About That Portrait ...

Thank you for the kind compliments about the portrait that our friend, Dan, painted of me.  This morning, I'm going to let you in on an interesting connection between this painting and a portrait that my husband painted of Dan's husband, Jim.

Dan took the reference photo of me at his house in their music room last spring.  This room is also where I snapped the photo of Jim that my husband used for his portrait.

Look at the reference photo for my husband's painting, and you will probably figure out where I'm going with this story.

Notice the vase of dried flowers?  Both of these photos, and the resulting portraits, quite coincidentally, ended up almost as two halves of the same whole image.  (Offering a very bad Photoshop image to illustrate this.)

Dan took dozens of photos of me that day, some in their music room and some in his studio, and I love the fact that he chose this one ... and he unconsciously created a special connection to the portrait of Jim, which makes me love it even more.

My Favorite Photo from Yesterday

Saw this fuzzy fella at one of the properties that my husband and I toured yesterday, while on the Fredericksburg Garden Week tour.

I think that this sweet-faced Highland bull may soon find himself immortalized on canvas in oil paint ... hint, hint to my dear husband.

Sunday Snapshot ... Finished Portrait!

I told you in THIS post about evolution of the design of the portrait that my husband is painting of our greyhound Daniel and me, and I promised to show it to you as soon as it was finished.  It's finished ...  What do you think?

Makes me all teary when I look at it, because this image perfectly captures the relationship that Daniel and I had.  The look on my face, the way he is listening as I was whispering to him ... makes me happy and gives me a lump in my throat all at the same time.

Happy Sunday, Everybody!!

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Sunday Snapshots are posts that are devoted to a moment in time that represents a slice of life in Hartwood, or wherever else I happen to be.

A Month of Mr. Rogers ... Days Twenty Five to Twenty-Eight

Mr. Rogers said, "Love is like infinity:  You can't have more or less infinity, and you can't compare two things to see if they're 'equally infinite'.  Infinity just is, and that's the way I think love is, too."

I took this photo a couple of days ago.  That's my husband working on his portrait of Daniel and me.  I love how he was using an enlargement of the reference photo on his iPad to get the details of my sneaker just right.

Me:  There are no words to accurately express how thankful I am to be spending my life with this man!  "Infinity" comes close, but it's still not enough.

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During the month of November, I plan to share wisdom from Mr. Rogers with you each day (from the book "The World According to Mr. Rogers") ... Mr. Rogers's words accompanied by everyday images from life here at Hartwood Manor ... this place that I am blessed to call HOME.

Thirty Days of Mr. Rogers ... Day Eight

Mr. Rogers said, "You rarely have time for everything you want in this life, so you need to make choices.  And hopefully your choices can come from a deep sense of who you are."

The pink dog bed in the dining room is supposed to be Winnie's, but I find other animals in it from time to time.  Ruby has to wad herself up really tight to fit into it.

"Solitude is different from loneliness, and it doesn't have to be a lonely kind of thing."

It's okay that other critters use Winnie's pink bed, because she has other snuggly spots to use.

Me:  Alone time is essential to my well being.  I find that I get a bit nuts when I've had too much 'togetherness'.  Don't misunderstand ... I adore my husband, but he works from home and we are together almost 24/7, so it's important that each of us make time for ourselves.  I garden or work on my latest project-du-jour ... he paints.   Maintaining our individual interests is part of why we have been together so happily for over thirty years.  (click the "My Husband's Art" link below to see some of his work from blog posts or click HERE to go to his web site.)

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During the month of November, I plan to share wisdom from Mr. Rogers with you each day (from the book "The World According to Mr. Rogers") ... Mr. Rogers's words accompanied by everyday images from life here at Hartwood Manor ... this place that I am blessed to call HOME.

Coming Along Nicely

My husband was able to carve out a little bit of time over the course of the past couple of afternoons to work on his painting of Daniel and me.  Progress is rapid and dramatic with the underpainting at this stage of the process.  There is still a LOT left to do, but you can sort of see where he's going with it.

The painting on the shelf is a portrait of my brother's granddaughter.  My husband says that he thinks that it's about 80% finished.

As a reminder, this is the photo that he is working from for my portrait ...

a Photoshop composite of three different photos to get an image of Daniel and me sitting on a deck in the rose garden.

I am very excited to see such progress, and I love it SO much!

(Click HERE if you missed the post about how he and I put together the final inspiration image.)

A Glimpse Into the Artist's Imagination

My husband started a new painting this week.  It's one that he has been mentally working on for some time now ... trying to put together a pleasing composition and make the overall painting into an accurate representation of the subject.  

It started with a photo that I have shown you before ... one of my favorites ... an image of a special moment between Daniel and me in 2011, which we knew had the potential to be a wonderful portrait.

While the subject and the mood of this photo is perfect, the background is not.  We have brainstormed different things that we could replace it with ... never finding anything that felt right.  Inspiration struck while we were at Biltmore two weeks ago, as we were admiring John Singer Sargent's portrait of Frederick Law Olmstead.  (truth be told, we were standing there trying to scheme a way to get the enormous painting off the wall and leave with it without being arrested.)

A portrait of the man surrounded by the garden of his creation ... perhaps we could do that with the painting of me.  (Let me say, up front, that my husband is a master of editing things with Photoshop, and he did lots of that to get to our final image.)

With this inspiration in mind, we got to work.  I searched through my photos to find one that would provide the look we wanted.  I found this one, of 'Alexandre Girault' spilling over the Rambler Fence, but the composition was going the wrong direction.

No problem ... it was a simple matter for him to flip the photo and make the bulk of the rose fill the empty spot in the upper right part of the composition.

now it's pointing the correct direction

The cement slab that I was sitting on in the original photo is too white and very distracting ... but, what could we replace it with?  How about some decking to go along with the weathered fence?

photo of the steps of our pavilion.

With all the pieces of this puzzle in place, and quite a bit of time spent with Photoshop cutting and pasting and adjusting colors and saturation and levels of the various components, the final inspiration image for the painting looks like this:

My husband was eager to get started on the painting right away, and he sketched everything onto the canvas the other day ...

... and he started the underpainting last night.

Even at this stage, I can see that this will most certainly be a very special portrait that captures so many of my favorite things in one fictitious-but-very-representative image.  I have a perfect spot already picked out to for it to hang it's finished ... it's gonna be a while till I can do that, tho.

(want to see more of my husband's art?  Go to his web site.)