Shepherdess
 

Bouguereau to buckaroo? Comments invited.

Hello Richard,

Very nice painting. It's difficult to critique however without knowing some elements of the piece, such as size and medium. Overall I like the composition and your drawing looks well done. I also see competent use of color and technique.

I'm confused on the light source. It appears to be coming from the upper left according to the dog, goat and the girl. It also appears to be coming from the upper right according to the fence gate. Am I missing something? I do confuse easily.

On a different level I question the lack of details which leads me to believe the painting is small by comparison.

One recommendation I would consider concerns the goat's right ear (on our left). It is lost too easily and confuses my eye causing it to stop and question thereby interupting my flow through the painting.

I hope this helps.

John, please pardon my lapse! The painting is oil on linen, 16x20".

Light source is literally "high noon", more troublesome than I imagined possible. Thank you for your comments, which I find instructive.

Richard,

Actually I kind of like the way you called it "Bouguereau to Buckaroo!" The humorous tone adds a dimension to this painting, I think because it is not sentimental (thank goodness). On the contrary, she looks like a real person and you can really feel the action in the moment and the heat of the sun beating down.

The light/shadow pattern doesn't seem inconsistent to me except for the shadow of the goat/dog in the lower right. Maybe it really is there,. but it is puzzling, since the sun hits the gate. I'm sure you are already re-checking your reference(s) if you painted from photos, but there might be some subtleties missing that caused John's problem in reading the direction of the light.

By the way, can you post your references? This always helps.

Alex

Alexandra, thank you for your comments. I didn't actually "title" it that, I was going to call it simply "Shepherdess", and float the smart-aleck reference to Bouguereau, which is my idea of humor. (heh, heh)

As I noted, I found "high noon" light a problem. Maybe this is a cop-out, I don't mean to be evasive nor defensive, but there are a couple of things about my approach that make comparison to reference photos a little too oblique.

One is that the photos have little to do with the final composition. I have so "Frankensteined" this painting from (necessary) photo snippets that it's not very instructive to compare them, as if I were rendering faithfully from a single photograph. My other cop-out is some questions of light direction in this piece I considered less for technical accuracy than as a compositional element.