PORTRAIT PAINTINGS

Portrait Painting is like meditation for me, and it is a luxury I wish I could afford to do more often.  The time spent is intense and demanding and after doing a quality portrait I could sleep for a week.  But really, there are so many things to do in the day that finding the time to have to just sit and paint a face is not as easy as it should be.  It feels good to connect with the materials and craft them into someone’s resemblance.  In many ways it sometimes seems like magic if there was such a thing.

I can’t emphasize enough how important it is for every artist to learn traditional painting before they lock themselves into the digital cockpit.  The choices made with brush strokes, color harmonies, edges, layers, broken colors, etc. are best experienced with materials that can purposefully make a kind of noise like no other medium, a noise that when placed just right evokes a sense of realism that cannot be explained, just experienced.  Those experiences are so valuable to have as an artist to help inform the mind of what the “objective” of realism is and finding just the right kind of “effect” for surfaces, forms, atmosphere, light, shadow, etc.

Bawhb in a Turbin  –  Media:  Oil on Panel