Another Day

We put in about four hours yesterday. Started working on Annes left eye, which happens to be her larger one. I've become acutely aware of my own eyes whilst working on this painting. I've become used to working very closely to my painting and looking over the top of my glasses. I am short sighted which means as my eyes age they are actually getting better for close-up work - I have to remove my glasses to read now. So it's been good for the small miniature paintings I've been doing over the last three years or so. However, with a larger painting, and the constant refocussing between observing Anne and working on the painting, I'm finding it quite a strain on my eyes. I've tryed progressive lenses without much success and now I'm tryign the so called mono-vision ie: one lense for long range and another for close range effectively making me one eyed. Everyone has a dominant eye. Just as some people are left handed, some favour the left eye and vice-versa....

Another day's sitting with Anne's portrait yesterday. It's at the stage where in some sense it seems to go backwards rather than forwards. Readjusting and correcting the relationships between features. Working from life you become acutely aware of how everything changes with the slightest tilt of the subjects head. Anne is a wonderful sitter - probably the best sitter I've worked with! Some people can never relax and squirm around self conciously, however, but with no true self awareness. Anne strikes no poses, in any sense, but she projects an open and honest, natural quality. I want to try and do my utmost to capture some of that quality. Painting from life is all about the dialogue between the sitter and the artist. I regard it as a team effort rather than the cliche artist/model scenario of Picasso's day. This is why I find working from photographs unsatisfying and uninpisiring. It doesn't show in the photo, but I'm pleased with the warm glow...

It was a cold day for our second sitting with a fresh fall of snow on Mt Taranaki. Anne really feels the cold and she was wrapped up in several layers, though I did have a couple of heaters on! I realised I had positioned the brow and eyes much too high in my initial roughing out so the first thing I did was to remedy this. I deliberately kept that first stage extremely thin and I sanded it down before starting the second sitting. When planning a painting that you know will be worked on in layers it is important to keep the early layers "lean" of oil, otherwise the paint will crack. Especially with paint ground in safflower or poppy oil, which most of it is nowadays. I was concentrating on the area about Anne's eye's and nose mostly. Anne has a particularly asymetric face which I find interesting. One of her eyes is quite smaller than the other, a fact she finds much amusement in! It's still in it's early stages but I'm happier with the way it...

I did this little study of my friend and fellow painter Anne Holiday a week or so ago and I'm now starting a slightly bigger and more ambitous portrait of her. I prepared my surface by gluing a fine weave linen canvas to 9mm thick MDF. I use a traditional animal hide glue which is put on hot to the MDF board. I then lay the unprimed canvas over this and I iron the canvas with a warm iron to adhere it and smooth out the bumps. When this was dry I trimmed the edges and gave the linen three coats of Liquitex Acrylic Gesso sanding between coats. The dimensions are 400x450mm, for a head and shoulders approximate life size portrait. Here is the result of the first sitting and it is little more than a very rough idea. I gave the whole canvas a thin stain of yellow ochre and then started drawing with a paintbrush. I initially had the canvas up the other way - it's slightly off square - but I felt it would sit better with it slightly wider, rather than taller. I had made marks on the fl...