Now and Then

 

"Now and Then" is an older painting of mine, done in about 1995, before many of y'all were born.  It has a very important place in my growth and I thought I'd discuss it here.

In '95, I was still in the Navy and stationed in Maryland.  I was taking a night painting class at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore.  The teacher gave us a homework assignment of painting a still life.  Since I'd been painting for many years at that point, I didn't think it would be very challenging.  Actually creating the painting wasn't difficult.  I piled a bunch of things onto a table, moved things around, tossed things out, added something every now and then, and kept whittling away until the only things left were my Navy hat and my ancient teddy bear.  The contrast in colors, values, and textures appealed to me: lots of harsh blacks and whites and hard-edge lines in the hat, compared with soft textures and warm colors in the bear.  

At the next class, we set our homework assignments up against the wall and everybody critiqued everybody else's work.  When they got to mine, it got a lot of emotional response.  One of the students said it was about a father who had gone off to war and wasn't coming back and the kid was going to grow up without a father.  I was looking at them thinking "umm ... it's just a still life ...".  I was really taken aback.

However, the big lesson at the time was that I can't control the story the viewers see in my work.  They come to it with their own background, history, mental associations, prejudices, likes, and dislikes, all of which have nothing to do with me.  All I can do is tell my story as best I can.  Maybe suggest a particular line of thought, but that's about it.  They'll see what they're going to see.

There was another lesson quite some time later.  Eventually, I realized that my choice of the hat and teddy bear wasn't random.  Something in me specifically chose those two items.  It's a self-portait done with two of my possessions.

These two lessons have affected every piece of art I look at now, and every piece of art I make.

More Experimentation

 This time of Covid is giving me plenty of time to experiment with new techniques and approaches in painting, play with new ideas, and generally try stuff that I often don't get to try.  I just had an experiment that, I think, gave me some new tools for my artistic toolbox.  Here's what happened.

I've been working on my family history for many decades now.  Last year, I was sorting through some old photos and came across this one from about 1920: 

The two on the left are my grandparents.  They were apparently clowning around with their friends somewhere over the Hudson River.  What really grabbed my attention, though, was the guy on the right.  In the photo, he's laughing, but with just a tiny change to his expression, he could be crying out.  Remember the Nazi in the movie "Raiders of the Lost Ark", the guy whose face melted at the end?  Yeah, this guy in the photo kinda looks like him.  So I thought it would be fun to take this old photo and see if I could make it creepy.  I took a swing at it last year and this was the result:

I titled it "The Undertakers".  I thought the end result was pretty "meh", but didn't really know why.  So I shrugged my shoulders and went on with other experiments.  

Recently, I was looking at the work of a really interesting painter, Anne Magill.  Her paintings are often dark, with a very limited range of colors.  Here's a sample:

I was looking at her artwork and asking myself what feelings they evoked in me, and one of the responses was "mystery".  And then I remembered that mystery was one of the feelings I was trying to get out of "The Undertakers".  So I pulled it off the shelf, set it up on an easel, and compared it to Magill's paintings.  And I realized that, in my painting, I told the viewer way too much.  Too much detail in the faces.  Too much light.  Too much color.  Too much other stuff: cracks in the rock, trees, people.  It didn't give the viewer room to create a story of their own.  So I pulled out another canvas the same size as the first one and transferred the same composition over to the new canvas.  Then I went to work: simplifying the composition (one of the figures and all the trees are gone), reducing the details, reducing the range of colors, and trying to keep the attention focused where I wanted it.  It took a couple of weeks, but I called it done and here it is:

This version is much better than the first one.  I don't know that I'd call it a winner, but I certainly learned a lot from it.  There are several things that I'd do differently if I had to do it again.  Maybe I'll go back over it in a week or two and make some more changes.  But it's definitely closer to my original intention than the first painting.  I'm working on another project right now that uses many of the same ideas, but in a very different way.  We'll see how that one comes out.  Meanwhile, I'm pretty happy to have a new tool in my studio toolbox!

