The Portrait Project

For lack of a better name, seven of us are calling this the portrait project. We study at the Art Students League in Manhattan on Saturdays (myself, Claudia Monaco, Helene Balzarini, Michael Elsasser, Kurt Tatum, Myung-ja Chun, and Kevin McCaffrey) and we have joined together in a project in which we will each paint self-portraits and portraits of at least two others in the group. We each drew a random portrait assignment and we will each also paint (or draw) a portrait of at least one other in the group.

Most of us met six years ago while studying in Sherry Camhi's figure and anatomy class at the the League. We are all roughly middle-age and most of us returned to fine art after working on the fringes in areas like advertising, design, art direction etc.

In these two cases, I sketched the figures in charcoal and then began the underpainting in terra verte, a weak green pigment. I'm working on canvases primed in a neutral gray. In the case of Claudia's portrait, as is often the case for me, I found the charcoal drawing in some ways better than this underpainting. The charcoal makes her look younger than she is, but seems to capture the contours of her face better.

The first glazing for each of these two is a mixture of a great deal of yellow ochre with just a bit of vermillion. According to Jonathan Janson, this is the color Vermeer used for his skin tones. Janson's Essential Vermeer website is a real treasure for those who enjoy Vermeer and Rembrandt. He also has a self-published book, "How to paint your own Vermeer." Although the book has a good deal of valuable information, one quickly sees the pitfalls of self-publishing and why we need editors to keep authors on track. (Sequences of entire pages are repeated, sometimes only a short distance from their first appearance.)

Problems I see with the two portraits above: I need to keep my eyes in the self-portrait from becoming too cartoon-like. Claudia's portrait needs a background and more of a setting.

The members of the portrait project have given themselves a year for this project, after which we will begin to look for a venue in which to exhibit.