Work in Progress - Kevin

This just goes to show you how ghastly things can get in the underpainting stage. Night before last his face was green. It all gets better in the final stages. Honest!

Progress in the Portrait Project

Top to bottom: Michael Elsasser, Claudia Monaco and moi. Sea earlier posts for preliminary drawings. Obviously I like horizontal compositions for these portraits and I also like side or back-lit light sources. The shadow areas are built up in multiple glazes of alternating complimentary colors Terra verte mixed with a tiny piece of viridian in one glaze and vermilion mixed with a little alizarin crimson in the next glaze.

Meself

At the drawing and under-painting stage.

Another contribution to the portrait project I have mentioned in earlier posts. Tough to look at oneself and acknowledge that I don't look as I did when I was twenty-five. You would think the mirror would do a pretty good job of accomplishing that but we do have a way of deceiving ourselves and, for an artist that doesn't go away until we drag a brush over every square inch of the face.

At that point the tendency may be to go too far in the other direction. Earlier self-portraits have prompted others to tell me that I'm not that gray, etc. Maybe this time I'll nail it.

Mistakes in a drawing

As I look at this now I realize that the perspective for the wainscoting is at the wrong angle when compared to the angle of the line where the floor meets the wall. I also realized that the leg of her chair nearest the viewer was in the wrong place so I re-drew it with my eraser, placing it a little closer to the other leg and in line with the back of the chair.

But I'm fairly happy with my rendering of the figure herself. She's a new model and I don't know her name. She seemed Eastern European or Russian.

Michael and Claudia, drawing and underpainting.

Michael Elsasser and Claudia Monaco are two of the other artists participating in what seven of us have come to call our 'portrait project.' We have agreed to spend a year or so each doing a minimum of two portraits of other artists in our group plus a self-portrait. The end of our year will come in January and at that point we hope to find a venue in which to exhibit our results.

I started my self-portrait and another rendering of Claudia in the spring, but after staring at the canvases for a number of months have decided to start over with entirely new compositions.

Except for Claudia who is a fairly new member of our group, the rest of us met six years ago at the Art Students League in Manhattan in Sherry Camhy's drawing and anatomy class. We have all since moved on to other classes at the League but we now get together for lunch once a month to share progress on our project and swap other stories.

Michael, for example, was just featured in Connoisseur Magazine. An article written by a magazine editor describes first-hand what it's like to purchase a portrait painted by Michael and add it to his collection.

Eva

A new model, Eva. Well, new to us anyway. She is petite and athletic. This drawing took about an hour with a number 4B pencil.