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Clive,
In painting a portrait of one person you are painting that individual. If you are painting more than one person, you are painting a relationship. A child and a mother are no longer Joey and Sally, they are Madonna and Child. If there is no connection between separate individuals in a group portrait, I think the painting is flawed.
On the bad photograph brouhaha, in my classes, I find students going out of their way to make things difficult. I tell them there are enough challenges involved in doing a good painting without intentionally putting road blocks in your way.
It seems that every year I will have an excited student show me the reference material for their first commission. Invariably, it will be something like "...seven figures, full length, Grandma's in a wheelchair, and the finished product no bigger than 16x20." (I am not making this up, this was an actual "commission" a student brought to me. Oh, she would get $500.)
When I suggest the artist might be better served by turning down that commission and doing 10 noncommissioned 20x24 head and shoulders portraits, (which would take much less time than the 7 figure painting), they say they "like the challenge" (...see paragraph two....)
I'm glad you seem to have worked it out, Clive. Know that those of us who have cautioned you to, in the words of Steven Sweeney, "Put down the photograph, raise you hands over your head and slowly back away", that we are saying all this after learning the hard way that we only have so much time on this earth, and spending six months slaving over a bad painting that we will not be compensated for either monetarily, through knowledge gained, or by producing portfolio material, is not the best use of our time.
Peggy
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