"Guardians"

Guardians

It's been a bit of a journey, but one of the paintings I mentioned in my last post is finally done. Guardians is the second painting of a new series about a possible future. I'm very disturbed by the division, vitriol, and willful stupidity that is rampant in this country today. I've personally seen what divisions can do to a society: Bosnia's ethnic cleansing, Iraq's division between Shiite and Sunni, and Afghanistan's divisions between the Taliban insurgents and the corrupt government. And I'm imagining what those divisions would look like in this country if we keep going the way we're going. It's not a pretty sight. 

 A big focus for me with this painting, beyond the concept, as in the technical aspects of making the idea work.  I spent a lot of time on the composition, then on the execution in paint: colors, light/dark values, hard and soft edges, cool/warm balance, all with the goal of getting the viewer to see what I wanted them to see, in the order I wanted the different things to be seen.  I think it turned out pretty well.  The subject is certainly not one that people will find beautiful and want to hang over their couch, but that was never the point.  

The next couple of paintings to come out of the studio will be much more cheerful, I promise!

More Wedding Paintings

Wow, it's been almost two months since my last post.  That's not good!  I've had a lot of stuff happening and wanted to write about it, but just didn't.  No excuses, that's just what happened.  So it's time to do some catch-up here on a lot of topics.  For today's post, we'll talk about three completed wedding paintings and one that's in progress.

I was happy to be chosen to create the wedding paintings for four couples in late summer and fall.  The first of these was for Nil and Aveni, a wonderful couple from the Durham area.  They had a wedding based on traditional Hindu customs, but modified a bit for America.  For one thing, it was only one afternoon - I understand that Hindu wedding ceremonies can go for days.  In Indian tradition, the groom travels in a procession from his village to his bride's.  That doesn't work so well in an American urban setting, so instead, the procession went around the large building where the wedding took place.  It was led by Batala Durham, a Brazilian samba reggae drum band (that's part of the Hindu tradition, right?), and to say they were lively is an understatement.  They had entire procession of several hundred participants (and me) dancing all the way around the building.  However, they didn't have somebody in the nearby residential area dancing and the cops showed up.  Any time you have the cops called on your celebration for making too much noise, you know you're doing it right!  The wedding itself was beautiful.  I painted a moment at the very end of the ceremony that, I thought, perfectly captured their feelings for each other - and it was a huge hit for them both.

Nil and Aveni

The next painting was an outdoor ceremony on a ridge outside of Hendersonville, North Carolina.  It was held shortly before sunset with beautiful colors in the sky.  Taylor and John are very close with their families and wanted the painting to show that.  So we decided to include all of the immediate families: their parents and brothers and sisters.  Getting good likenesses, with lots of life in them, for so many people, is quite a challenge.  Taylor and John, though, loved the way it turned out.

Taylor and John

The third painting wasn't a wedding, it was a vow renewal.  Juli (the owner of Wedding Inspirations Bridal Boutique in Asheville) and Jeff had been married for 32 years.  The ceremony was held at Jeff's surprise birthday party, and to top it off, it was a surprise vow renewal.  I won't go into the story of how you can have a surprise vow renewal here, but it's enough to say that, as told by Juli, it was both hilarious and deeply touching.  I had free rein in choosing the moment to paint, and to heighten the feeling of love between the two, the painting only included them.  And here's how it turned out:

Juli and Jeff

Yesterday, I started a new painting for Klaire and Drew.  Klaire had a very definite idea that she wanted the painting to focus on a moment at the end of the ceremony when they were showered with roses.  That sounded great, but as the couple was coming down the aisle at the end of the ceremony, they stopped a couple of times for impromptu kisses.  I changed the painting's focus right then and there.  Fortunately, once they saw how it was developing, both Klaire and Drew loved the concept.  This painting is still at the very early block-in stage.  It's going to take 2-4 more weeks to get it up to the standards that you see in the other paintings.  But it WILL get there and I will post it here when done.  So here's the painting, still at the ugly stage:

Drew and Klaire (rough block-in)

So that's what's been happening with the wedding painting side of my studio operations.  The painting of Drew and Klaire is the last on my list until April, so over the winter, you'll see more of my charcoal and pastel figures, along with some small oils and maybe even one or two large artworks.  And I hope to be a little better at keeping this blog up to date.

