Phillis

As part of the upcoming Let's Face It 2022, Kara Bullock Studios is providing a series of live, short how-to lessons from various artists. Today's was a portrait with Angela Kennedy. I liked the look of the methods she was using, but didn't want to use yet another old-fashioned Gibson Girl as the reference, so I decided to use the technique to make a portrait of Phillis Wheatley, enslaved person and one of the best-known poets in 19th-century America.

Phillis was seized from Senegal, West Africa, at about the age of seven and, due to her frail appearance, was spared from shipment to the Southern colonies. Instead, she was purchased by John and Susan Wheatley, a prominent Boston tailor and his wife, as a domestic. The Wheatleys soon discovered that Phillis was a precocious child, and they and their children taught her to read and write. In 1770, at about the age of 16, she wrote An Elegiac Poem, on the Death of that Celebrated Divine, and Eminent Servant of Jesus Christ, the Reverend and Learned George Whitefield, which was published in conjunction with Ebenezer Pemberton's funeral sermon for Whitefield in London in 1771, and the poem brought her international renown.

By the time she was 18, Wheatley had gathered a collection of 28 poems for which she, with the help of Mrs. Wheatley, ran advertisements for subscribers in Boston newspapers in February 1772. When the colonists were apparently unwilling to support literature by an African, she and the Wheatleys turned in frustration to London for a publisher and, in 1773, the first edition of Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, the first volume of poetry by an African American published in modern times, was released by book publisher Archibald Bell.

Sadly, though she continued to write poetry throughout her life, her subsequent history was not a happy one. She was manumitted shortly before the death of Mrs. Wheatley and married a free black, John Peters; but both the general economy and specific hardships visited upon free blacks, who were unable to compete with whites in a stringent job market, led to a life of increasing hardship. Although she continued to write her poems and to keep up a correspondence with some of the great figures she had met in her early career, she ended sick and destitute, unable to convince anyone to publish a second volume of her poetry. She died in 1784; her poems were published two years later.

This portrait was drawn and shaded with a hard charcoal pencil, and then painted over with a coat of Daler Rowney acrylic ink in burnt umber, which was then selectively blotted and thinned out with water. After that dried a bit, I went back in with the ink and did some subtle shading of the darkest areas; after the whole was dried, I added some more charcoal, both black and white, just to make certain areas pop a little more. I'm not great with either charcoal or pencil, being too impatient to ever learn proper shading techniques when I could instead just paint the thing! But it was fun to explore it again after many years. It would have been better with a slightly softer charcoal pencil.

"Phillis"—charcoal, acrylic ink on 140-lb. Fluid coldpress watercolor paper, 9x12 inches.