Portrait #2

After finishing Ron the Portrait in Instructor Richard's Studio Class, I brought it home looked at it for a couple of days and then spent eleven more hour working on it. Another artist asked how many of those were "good" hours...well, there was a lot of destruction in the first five (and no "undo" keys) and then some very good decisions were made in the last 3 hours. Those decisions were about simplifying the form and paying attention to plane changes as if his face was another element in the landscape. It is far more painterly than this digital rendition indicates, but then that's why we go to see original works. Original works have a quality that can't be duplicated in pixels or printed pages for that matter.

Will there be other portraits? Yes, I found painting a portrait intriguing and now have rediscovered 17th century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer and The Girl with Red Hat, in particular, as an inspiration for another. It is not the composition or subject matter that is compelling, it is the simplicity found in all of his work. It looks complex, but is elemental in execution. Simplification sounds easy to do, but in reality it is harder than making a photographic likeness. It is the illusive bird of paradise from a painter's perspective.