A full day of painting two small portraits for the Bickerton exhibition. Both were poor quality source images; small, blurry, monochrome, as is usual for me. One reason my self portraits are always more detailed and accurate than my other portraits, is that all of my portraits are based on poor small, blurry images - apart from my self portraits which use super-high-res photographs. I think that only The Last Madonna featured actual photography of the subject (but that, ironically, excluded the face of the sitter).
I started with the flesh of one:
Then stopped so that I could use the same flesh colours on the second portrait, reasoning that I could paint the hair for both tomorrow:
In the end, the hair and background didn't take long. I painted the hair very roughly, impressionist-like. I generally dislike impressionism. Its main merit was its colour in a time when colour images were rare, but even then the colours were garish, childlike. That Victorian era favoured 'prettiness', nothing more, nothing difficult or deep or thoughtful or emotional; all reasons why impressionism is a poor art genre, as well as being trivial to paint. Painting roughly, though, is fun. I like to think of Rembrandt when painting in this way.
The resulting face looks rather tired and haggard, far older that she should, as my old Mary Brian portrait did. The heavy eye makeup is hard to discern in the small black and white image so I had a lot of inventing to do.
After that, back to the first painting. This is much more interesting in lighting, pose and variety. The other image is rather flat by comparison.
Hair to do tomorrow. Both were pleasant and satisfying to paint, and a certain step up from similar works of the relatively distant past; yet far from what I imagine as my best. The mars yellow-orange was a hero, proving to be a beloved stalwart of my palette.