More information on wedding paintings:
Asheville Event Paintings
Asheville Event Paintings Facebook page

Starting a New Painting

I haven't done much of anything in the studio for the past three weeks or so.  When our dog came down with vestibular disease, that took all my attention through the holidays.  I mean, I have my priorities, and my dogs are a very important part of my family, and I needed to take care of the little girl.  Over the past week or so, I've been able to get into the studio three times, so things are starting to move again.

Being out of the studio for a while may have a benefit that I didn't expect.  For the past couple of years, I've been working on figures and experimenting with ways of capturing an individual's character on paper or canvas.  This has included mark-making that is more energetic, exploring how much to "finish" a work vice leaving parts of it "unfinished", and trying to be a bit less literal about what goes into an artwork.  In the back of my mind, there has been this idea that the next level is to put those figures into environments and situations where there's more of a story or metaphor.  Now, after being away for a while, it seems to be time to go to that next level.

I've had an idea that I wanted to take one of my charcoal and pastel works and blow it up in oil on a much larger canvas.  The specific piece is this one:

Astrid #7

There are many things I like about this work: the strong focus on the face, the unselfconscious and slightly awkward pose, the overall composition of light and dark, the unfinished nature of most of the work, the mystery that comes from the eyes being in heavy shadow, and the confrontational and challenging nature of Astrid's gaze directly at the viewer.

One reason that I hadn't translated this into an oil on canvas earlier is that I wasn't sure how to capture the looseness of the charcoal and pastel.  Oil painting is a different beast entirely and I have not been able to get the same effect in oil that I can get in charcoal.  But now I think I have an idea about how to move forward with this image.  No, I'm not going to try to duplicate it.  Instead, I'm going to use it as an inspiration for a very different work.

So that's what I started yesterday.  The first thing I did was to lay a piece of tracing paper over the original and grid it up.  A grid is an old and low-tech way of enlarging or shrinking a composition.  You build a grid over the original, build a new grid on the canvas where you want the image, and draw the outline on the corresponding grid marks.  Here's the original with the tracing paper and grid over it:

Some artists use a projector to enlarge an image onto a canvas.  I don't.  One of the reasons is that I like the grid system.  It's low-tech and ensures that there are human errors incorporated into the image.  That's an advantage to me because human errors are the big difference between art and photography.  The original of Astrid #7 was done freehand and you can see some of the "errors" if you look closely.  The chair, for example, is a little lopsided, which is fine by me.

The next step is to draw a corresponding grid on the canvas and then transfer the composition onto it. Here's how the canvas looks:

Okay, sorry, it's a bit hard to see, but you can barely make out the gridlines and some of the drawing.  I use vine charcoal because it erases easily.  And yes, the canvas really does have a slightly greenish sloppy tint to it.  I had started a painting on it four years ago, but it failed, so I painted oil primer over it and then toned it again.  The canvas has been waiting for something new ever since.

And here's my painting setup.  The original is 25"x19" and the new canvas is 50"x40".

This afternoon, I started on the canvas.  I wiped out all the gridlines then laid in a cool dark as basically one large shape.  I'm trying to use a limited palette as much as possible, so I've got ultramarine blue, cad red, cad yellow medium, and Flemish white on my palette.  I'll let this dry a day or three before starting to develop the figure.  So here's how it stands right now:

Results from a Limited Palette

I have an open life drawing and painting session in my studio every Wednesday evening.  In the most recent session a couple of days ago, we had a lovely young lady as a portrait model.  I decided to try two things: one, use a very limited oil palette, and two, to try to approach the painting as much like my charcoal and pastel works as possible.  Long-time readers (all three of you) will know that I've been struggling with this second issue.  My charcoal and pastel works have been, I think, very successful, but I haven't been able to carry that feeling over into paint.  At least not yet.

