Do I enjoy doing little urban sketches, or illustrating some food to go with a recipe, or painting a brochure or a map? Yeah, I do. But...these past two years of quarantine, portrait painting has taken precedence—mostly because of the classes I took and am still taking. And I have to admit that, when the portrait goes right and I do what I wanted to do, which is to capture a likeness but also express an emotion and make a connection with the face on the page, there is nothing more satisfying—and I feel like I have barely scratched the surface in two years of painting people.
I have a painting I want to make, but I'm a little afraid of it—it's more ambitious than anything I have previously undertaken, since it is a full-figure painting (or at least 3/4) rather than just head and shoulders, and includes two people. So I bought a canvas (part of what is probably making me afraid, since previous to this I have only painted on paper), and mapped out in a sketch on paper what I want to do and how, and that's as far as I've made it.
When I don't show any major new work for a few days, some of it is that when I do a portrait that takes a lot out of me (like "Strong Light" did a few days ago), it can take a few days to get out from under its spell so I can contemplate another; some of it is also that when I release tiny bits of creativity doing these October prompts every day, it's not as satisfying but it's enough to make me feel like I did something, so I don't do anything else. But yesterday I looked at a reference that had such sweetness and personality in it that I just had to paint the subject, and I had to do it as closely as possible to the manner in which she would do it. So, last night I got out my brayer and my acrylics, carefully selected my colors, and slopped them all over a piece of 12x16 paper, with scrapes and drips and runs and swashes of color mixed over the top of one another, and today I painted the portrait.
This is taken from a photo of my teacher, Emma Petitt, and uses her favorite palette of red, orangey-pink, and turquoise (I added the lavender because I love it). Her smile in the photo was so quirky and engaging, and her crinkled-up eyes expressed such joy that I needed to capture it all.
I did some process photos (I'm trying to remember to do that!). Sometimes when I look back at them, I regret some of the stuff I have covered up and wish I had left it a little more raw, but...paint and learn. Or don't paint and learn.
I think I have made her look maybe a decade younger than she is, by getting the eyes a little too big and the face a little sharper than it should be, but it's still a good likeness. More important, I feel like it captures every ounce of that expression of good will she puts out to the world.
"Emma"—charcoal pencil, acrylic paints, and Stabilo All pencils on 140-lb. Fluid coldpress watercolor paper, 12x16 inches.
