Tierney
 

I haven

Thank you so much for showing us your work, it is a jewel.
Ilaria

Dear Bill,

What a lovely treat to see this work. It is so very fresh, and the brushwork adds so much to the scale of this painting.

Personally, I think it would be hard for anyone to pass on adding this painting to his or her collection - it's nealy impossible to look away from her compelling gaze. It's a gorgeous little gem.

PS Can you provide a link to the exhibit?

Bill, this is a lovely, lovely painting which manages to be sensitive and loose at the same time. In fact - looking at the closeups - it is a tutorial on how to paint living form paintings. This will be snapped up instantly. I really appreciate your posting it here, it has a lot of soul and charm.

I loved it!

Bill,

Wow, it's compelling and lovely! I agree with everyone that a collector will fall in love with it. I'm not sure, really, whether there is a boundary between portraiture and figurative art. At least I am sure that the best figurative art contains a personal element, and the best portraits say something universal.

I enjoy the economy of brushstrokes in the fabric and your subtle tonal relationships throughout the painting. I especially like the spatial relationship of the arms (i.e the arms on the viewer's right coming forward and on the left receding), and also the indication of space where the head juts forward from the neck. The excitement of your work lies on your extreme sensitivity to tone and space, and I am really looking forward to see how far you might leave your paintings underworked. (I am doing some watercolours at present in order to explore these tonal / spatial relationships. Watercolour is very headstrong so the sensible thing to do is to leave it alone, which gives me the freedom to focus almost fully on the tone/space aspect of the work)

Lovely painting!
I like the limited color theme, and how you framed your subject with the background. She doesn't at all look made out of vinyl !

It's always inspiring to me to see your work, Bill. Thank you for posting, she is lovely.

In my imagination I try to place myself into your studio and learning from a master. Maybe someday I'll actually be able to make the trip.

Respectfully,
Jean

Thank you everyone. And Thomasin, your watercolour studies are exciting. I trust you will do more. All of us should! By the way, your remarks were insightful. The forearms were indeed challenging.

I bought the Edwardian Linen slip at a shop on Kings Road when I was living in London. It has a monogram of stitched initials and it is one of my treasures. However linen doesn't drape very well and I don't use it very often.

Although that's true about linen, I have to say I love the way the irregular draping quality works in this painting, Bill.

Beautiful. How do you manage such detail in such small paintings?

Mr. Whitaker--

Thanks so much for this gem, and your previous post. There's a year's study for me in all of them--especially regarding surface. Appreciate your generosity!

All of you say such nice things. This forum is like a refuge from the asperity we get in the world.

Julie,
I'm blessed with a steady hand, I have a good mahlstick, I have some high magnification closeup glasses and I use small new watercolor sable rounds on the details. I also use high end paint without fillers to get the maximum paint strengh in thin applications. Sometimes I grind my own Titanium White which is super intense. I also like working small.

Tom,
I too love to get in close and examine paintings. I think the biggest drawback in displaying paintings on the Internet is that we can't get in close enough to see technique.