So here was the result:

I think this was pretty much a success as a painting.  For one, it's a good likeness, and for another, there's a lot of fresh brushwork.  It doesn't have the same feel as the charcoal and pastel works, but as I was working on it, there was much more of the same kind of thought process than there has been in previous attempts.

One of the reasons was the limited palette.  I used:
   Terra Rosa (a muted, slightly cool red)
   Yellow Ochre (a muted yellow)
   Chromatic Black (a new Gamblin product)
   Burnt Umber (a dark brown)
   Flake White Replacement (a slightly warm white)

This choice of colors is similar to the famous Zorn palette of one red, one yellow, one blue, and white.  To this, I added a dark brown.  Where's the blue, you say?  It's the Chromatic Black.  Yes, if you add white, you'll see that it really is a muted dark blue.  And to make things really odd, Chromatic Black is actually made up of Quinacridone Red plus Phthlao Emerald, two colors that are on opposite sides of the color wheel.  And when you mix this red and that green, and add white, you'll see you have a blue.  Go figure.

So work on a figure is what I did.  I started by choosing a 16x12 panel with a slightly warm tone.  Then I blocked in the figure with a mixture of the black and burnt umber.  The umber knocked down the blueness, so it was even more neutral.  Then I refined it into a pretty-well-developed 2-value rendering.  Actually, it wasn't strictly two values; there were slight variations in the very lights and very darks, just enough to add some volume.  When I was satisfied with the black and white, I started applying color.  The skin tones were the terra rosa, yellow ochre, and white, all with a little variation in the mixtures to lean toward one color or another.  Her shirt was just the chromatic black, a bit of white, and a touch of the terra rosa.

And that was it.  The result, I think, came out pretty well.  The more I use limited palettes, the more I like them.

New Colors on the Palette

I don't do a lot of experimentation with new colors.  I have enough trouble trying to understand the ones that are already there and being used.  Recently, though, I tried two new (for me) tubes from Gamblin.  I've been converted: these two add a lot of capability.

The first one is Chromatic Black.  For years, I have rarely used blacks from a tube.  They are color-killers: they're often muddy and they create a dead hole wherever they're heavily used.  Instead, I've mixed my own blacks out of Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Umber.  Now Burnt Umber is really a very dark, muted yellow, so mixing it with Ultramarine Blue produces a dark dull green, but by varying the mixtures, it can go from bluish to brownish, so it's been pretty useful.  One of the problems is that it dries to a lighter and flatter finish and requires a coat of varnish to bring out the depth of the color.

Over the past couple of years, I've been experimenting with limited palettes.  One notable palette was used by Anders Zorn, a Swedish painter, and consisted of ivory black, white, yellow ochre, and cadmium red medium.  Occasionally he added other colors, but those four were his mainstays.  This worked because he had one yellow (yellow ochre), one red (cadmium red medium), one blue (ivory black), and white.  Yes, most blacks are really dark blues - if you don't think so, then mix them with yellow.  You'll get green, almost every time.

The problem with ivory black, though, is that it's made of a carbon base of ground and burned bone.  This is what makes it muddy, and that muddiness is why I rarely used it.

Gamblin has brought out a new color: Chromatic Black.  Rather than using some sort of carbon base, it's made from blending two dark colors that are on opposite sides of the color wheel.  Since they're almost exactly opposite, they largely cancel each other's color tendencies out and leave a very dark and muted "black".  The two colors are Phthalo Emerald and Quinacridone Red.  Both are synthetic colors and have a purity to them that earth and carbon colors don't.  The result is a black that doesn't suck the life out of the painting.

