January 22, 2014 – Simply Painting

8″ x 8″ oil on gessoed panel

$125

I thought I would tell a little story about how this painting evolved to whomever is interested in these kinds of things. 🙂

I was very inspired by one of the artists who is painting 30 Paintings in 30 Days. She is taking an old painting of a favorite artist of hers and on the first day copying a portion of the painting, and then on the second day using the colors to make an abstract painting. I started to think about this in the middle of the night as I frequently do…lie awake and think… and I decided to take one of my favorite paintings and try her method. Well, it didn’t work out that way at all. Here is the painting…

John Eastman (American Artist 1842-1880) Gathering Lilies

I started the painting in my usual way of just putting a wash on the board and vaguely outlining what I was going to paint. In my mind I was not going to copy this painting, but mainly copy the shapes.

This is what I roughly sketched out. Do you see what I see? A woman with her hair flowing back and to the side… I thought I should go with this and not do my original plan.

When this dried I began to work with the figure and fill in the background…

She even had a bit of a face at this point.

The background was something that I used from a photo I had saved of my daughter…

She has been a model for a lot of my paintings.

So then I was totally immersed in painting and didn’t take any more pictures until it was finished. And it ended up being not at all what I had set out to do.

And the face…what happened to the face you are probably wondering, if you got this far in reading?

It takes me hours to paint a face, maybe even days…Not something I can do in one painting a day…but there is something I love about these faceless paintings.

So there you have it. Quiet Reflections…