Nancy

This week I decided, on impulse, to paint a portrait of my cleaning lady, Nancy. I had taken a few photos of her with that in mind a few months back and then forgotten all about it, but it popped into my brain last week and I started prepping the board.

I used a 10x10-inch square cradle board so that I could make it ornamental and "self-framing." I had asked Nancy what were her favorite colors and flowers, and she answered "Roses" and "pink and yellow," so I pulled out a favorite all-over rose stencil pattern. I made the background a pale green, and then did the roses in yellow and pink, with an occasional blob of darker green in between them (even though there are no actual leaves on the stencil). I decided it would be too busy and repetitive to use this stencil on the sides of the cradle board as well, so instead I used a stencil with just leaves.

   

   

I chose the leaf-and-flower motif because one of the nice "extra" things that Nancy has been doing for me for the past few months is watering all the plants and shrubs in my yard. She was at first just doing this on Saturday mornings when she comes to clean, but since it's been so hot she's also been showing up on Wednesday or Thursday night after a full day's work elsewhere to make sure my plants don't wilt in the heat. She has often expressed a wistfulness that she doesn't have her own garden (she lives in an apartment) and has mentioned how much she enjoys spending time in mine, so I thought setting her in those surroundings would make for a great theme.

After stenciling, I used a thinned-out shade of Titan pale green to knock back the intensity of both the background and sides, repeating the glaze several times until it felt like it was the proper intensity so that it would show up but not fight with the portrait.

Then I carefully drew Nancy's smiling face onto the background in pencil, and started to paint. I finished fairly rapidly—two afternoon's work—but ended up tweaking the portrait for three more afternoons. I have discovered that I am somewhat blind to flaws if I'm looking directly at the painting, but if I photograph or scan it and put it up on my computer screen, I can immediately see them. So I repeatedly photographed the portrait and put it up next to the original reference photo to analyze the differences. The most challenging bits were her nose, which I redid three times, and her hair, which is a dark brown/black. I wanted to show highlights, but when I used white or gray it just looked like she had gray hair, so I ended up mixing some turquoise into raw umber and that worked pretty well. The mouth and teeth were also challenging and were tweaked multiple times.

I would normally ask for feedback from my artist friends, but in this case I was more concerned with getting as perfect a likeness as possible than with the artistry of it, so I sent a photo of the finished portrait to my cousin, who knows Nancy well, and she said it was good. Then I sent it to my friend Kirsti, forgetting that her husband, Aaron, also knows Nancy, and was gratified when she said that he had seen it and immediately recognized her without prompting or identification.

Today I did a few final passes on some difficult shadows under the neck and then waited for it to dry (a matter of moments in this heat!) and put a coat of satin varnish over everything. And tomorrow, after Nancy is done cleaning, I will be giving it to her, as a thank you for going the extra mile for me and also just for being a stellar individual with an engaging, positive personality who always cheers me up!

Nancy, stencils, pencil, and acrylics on a 10x10" cradle board. Gift.
(The scan is cropped a little horizontally—ordinarily I would scan it in two pieces and put them together, but with this background pattern I couldn't match them properly and gave up!)