Thanks, Terri and Beth! Terri, I shipped it Monday and his wife will receive it today, so I haven't heard. She has seen the image I put up on my website preview page ( at
http://leslieficcaglia.org/klaffky.htm ) which is better than the one I could upload here, and really liked it. My parents live near her and knew them both well; they thought it was excellent, too.
Yes, it definitely looked as though light were coming both from the lamp and from a flash, which did make it hard to render. But that was the nicest picture she had of him. The background is very much like the one in the photo although I moved some of the furniture slightly.
Beth, I tried replacing the other detail shot with a better one, but because the head is so small, relatively speaking, I didn't have a lot of material to work from and it's fuzzy. I tried sharpening the image but it's not quite reflective of the real thing. And of course I don't have the original anymore.
I actually think I've done smaller faces but it does make it challenging. She had initially asked for a 16x20 but then decided that she wanted it to fit into a very nice frame which she already owned, so we got to upsize it.
Personally I prefer less formal portraits, but I really enjoyed painting his expression. He looks like such a nice person.