur in nature." An artist's self-critique never ends and that's part of the creative process. But, I digress. This is, after all, supposed to be about composition and how this particular painting has evolved.

As soon as I saw this photo last summer, I knew I had to paint it. There's something so delicate about Ava's features here and the backward glance at the viewer, captivating. What is she pointing towards? Is she merely curious or concerned? I like a painting that leaves those answers to the imagination.

My first intent was to delete the outdoor furniture from the background, uncluttering the painting, so the eye is drawn more to the focal point, Ava's face. Luckily, what remained in the photo is compelling---an old stone grotto, a stone wall, and new grass pushing it's way up through fallen leaves from the past autumn.

I wish I could say that I immediately relied upon an ancient formula for composition, using the Fibonacci sequence and the Golden Mean to determine the precise location of my focal point on the canvas. However, the truth of the matter is not so lofty. In fact, it was pretty haphazard.

First of all, I just happened to have a square 20x20 canvas already primed and a frame to go with it. Double bonus! As soon as I finished the sketch on that square canvas, there was no denying my mistake: it was a bad, bad composition. Ava's head teetered up in one corner of the canvas, and the background was so cramped, all you could really see was her figure.

In a case like this, it's better to cut your losses and go back to the beginning. Who wants to spend time and energy working on a painting doomed from the start by poor compositon? So, I chose a rectangular linen canvas 22x28 and started over again. This time I roughly divided the canvas into thirds horizontally and into thirds vertically, placing Ava's face approximately in the sweet spot, the Golden Mean. Well, okay, it's off by an inch because I had to look at the overall composition and not place her body too far to the side of the painting. Still, her face is roughly 1/3 from the top of the canvas and 1/3 from the right side of the canvas. Close enough and I like it.