First Draft

It has been a busy few weeks for me and I haven’t gotten back to this. One of the things that I noticed as I showed a piece for the first time at an art show and auction was that people called me an artist. For some reason that feels uncomfortable to me. “Artist” means something that I’m not sure I am yet. I asked Michael (my instructor) if he called himself an artist and he immediately said yes, and that he had called himself that early on (i.e. in his teens when he did his first commission). Maybe it is the first commission, or maybe something else. I think of “artists” like Monet, and Picasso, and it seems like they had a purpose for what they were doing; that it wasn’t just reflecting what they saw but symbolic in some way. Anyway, I’m wrestling with the word as I continue to paint and get lost in the process. Maybe that is all an artist really does in the end.

I have started a portrait. It is a picture in sepia tones of my mom and her twin sister. There is something about the pose and the subjects that just seem so right to me that I decided to paint it. I will be adding color so we’ll see. I have done portraits before and I find that I struggle most with eyes. Michael has continued to say don’t think of them as eyes, but just shapes with lights and shadows, but it doesn’t work. I still get nervous about putting them in. Below you will see some of the portraits I have completed and a first draft (i.e. underpainting) of my latest. You’ll notice that I need to work on the eyes, but luckily paint is really forgiving.