Michele, you are too kind...really!
Grethe, thanks! Charcoal really is a wonderful medium, the range of values, the deep rich black than you can get, and the soft passages - I just love it.
J
ean, thanks for saying these things, but, with this one, I now just see the flaws, and maybe a few nice passages. And as for Farrah Fawcett - I would be really interested in seeing her painting process - her technique in applying the paint - perhaps more so than the finished painting itself.
Mischa, you put these sentiments so well...What a joy indeed! We are so fortunate, I really feel it as quite a high calling that has come to us portrait artists: to call attention to the beauty ( and frailty, vulnerability, strength, weakness, pain, love...) inherent in each person we portray; to lift the veil slightly to reveal the innate excellence and overpowering beauty of the human reality - and not through dialog or argument, but by pushing colored pigments around on a flat surface! How wonderful!! By our concentrated and penetrating gaze upon our subject, and by repeating the gaze, over and over, and finding our own unique ways of capturing those fleeting moments in paint, we can somehow reveal - or at least intimate - something of the eternal, profound mystery that is all of us. And for the viewer - to encourage this type of reflection, if only briefly - what a gift we give to the world. And - if that weren't enough - to be part of such a rich heritage - to follow in the footsteps of Raphael, Rembrandt, Bouguereau, Sargent, and all the great Masters who preceded us...my God, what a noble profession!
David