"Monichka" 30x30
 

Here's one I completed a couple months back.

Just gettin around to posting...

Monichka "30x30" Oil on Linen

Tony

Beautiful, Tony!

Was this a commission? She has a bold commanding presence, and your use of a composition within a square is daring, and accentuates her strong personality. I love your way of distilling chiseled planes of color and value that are right on key, and very sculptural; also the dark, moody atmosphere. This is a great portrait! Congratulations, and well done, my friend.

Garth

So very lovely and so understated - your trademark :)

Thanks guys... would you believe this was a wedding present?
My best friend's wife... I owed it to them and finally got around to painting it...

Tony

Tony, I love all those fluid color changes in the face and I really like the strong brushwork as well - keep posting these!

Tony, handling all those darls without mud and dirt in the skin tones, what an accomplishment.
Really an elegant painting
Ilaria

Tony,

Beautiful portrait! As usual I admire the way you heighten the values towards the face (or I guess you could say lower them towards the rest of the body including the hands) to achieve a finely-tuned focus.

Her face is really interesting! I often see paintings of beautiful women that do not interest me, and I suspect it's the way they are painted, i.e. viewed by the artist. But you have put something in this that catches the viewer's attention. That one heavy-lidded eye is slightly, intriguingly, wierd, yet her other eye (in the shadows!) is alert. Her nose is crisply painted, assertive but not overworked. Her lips are softly mobile, about to speak or change expression. All this adds up to a unique face that is hard to forget. I think these nuances come through the brush straight from the artist's intuitive feelings about the subject.

Captivating!

Tony, I always love to see your work - you say so much with an economy of beautiful brushstrokes.

Can you speak about the pose? She conveys a sense of tension, as though she's getting ready to get up, or do something - was that deliberate?

I agree with Cindy. It looks as if she wants to move on.. There's a story there, a mystery.

I like it!