Two portraits

I have two new paintings to share with you today.  Both seem like portraits to me.  One is the portrait of a person, and one is a portrait of a Joshua Tree in bloom.  As you already know from my earlier post, I do think of the Joshua Tree as being figurative.

Here is the second finished painting of the Joshua Tree in bloom.  You can see that having an under painting really made a difference in the overall quality and liveliness of color.  This painting is oil on canvas, measuring 20 x 16 inches.   What really interested me in this painting was that clear blue spring sky. 

We received more rain over the weekend, and little bits of green are beginning to pop up all over the place.  There is quite a lot of mud, which Pono is irresistibly drawn to.  I suppose if I were a dog, I would want to walk through soft, squishy mud, too.  If I were a dog, I wouldn't have to mop the floor, after the adventure in mud.  The drawback I can see to being a dog is having to eat kibble every day.  So, I guess I will stay human. 

I also completed a portrait of my friend Shant last week. This painting was started with a four hour painting session at Shant's house.  I took photographs the day I started the painting, and used four of the photographs as reference to help me finish the painting once I got home.  Since it was a live sitting, I wanted to try to preserve the feeling of that.  It seems as though there is an unspoken communication between sitter and artist during a live session.  That is something that is lost when I only have a photograph to paint from.  I found it interesting that when I got home and printed out the photos I had taken, each photo was different.  Subtle shifts in the position of his body, along with variations of his expression were evident in the photographs.  The vitality of a live session is what I find compelling when painting a portrait.  The impossibility of both artist and sitter to hold completely still somehow becomes the thing that I want to capture, since it seems to be the part that is most elusive.  A likeness is important to me, but there is more there that I want to try to capture.  I am looking for the essence of who that person is.

I know it is probably surprising to some of you that an artist who is so infatuated with abstraction also enjoys painting more realistic and clearly representational art.  They may seem like two completely different things.  And yet, for me, I cannot seems to have one without the other.  When I am not drawing from life, my abstract work suffers, and vice versa.  The freedom of abstraction also helps me when I work realistically.  I will write more on this later.  Happy Monday, my dear blog readers!