What's really interesting is that it is actually a dark blue.  Yes, red and green can sometimes make blue.  Mixing white with the Chromatic Black gives a clear but muted blue, quite different from the muddy blue you get from mixing white with ivory black.

So.  Chromatic Black is a pretty cool color.

The other new one is Gamblin's Naples Yellow Hue.  Naples Yellow is an old color dating back to the 1600's, but is rarely used now because it's lead-based and very toxic.  It's been replaced by a variety of other mixtures and varies greatly between manufacturers.  I'd always considered it just a convenience mixture of white plus cadmium yellow, and since I already had both, why buy a tube?  But in a recent life painting session, one of the other artists had Naples Yellow on her palette and I was intrigued.  So I got a tube and tried it out.

Turns out, it's working very well for me in the skin tones.  Gamblin's version is made with zinc white and cadmium yellow.  So it's a muted yellow with a rich texture and surprising depth.  It has given me some beautiful muted greens that are clear, quiet, and useful, with no muddiness.  Mixing the Naples Yellow with Chromatic Black gives a particularly nice green.  It's also good for pale caucasian skin tones.  I'll go into that in another post soon.

Some of you may have been using Chromatic Black and/or Naples Yellow for years and know this stuff already.  Bear with me: I'm still learning, and these two colors are going to be affecting how I paint figures from here on out.

Commission

I recently finished a commission.  I was contacted by somebody who wanted a "portrait" of her parents' house, to include her parents.  This was an interesting assignment for me.  Since the house is nowhere near here, I needed a lot of photos of it.  My client was, fortunately, able to provide quite a few.  I worked up a couple of compositions in sketches and, after a bit of back-and-forth, we decided on the approach.  Then it was time to get to work.

Although I was working from photographs, I wasn't copying them.  No single photo showed everything I needed, and different areas were kinda/sorta covered from different vantage points.  The focus of the photos was generally on the spectacular flowering bushes and other features, and usually from the viewpoint that showed them best, which was never my chosen viewpoint.  And, as you can see, there's a LOT going on in this yard.  To work out where everything was, I had to make a map of the front yard, using all the clues from the photos.  Once I had that, then I was able to determine my viewpoint and accurately place the house, trees, and flowers.  Then it was a matter of creating something that worked as art, as well as being accurate.  So here's the finished painting:

The Williams House

Oil on linen panel, 16"x20"

I knew that the house was going to be the primary focal point, simply because of the straight lines, sharp edges, and dark shutters and door.  But I didn't want it to overpower everything else.  The yard, particularly the flowering bushes, was the secondary focus.  So I made the house fairly small and near the top of the panel.  The flowers were strong reds, pinks, and whites.  To make them pop out, I had to play with the greens surrounding them, which generally meant changing the light/dark values of the greens as well as muting them.  The grass was different: I decided to make that a stronger, warmer green, and make it look almost like a carpet rolling back to the house.  This connected the foreground to the house and provided a nice swooping movement to guide the eye into the painting.  Finally, I put in the surrounding foliage.  I kept it as simple and muted as possible, just enough to read as trees and foliage, and to provide an environment for the primary interest areas to strut their stuff.

Right near the apex of the swoop, I placed her parents.  They're small enough so that they don't become the focal point, but large enough so that they are recognizable for who they are.  Had they been any closer, the painting would have been about them, with the rest of the painting serving as support.  As it is, it's about their home and their creations in the yard, with their figures serving as a supporting element.

Reading back on this, it sounds as if I did this by painting the house, then the plants, then the grass, and so on.  Of course, that's not the way it happened.  I worked up a full-size sketch, transferred it to the panel, then blocked in the house and everything else in one go.  Then it was a matter of developing, adjusting, smoothing, and tweaking over several sessions, keeping all the stuff I wrote about in mind the whole time.

All in all, I'm happy with the way it turned out.  More importantly, my client is, too. 

