Chris, thank you very much for yor comments, our posted crossed yesterday, so you asked me about unifying while I was writing on the same subject to Garth!
Right, so this was my strategy.
There are a few technical elements that unify the lot. Scale and size is the first one, it appears better when you see them live, but they are consistent and true to the real proportions of the heads, so the girl's slightly bigger, etc..
I use a limited palette, two yellows, two reds, two blues and white, so there is a certain unity in the colour throughout the paintings. Also, I chose to have a flat background behind them, something that would put them in their rooms, so I have a rug, a victorian fireplace and a poster (the latter was also very useful to lose the boy's ears, that stick out a little).
But for me the most important unifying element it's more of a philosophical kind. I struggled a lot to understand it, and now I am starting to grasp it and I think it shows from these last works. I'll take it from afar: the more I work, the more I am gaining the confidence to work live. This is enabling me to spend more time with the subject and creating a person to person relationship. The result is that the reaction to being painted comes out more clearly, so this is a powerful element that I think keeps the paintings together: they are all interacting with me.
The little boy is sweet, he is telling me he wants to be painted, the middle child is challenging, the girl, the one I spent more time with, she just didn't let me in. I am mother of three boys, teenage girls are a mystery to me, and I was uneasy in her room, and she was shy, she did not look, so this is how I painted her.
All this is, I think, giving a deeper dimension to my work, and I owe it all to my tutor, Minna Stevens. During the first term she pushed me on technical matters, managing the quantity of oil in the paint, dealing with edges, and so on. On our last meeting instead she told me to forget all the technicalities and just go for the person. I did not get it at the beginning, but now I start to understand, she is such a clever lady, you can view her work at
www.minnastevensportraits.com.
So Garth this is where my question on your last painting came from. Because I am working on this idea of the relationship with the subject, I was interested in the non relational approach. I mean, if it is possible to build a portrait on the tension between painter and model, the contrary is also an option, which is, building it on its absence, on the unawareness of the model, so I find this is THE most powerful element in your painting, rather then the exquisite technique.
Am I talking sense?
Ilaria