Real people reading

Every year in December I go to calendars.com and ponder my choices for the following year's daily notations, ordering one in time to input all my year's doings (birthdays, events, meetings) by New Year's Day. Sometimes I go for a one-artist calendar, sometimes a 365-days-in-a-foreign-country extravaganza, occasionally an art era such as Impressionism, but my most frequent choice in recent years has been the "women reading" calendar. Being an avid reader myself, I love seeing all the many and varied portraits of women enjoying books.

Back at the beginning of my painting career, when I was taking Watercolor III at Valley College, the penultimate assignment for the semester was a portrait of my cousin Kirsten, reading a book. I got her to sit and pose for me on my sofa, but then largely made up both the color scheme and her attire to fit with the assignment, which was to look at an artist's work and paint in that style, color palette, or some other feature. For this portrait I looked at Cezanne's portrait of his wife in a red chair, and chose the color palette accordingly.

Ever since I painted that picture, I have had the intention of doing more paintings of people reading, but I have somehow never gotten back to it. But since this is the year when I am creating my new consulting business, The Book Adept, and its accompanying blog reviewing books and discussing them in terms of readers' advisory (http://bookadept.com/blog), I decided that a good companion project would be to finally assay the readers' portraiture. Here is my first attempt, taken from a quick photograph of a guy reading at the Encino/Tarzana Library near my house. Part of my goal is to paint what I call "real" paintings, as opposed to illustrations, which means drawing in pencil and letting the paint be the primary medium, rather than first defining the image with my ink pen. I may not stick exclusively to that method, but I chose to for this first one.

The color scheme in this library is so similar between walls and furnishings that it was somewhat hard to distinguish where chairs and tables started and walls and bookcases ended (if I did it again, I would choose my own colors and not be so slavish to reality), but I did like the reflection in the window behind him of the elderly and focused reading man.

This is a relatively tiny picture (maybe 6x7 inches?) but I'd like to get back to painting on a larger scale, as I did for Kirsten's portrait. It leaves more scope for getting the details right! I really struggled with the hands and face in this one.

Watercolor on 140-lb. paper.