Skin Tones

One of the questions I get a lot is, "what colors do you use for skin?"  The answer, of course: it depends.  It depends on the subject's skin color: the colors used for a light caucasian will be very different than an Asian or African-American.  It depends on the light source as well: the light coming in from a north-facing window is a different color than the direct light from a tungsten lamp.  It also depends on the colors of the things surrounding the individual, as they will reflect their colors into the skin tones.  And it also depends on whether you want to bring the skin tones forward (in which case you'll probably use stronger hues) or push them back using more muted colors.

The majority of my subjects are caucasian or similar, so I'll address those colors here.  The basic composition of most of them is a red of some sort, a yellow, a good bit of white, and maybe a bit of blue to tone them down.  Within these limitations, there are an infinite variety of possible colors that you can mix.  For reds, I've used cadmium red light (a bright warm red), alizarin crimson (a cool red), and terra rosa (a slightly muted, slightly cool red, and my current go-to color).  For yellows, I use yellow ochre (a muted yellow with both red and green components), cadmium yellow (a bright yellow in light, medium, and dark variants), and lemon yellow (a light yellow, leaning slightly towards green).  For whites, I prefer flake white or Cremnitz white.  Both are lead-based and have a slight warm tone with a rich feel to them.  You just have to be careful because they're, well, lead.  Another white is Flake White Replacement, which is really a combination of titanium and zinc and provides a very similar white without the toxicity of lead.  Titanium white is a strong, cold white that gets a bit too cold and chalky for my tastes.  As for zinc, I never use it.  Used alone, it's too brittle and can sometimes react with other chemicals.

So those are the colors I've been using for years.  Here's an example of how they look in an alla prima figure sketch:

In this exercise, I used primarily terra rosa, yellow ochre, and flake white replacement.  The light in my studio comes from daylight-balanced bulbs, which is slightly blue, so you'll see a touch of ultramarine blue in some of the shadows as well.  When accentuating colors, I use a touch of cadmium red and cadmium yellow.  These stronger colors don't show up well in photos, but in person they make some skin areas really come alive.  You can see it in her cheeks and lips, for example.

I don't use cad reds and yellows everywhere because a painting needs larger areas of muted color in order to make the small areas of strong color stand out.  I typically use strong colors in the focus areas only, and more muted colors like terra rosa and yellow ochre everywhere else.  When you realize that 90% of a painting is really a supporting area for the 10% focus area, it makes sense.  If you try to make everything a focus area, then the eye gets confused and you can't figure out what the painting is about.

Using this selection of colors has its disadvantages, though.  I've never been able to make very pale or muted skin tones with them.  You've seen the people I'm talking about: people that have extremely white or muted skin colors.  Many redheads, for example.  We had a redhead model a while back and I tried to paint her with my usual colors and failed miserably.  Trust me: flake white replacement is NOT a skin color by itself!  So I've been frustrated and trying to figure out just how people like John Singer Sargent or George Bellows handled those hues.  I think I may have found an insight into a workable approach.  Recently, I discovered a Swedish painter named Nick Alm.  Most of his figures have very pale skin tones.  I downloaded a few images of his paintings and took them to the studio.  After some trial and error, I found that using burnt umber (essentially a dark muted yellow) and Prussian blue (a greenish blue) and a lot of white gave a soft green, and I could then mix in just enough red to get a pale skin tone.  So rather than taking a red and yellow and toning it down to get a muted skin tone, I was taking a light green and then adding enough red to make it into a pale skin tone.  A very different approach for me and it seems to be working.  I copied one of Alm's portraits and here's how it turned out:

This approach seems to have some promise.  I'm going to continue to play with it to see what it can do.  I won't call it "the" answer to realistically showing muted skin tones, but it's certainly an interesting option.  What do you think?

Cinderella's Seamstress

Cinderella's Seamstress

Oil on canvas, 48"x48"

A couple of days ago, I finished my newest large painting, "Cinderella's Seamstress".  This one is about the backstory in everything that's beautiful.  Those beautiful things don't just appear by magic: they require a lot of dedicated, hard work by some creative individual.  Often, the work is done alone in a small shop or studio that's a far cry from the glamorous scene that it's meant for.

