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Superb portrait, Alex! You have such mastery of your technique and ideas, and in this one I feel like you're riding on a wave of confidence and assuredness. To me, this painting is a pillar of contemporary portraiture making you definitely one of the very top portrait painters around.
A real masterpiece.
I have just come back from 3 1/2 weeks of vacation overseas with family which seemed like a lifetime of intense living and learning, and came back feeling like I wanted to shake off all the things that were hindering me in my art and seeing this one of yours was such an inspiration. A lot of art I saw in this recent trip seemed to be more in the line of art therapy - a getting-out of personal feelings and a kind of punching-the-cushion gestural mark-making. After watching Kenneth Clark's "Civilization" (a lovely revision of art history) I was struck by the professionalism of the painters of the past. A dedication to work and to service rendered to society and humanity. Art is a privileged career, but it is not a society-supported psycho-therapy. To have an income - to take people's money for the services we provide - there must be a respect for the clients, and so there must be a balance between belief and expression of in our own ideas, and a professional attitude toward the hard labour of recreating those ideas in paint. A gestural mark doesn't make it by itself - it needs a lot of painterly explanation. In the end we are workers like everyone else, and should be.
Your painting is a very fine example of this - the balance between original and passionate ideas and a dedication to the unavoidably hard work of creating them.
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