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Painterly
Hello Holly,
what a nice portrait, it is technically good, but also it has that quality of intimate relation that makes it more interesting.
I wanted to say something about being painterly: for me to be more painterly the best way is painting LIVE. When you paint edges from life what you should or should not blur just comes to your eyes as soon as you look for it. The way colours are interwoven, how one colour is found on both sides of an edge, these are things that will not appear in a photograph, you'll have to make them up.
I think that you do learn a lot by painting from photos, and I did almost nothing else up to now. But when you arrive at a stage when you know what to look for when you are painting (again edges, temperature, direction of brushstrokes etc) you might find that it's easier to paint from life then from a photo.
I recently read an essay by Antonia Byatt about portraits. She was saying that a photo (and a portrait from a photo ?!), because it is a record of a moment lost in time, that will never return, is ultimately about death. A portrait, painted in a certain period of time, not to mark the instant but to look for someone's personality and special features, it's about life.
I think it is a very interesting approach. I just started my first portrait of a young girl from life and I immediately felt it was worth the effort: it is coming out painterly without me thinking about being so.
I posted the canvas after the first (short) sitting.
To go back to your beautiful work, I agree with Chris about the blue of the irises being maybe too blue, but overall i think it is great, also the accent on her left eye really works
Ciao
Ilaria
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