Self-portrait
 

This is a self-portrait head (it is actually a detail from a larger work which, I think, may not be suitable to post here, but can be viewed on my website , if you're interested). It is oil on board and is life-size (the whole painting is 40" x 30"). It was finished about 3 years ago.

Thomasin, it is great to see you at work so feverishly again. The surface of your painting is always so busy and the rythm of your brush activity just terribly intense and musically "ostinato". I can see a lot of Reinassace reminiscence too, and it is very interesting to see them transposed into contemporary
Ilaria

Hi there,

I've seen this one in your website before and liked the whole piece very much.

I think you should post this one in the nudes section.

This is a stunning and magical painting, Thomasin! The brushwork is such a visual feast.

I wish I could get out and see your next gallery show; it would be wonderful to see several of your works together! Thanks for sharing this.

Garth

See, like I said: your work is always attention-grabbing ;)
Let me see....there is so much to be said about this particular painting. I like the way you use/play around with reflected lights (on the face, arms, belly...) The modelling of the face and forms is done in your usual unique, inimitable way--very enviable, actually. I like the idea of the repetition of the heads--although they are "repeated", they each seem to mean something different. And the forearm and the wrist resting on your hip is simply exquisite. And your use of colour....
Very big congratulations!

Thomasin,
I love this work! It's beautiful, captivating, and very elegant.
I like how you play with the materiality of the paint. Were you already using this special grey which gives this unity to your paintings?

Oh! Congratulations! I just saw on your website that you're also a finalist of the Richeson 75... well, our works are going to meet each others before than we do ! :)

Thomasin,

This head is exquisite! I went into your website and looked at the whole painting and it, too, is wonderful, and I agree you should post in the nudes section with some details like this one so we can take a close look at your technique.

It never ceases to amaze me that you can create such rounded, believable form with so little apparent contrast and subtle color shifts. I'm looking at the mouth and tip of the nose, how they emerge from the surrounding skin. The eyes, too, are not separate things, but part of the face yet made of a different texture and material. The features are differentiated as if by magic. You have to have a very fine understanding of edges to be able to create that magic!

I love the pearliness of the color...

Ilaria, thank-you very much! You remarks are very confidence-boosting. This is, in fact, a piece I did a couple of years ago. I am still scraping off the paint from what I am currently doing, so was looking through photos of my earlier work (for ideas and inspiration) and thought this one looked much better than I remembered. I thought I would post it instead of the current shambles of a painting I am doing.

Claudemir, thank-you very much too. With your encouragement I might just post this in the nudes section with some details, and perhaps its companion piece.

Garth, thank-you so much for your exuberantly supportive remarks. They are undeserved but very much prized! I may get a few works up to Vancouver, Canada and London, U.K. before the year's out. Your wish to see my work is very flattering and would love to see yours "in the flesh" too.

(I wonder, has anyone thought of having an SOG forum artist exhibition somewhere central and public?)

Carlos, thank-you too for your wonderful comments. I really do value them. The repetition in the heads, I think - theme is usually not deliberate or that conscious in my work, but secondary always to the paintwork and drawing, is me being my own midwife etc. which is what it felt a bit like when I had my son.

Marina, thank-you very much! No, I didn't use the torrit grey. I am just always drawn to the blues and greys in the light in the skin, and the oranges in the shadows, and I cannot stop satisfactorily until I have a feeling of a single skin covering the body.

Thank-you Alex. I wish that I could use more darks, but they always get lighter and lighter as I put the reflected light in them to get the three-dimensionality. The subtle variation is, in fact, a failure to get chairoscuro.

Thank-you, Tom. The pearly blues in the light that I am drawn to seem to suggest a translucency and vulnerability in the flesh, which I need to get as it makes the figure seem more alive.

Sadly, no, I wasn't one of the finalists. I am just having two of my works published in the book they are doing. Congratulations on your being one of the top 75, though. I am very envious.

Thomasin,
I'm really sorry, I read too quickly after a too long day...
Anyway, it's a good news that they chose 2 of your works for the book ! Your work deserves to be known.

I agree that your work deserves to be known--it WILL be known!

Thomasin, this is so captivating. I have been studying it in depth with great admiration. It looks to me as the whole face is covered by a rubber- mask that can be pulled off by picking up the edge by her ear., and reveal her underlying soft skin. Most remarkable.

Marina, thank-you for your encouragement, and also to Alex. You are much too kind! It's very good to be appreciated by such intelligent artists as yourselves. Being here has gone a long way to keeping me going when nothing seems to ever go as I want it to.

Grethe, thank-you very much for your compliments. I am very flattered.

lovely!
 

Hi, can I just add my congratulations to the comments already made. The new works on your website and just beautiful. How do you attain this luminosity of skin??
I'd love to know, the last time I saw skin portrayed like this it was on a Klimt painting in Vienna. I was taken aback by the difference from seeing it in life compared to books. The pearlescence was gorgeous, don't know if it was done through glazes

I would love to see your own work in an exhibition.

Margaret, thank-you very much. With the skin, I don't often use glazes because I don't really have the patience, but I do have a number of layers of paint from all the workings-out i do before I am finally satisfied. So that creates a kind of depth which is sometimes like polished precious stone i.e it looks as if you are seeing the colours and lines under a glass-like surface. You see the ghosts of earlier painted, partially destroyed, figures and that brings a mystery to the work, as if it were telling its own story and dictating my actions. I love it when I achieve that because I feel I am much freer from my clumsy self-conscious ideas - as though the painting itself has taken over the responsibility of its existence.

WOW! This is so strong. Great composition in a personal paintingstyle!

Thanks for the encouragement, Jan, Much appreciated.

So beautiful Thomasin, sigh!

I can really appreciate this after scraping the paint off yet another still-born head.

You're very kind, Sharon. I, too, have been scraping of heads for the
past week and, you know what, I came to the conclusion that I wasn't
dissatisfied with the painted head so much as with being excited about
what was going on in the scraped off head. So I left it in it's scraped
off stage, with just a few marks here and there, and it became an
impression of light of a figure more than an actual solid figure; a sort of
after-image on the retina, but in the normal positive colours. I am
so excited. It opens up a lot of possibilities and since it is all
about light (and not about a solid, rounded object), when an area of paint
just works as paint, even though it may not be describing the body's
contours correctly, I have a very convincing excuse to leave things as
they are. I'll post it when I've done the hand (I am so bad at hands!).

I have looked at your work a number of times when my painting's going
wrong thinking that I'll never get to your level of competency.



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Thomasin,

I restored your post! It was lost and now it's found!

What a thoroughly competent moderator! :cool:

If I could convice my client that the scraped head is the way to go, I would. I do like them, because there is still the spark of life, but veiled.

MY LEVEL OF COMPENTENTCY!

If you give a monkey enough time, meaning infinite.......................

You know Sharon, you are going to have to face facts one day: you are very good at painting. But enough, enough! All this mutual flattery is going to get virtual rotten eggs thrown at us!

Then let us make egg temperas!

I am fabulous, I tell you FABULOUS!

I am going through a bad painting patch. This head will not let it self be painted. I am running out of excuses and operations to ward off my clients. I had to resort to the head shot, because I scraped off ALL the work from life.

I wanna go to jail!

Deep sympathies. I've been going through a very similar circumstance. I've a portrait in progress that deserves to be burned, but since it's from a life sitting...well...the color notes are okay but the image itself is rotten... :thumbsdow