I've written about this painting in earlier posts.  I started sketching the initial ideas back in April and the basic idea was quickly settled.  Then I had the model come to my studio.  She really is a seamstress, quite good, very accomplished, and a helluva hard worker.  I asked her to come in her working clothes.  She did and brought along with a few accessories.  The leather tool pouch, for example, is what she wears, and it's stuffed with sewing supplies, scissors, and other tools.  Her grandfather was a carpenter and this was his tool pouch back then, so she has this great reminder of her family tradition of making things.

Amy came ready to work.  She brought along her manikin and used a scrap scarf from my studio to whip up a "dress", tacked stuff up on the wall behind her, and we did a lot of studies of her interacting with the manikin.  Oddly enough, the pose I finally decided on was only about the third or fourth one she did.  Although we did a bunch after that, none of them had quite the energy that I was looking for.  So her pose and the position of the manikin were locked in right at the beginning.

Almost everything else, though, changed, and not just in the details.  I had been looking at one of my favorite painters, Jerome Witkin, for inspiration on how to put this narrative painting together.  I couldn't make it work.  Witkin's paintings have an intensity that just didn't fit with my approach.  My paintings are generally quiet and fairly contemplative, so I started looking at another favorite artist whose paintings are also quiet and contemplative: Johannes Vermeer.  I studied his paintings, looking at how he arranged his people in the room, his use of large spaces and small, busy areas, the lines leading the eye around the painting, color of light on the wall, and so on.

Analyzing Vermeer's artworks to see how they work is one thing.  Trying to put those principles to work in a new painting is something else.  I went through many different compositions.  The window was originally on the right, but that put the light onto the seamstress and backlit the dress, and that wasn't right.  An ironing board was at various times behind, to the right, to the left, and in front of the seamstress and dress - sometimes as a visual device to connect the woman and manikin, other times as a visual barrier to establish distance.  A large poster was briefly on the wall.  The window was once more prominent, but it implied that you could look outside, which was not what I wanted the viewer to do, so now it's just barely indicated to provide a logical source of light.  The director's chair came in as a way to help guide the eye around the painting.  The "dress" she made in our first session didn't really work, so I found a photo of one that did, then bought some shiny blue fabric and mocked up the dress on the manikin.  And on and on.

When working on a complex composition like this, I will do sketches of everything - the seamstress, manikin, director's chair, and so on - then cut them out and move them around on a large sheet of paper to figure out how they need to relate to each other.  I'll draw some things in several different sizes as things come forward, backward, or turn.  Once I get something that works, I'll do a value study of the whole thing to look at the arrangements of lights and darks, then move things around again as necessary.  If it passes that test, then I'll transfer the composition to gessoed paper and do a color study.  The first several color studies resulted in me going back to square one and reworking the composition from scratch.  But finally the composition that you see above came together.

The next step was to prepare the canvas.  I built the frame and stretched the canvas.  It's polyester, more or less the same stuff used in sails, so it's extremely durable, much tighter than cotton or linen, and won't rot or mildew.  It's the same material that museums use to re-line old master paintings when they're restored.  I gessoed the canvas and then toned it with a coating of cool gray.  To transfer the composition, I drew grids on the final drawing, drew equivalent grids on the canvas, and copied the major outlines.  And then it was time to paint.  I built it up gradually, in multiple layers.  There was a good bit of adjusting going on - the director's chair turned out to be too large, so I had to shrink it quite a bit, for example, but mostly it was minor detail stuff.  The painting took a couple of months because this is a good-sized canvas and I wanted to take my time and do it as well as I possibly could.

And there it is.  Finally.  Done.  I feel pretty good about the way it turned out and am looking for exhibition opportunities for it.  And I'm already thinking about my next painting.  Haven't started the sketches yet, but there are a few ideas floating around ...