|
Matt,
You don't have to worry in the least about the quality of your work being good enough to post here.
You have a really beautiful painterly touch and your grasp of form is really quite wonderful.
Your self portrait is really quite masterful as well as the one of the Tibetan boy.
I have a problem with the portrait of your son, The profile edge is really quite harsh, and it doesn't seem to have that roundness associated with baby heads. It is rather at an awkward angle and the eye looks strange. Look at Rubens and the English portrait artists, Reynolds and Gainsborough for examples. Study Velasquez for edges. See how varied his are.
Is the painting of the Tibetan boy from your own reference or did you use a published picture. There are copyright laws that would prohibit this and you have to be very careful. It is better to use your own photographic reference or better yet, work from life.
As to making a living, it really depends a great deal on what the market is in your area and how original your depictions are. Simply copying photographs won't work. You have to have your own unique point of view. That is the most important thing. Then you have to really work on your craft. Figurative work, though on the rise, is a hard sell in most markets, suffering the onslaught of abstract expressionism and postmodernism for the last 9 or 10 decades. People do not know how to evaluate figurative work anymore. The average person thinks that if your work resembles a photograph or is a really close copy of one, then you are a really good artist.
I hope this helps.
|