A Challenge

I started another posthumous portrait for the Lost Dreams project. The family provided photos to work from, but I'm at a standstill. One photo was what looked to be an 8th grade graduation picture, blurry, with a sun-in-the-eyes squint. Another is an odd angle, from below. In the last, the young man is wearing opaquely dark sunglasses and a baseball hat. I decided to use the third, because it was the closest thing to a traditional portrait pose, and the placement of the hand might give him a thoughtful look. But the sunglasses are proving to be a terrible problem. I've been trying for days to glean enough information from the three photos to give me a sense of what he looks like. I'm going to leave the hat on his head because I can't see what his head is really shaped like and that is so basic to getting a likeness. I can tell his eyes are deep set and a beautiful gray blue, but I'm having an awful time getting them to look like they're set in his head properly and that they're the same eyes in the picture taken from below. It got me thinking again about how much these portraits must mean to a family who may only have a couple of poor quality snapshots as mementos. I will keep working on this. If anyone has any ideas about how I could do this, please let me know.

A Beautiful Day

Was it Toad or Ratty who said, "Believe me, my young friend, there is NOTHING - absolutely nothing - half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats." ? The only thing better is to spend the morning painting at a friend's farm, then taking a break to paddle about in a small boat. On Saturday, the art group I belong to got together to paint outside. The location was spectacular, and the company even better. Here are Alice Dustin and Renee Daily enjoying a Wind in the Willows moment.

I've never been comfortable painting en plein aire, but I brought my new camera and had a great time taking photographs. I expect to get several paintings out of the day's pictures.

Completion

I finished Darnell's portrait today. I decided to keep the background light because I liked the way the warm colors in his face glow in contrast to the lighter cooler background. I made a few drawing corrections which helped with the likeness as well as accentuating his youth.

I used to work in pastels instead of oil paint. It was convenient when there were little kids around the house. I learned a lot about color using pastel. It's an addition and subtraction process, adding color, restating areas, layering cools on top of warms, finding the warm tones again. With pastel, you can't mix the perfect color. You have to make the colors you have work. Now, when I'm at the point in the painting process that I've reached with Darnell, I paint with oils the way I did with pastel. I'm adding thin veils of color, perhaps getting too warm, then  cooling it down with a bit of titanium mixed with the color I'm using. If it gets chalky, I'll go back into it with a glaze of a transparent color. I'm adding and subtracting until I get as many of the subtle nuances of the skin color as I can.

Darnell Continued

It's been a few days since I've been able to get in to the studio, so the under painting had dried nicely. The first thing I did was to tone the entire head, including the hair, with a thin layer of Rembrandt's Transparent Oxide Red mixed with Liquin.  The under painting is still very clearly visible through this layer. This gives me a warm base color that I can blend other colors into.  At this point in the painting I use mostly transparent colors, alizarin, raw umber, yellow ochre, vermilion, and cobalt blue. Gamblin makes a beautiful transparent orange that I used also. Keeping everything very soft, I start layering and blending colors in. It all starts to get rather dark so I start to work in a little naples yellow and a little titanium white, depending on whether I need a cool light or a warm light, to re-establish the lighter areas. I also mixed some cobalt blue with the transparent red oxide to deepen the darks in the hair, eyes, and eyebrows. At this point, I realized that the paint was setting up very quickly in the hot studio, so I quickly scrubbed on some cobalt blue mixed with raw umber to tone the shirt, and added some light tone to the background around the head. 

A Chelsea Afternoon

Saturday in New York. Ninety seven degrees farenheit. What a great day to be in Chelsea! My good friend Nancy Bea Miller celebrated the opening of her show, Still Moments, at the Sherry French Gallery with a reception at the gallery. The gallery is in a wonderful airy space overlooking the Hudson River. The view is so spectacular that every time I am there for an opening, there is a moment when the focus turns from the art on the wall to the panorama outside. Saturday's distraction was a fireboat in the river below, spraying its hoses in all directions. The crowd in the gallery was cheery and animated despite the heat, moving towards the window to see the fireboat, then back to the main part of the gallery to continue enjoying the paintings and the company. Many friends came up from Philadelphia for the event including Fred Danziger, Carla Tudor, Marianne Mitchell and Fay Stanford. Nancy Bea's paintings glowed against the wall in the subdued light of the gallery. Her still life paintings are known for their strong sense of stillness. The doughnuts looking like they've been caught in a bell jar, the sugar gleaming with a stickiness that can never be touched. Surprisingly, even her landscapes with figures, like "Berry Picking on Manana " above, have a feeling of time stopped forever at a particularly quiet moment.

