Anne's Face

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A detail of Anne's face after another session.

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Portrait Of Anne 7th Sitting

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Another session yesterday. I started by applying some thin glazes on the left side of Anne's face trying to add a bit of depth to the shadow areas. Then I worked into that, using slightly more impasto paint. Last week I was struggling so much in bad lighting conditions that I turned on an electric light to give a bit more ambient light to her right side, and I quite like it so we've decided to keep it. I've added cadmium orange to my palette. It is a strangely cool orange that I've never been able to duplicate using cadmium yellow and red and as a tint with lots of white it makes a good colour for flesh lit by electric light. The same goes for alizarian crimson or rose madder tints. The left side of her face is picking up the natural light from the windows on that side and I'm using terre vert, raw umber, mars violet and ivory black. I was still not happy about something and I came to the conclusion I had the eyes too close together. Much to Anne's const...
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Portrait Of Anne 4th Sitting

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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....
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About Face - Concept and Ground Work

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I painted a large self portrait dyptich recently for the Puke Ariki museum's Homework exhibition of Taranaki artists work. I had photographed it's stages of development from the beginning with the intention of blogging them here in "real time". However, as always with new and experimental work, I found my need to work in privacy overcame any desire to share the trials and tribulations of that working process in public. But now the painting is on the wall and the paint is almost dry, I feel more comfortable with sharing the documentation. I have for the last few years been concentrating on modest scale works in my Postcard From Puniho series. But recently I have felt the desire, confidence and ambition to do some larger scale work again.  The question is "what subject"? Well, the self portrait is a genre that I have returned to many times, especially when I feel at some kind of cross-road in my life. Just turning round and taking a good har...
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