Morph

The question, when studying with art teachers, is when their lessons in combination with your own style morph into something new and you arrive at a painting where you decide to cease giving them partial credit for your achievement. I don't think I'm quite there yet, although most might say this painting is my own. I took inspiration from Flo Lee's (@florenceleeandco) method of using the ground within the portrait. This is a weird iteration of that, though, because rather than picking a ground color and leaving it in the face, I picked a face color and used it for the ground!

This reference photo (actually her artist's head shot) of Maria Pace Wynters (@mariapacesynters) was so sweet and endearing that the minute I saw it, I wanted to paint from it. Apart from her wonderful expression, the thing I love about it is how perfectly pink and yellow and white she is, with those wonderful touches of Sienna, so I decided to make her background almost the same color as her skin so that her face would emerge from it in the same organic way that Flo Lee's people emerge from (or are submerged in?) her backgrounds.

I used the palest of tints for this entire picture—Titan Mars Pale (the primary color), Titan Violet Pale, and Naples Yellow (and lots of white, of course)—and introduced darks via Burnt Sienna, Raw Umber, and Cobalt Violet Hue. There is a tiny bit of Payne's Grey in the darks between the hands and chin and for the pupils of the eyes, but otherwise this is all warm colors. I even drew the picture with a Sanguine-colored conté crayon, rather than the usual charcoal, pencil, or pen.

I painted the face yesterday, and it came together exactly as I anticipated, with no major challenges—I got the face shape and the features on first try, and the painting was so fun, to just take that background color and either darken it a bit with a mix of pink and orange, or lighten it with white, introducing a bit of the Cobalt Violet and some Burnt Sienna for the shadows, mixed liberally with the pastels so they are scarcely a few shades darker. Her bleached-blonde hair was fun to paint too.

Today I assayed the paintbrushes, her shirt, and the hands, and spent the entire afternoon (five hours!) swearing at all of them as I went over and over them, trying to bring them up to the standards of the face. With the shirt, I finally gave up and left it purposely vague; the most I was hoping for by the end was that it wouldn't distract too much from her face. I really wish, in retrospect, that I had refrained from filling it in, and left it as a few lines and splashes of color the way Flo does—and I may go back and paint over it to do just that (but not today!).

The hands I am still not happy with, but after an extra hour of fussing with a stroke here,  a line there, a little more shadow immediately erased for a little less shadow, I am giving up and saying "best I can do." So this is a bit more of a mixed bag than I thought it would be yesterday after I got the face down, but I'm mostly happy with it.

I hope Maria doesn't mind my taking her as a subject!

Maria PW"—conté crayon and acrylics on thin birch board, 12x12 inches.