Beginning Darnell

It occurred to me that watching me develop a portrait could be like watching the proverbial paint dry, but if you're reading this, you are probably a painter, too, or a friend. In either case you're more likely to have the patience.

I start with the pictures provided by the family. In this case, I have a camera phone shot, and one with a very small print of Darnell's face. I decided to use the that second picture,and I enlarged the portion of the photo that I needed to do a head and shoulders portrait.

I gave myself a few charcoal "landmarks" on the canvas, but then immediately started in developing a monochromatic underpainting. I use raw umber, titanium white, and turpenoid for this. I get the drawing problems worked out in this stage, as well as establishing my darks and lights. I can see that there are adjustments that I will make once I begin to layer on the color, but at this point, I have to allow the painting to dry for a couple of days.

Lost Dreams

For the last couple of years I have been volunteering to paint portraits for the Lost Dreams Project. This project, administered through the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, has artists paint portraits of children who have lost their lives through violence, mostly gun violence. The originals are given to the grieving families and prints of those paintings are displayed at anti-violence events. I've done about eight so far, including this sweet little girl. 

It's incomprehensible, really. How can we live in a place where children are being shot down in the street? While I was painting today, I was listening to the NPR coverage of the primary, and Barak Obama's triumph. I can only hope that we can change the culture in this country so that families don't have to lose their babies to gun violence.

I started working on another one today. The families often don't have great photographs for the artist to work from. I have photos of one 17 year  who has sunglasses on in one, is sleeping in another, and the last is an eighth grade graduation picture where he's squinting into the sun. I haven't figured out yet how I'll do that portrait. But today I began a painting of Darnell. He was 15. He was walking home from a relative's house a little after midnight. He was found in a 20th Street intersection with a fatal chest wound.

In this case, I have a photo of Darnell taken with a cell phone, and another one in which Darnell's face is quite small. Over the next several posts I'll take you through the process of painting one of these posthumous portraits, beginning with how I use the photographs the family provides. 

The Support of Women

I have a real conflict coming up this saturday. My dear friend, Nancy Bea Miller , is showing at Sherry French Gallery this month. The opening reception is on Saturday. Here in Philadelphia, on the same afternoon, is a memorial at the Philadelphia Museum of Art for the wonderful artist and teacher, Edna Andrade, who died this past April. You can read more about Edna in the wonderful piece Ed Sozanski wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

I first met Edna Andrade when I was a student at what was then the Philadelphia College of Art. Although I never actually studied with her, and the "op art" painting she was doing at the time was not a direction I would be going, she was an inspiration. I was an unsophisticated kid from New Jersey. She was the first professional woman artist I'd met. Finally, I had a role model.

Several years after I left PCA, at a time in my life when I was struggling to make a living and feeling discouraged about my choice to live the artist life, I ran into Edna at an event. She remembered me, and was as she always was, kind, friendly and very supportive. I no longer remember exactly what it was she said to me, but I came away reassured and reinvigorated. I also came away from that determined to remember to be equally supportive to my fellow artists.

So on Saturday, while Edna is getting her well deserved send off at the Museum, I'll be in New York celebrating Nancy Bea Miller's accomplishment. But I will make sure to raise my glass of "gallery opening white wine" and make a toast in Edna's honor.

Note: The magnificent portrait of Edna Andrade, above, was painted by my good friend, Alexandra Tyng . I'm so glad Alex had the chance to complete this portrait. I'm sorry it's reproducing so small.

Welcome to My Studio

There's a phenomenon familiar to most artists who exhibit their paintings. There's a mad intense push to complete the work, frame it, get it hung, celebrate at the opening - and then the crash. And that's where I am right now. My One person show at Sherry French Gallery just came down. It was a wonderful opportunity. It was exciting to start exhibiting in New York City and I was delighted to be written up in the Chelsea Clinton News  by Joe Bendik. The painting above, "Path to the Beach" is one of the paintings included in the May show.

But now, here I am, laid low with a serious case of post show lethargy. It's time to try something new. Like this blog.

Let me introduce myself. I'm a realist painter. I paint landscapes. I have a studio in the Manyunk neighborhood of Philadelphia. I'm going to talk about my work and my life as an artist. I may show how I work through the process of doing a painting. I may talk about what I'm reading or what shows I'm seeing. Of course, I may veer into the personal or the political - but isn't that what all blogs do ? 

And, welcome to my studio.