Jane and Iona

[Garth Herrick]

Dear Holly, Janel, Patricia, Jane, Chris, Joan, Michele, Josef, Sharon, Mary, Terri, Jean, Marvin, and Denise,

Thank you all so much for your kind praise and encouraging responses! I feel a great debt of gratitude to you all, and your superlative reactions to my painting are a hard act to follow. With all the struggle and challenge I felt I was facing with this painting along with endless revisions and a seemingly unrealistic deadline, I feel truly honored that it is being received so well here, and humbled by all your collective accomplishments as well. On Friday, it was heartily received at a public unveiling in Reading, Pennsylvania, where Governor Ed Rendell and the First Lady, Midge Rendell were able to view it (although I was in Massachusetts at the time attending as a dinner guest at Edith Wharton's home and estate; what a life!). By the way, Jane's family readily shared their approval of it too on Friday!

The fact that you are all so approving is all the more amazing to me when I consider where I was with this painting just twenty-four hours before I delivered it, last Thursday. I am not sure how I did this, myself. The painting was in a state of considerable transition and revision. with a number of major corrections prospectively mapped out in hatches and dashes. The background was pretty much fine, but I ended up repainting all of Jane and Iona (face, suit, hands, scarf, skirt, dog, and more) in the intervening twenty-four hour period, without any breaks (I did not know this was possible to do at such a frenetic pace). What mainly made it possible to pull this off was being able to be absolutely certain that the paint values were exactly where I needed them to be. Once the paint was applied, I made virtually no value adjustments or corrections.

How my system of painting works is complex, and involves (currently) a 52 level gray scale I developed and carefully calibrated over many months of trial and error. This gray scale is archived in individual tubes of paint, from which I have painted small hand held reference scales for value comparison and analysis. Basically I can see in a fleeting glance if any value in the painting needs to be even subtly adjusted, even before everything is placed and indicated, in order to fit with the intended grand scheme of the painting. This gray scale is precisely calibrated with the Lab Color scale used in the reference image in Photoshop. I also have calibrated my printer to produce prints in precisely the value, hue and chroma I intend to paint; so a few handy reference prints really helped out too. The Photoshop reference, the reference prints, the 52-level gray scale and the painting are all simultaneously in perfect calibrated agreement. This does not mean it is better to paint this way than from life. Hardly! But the reality of commuting a great distance for every sitting, and even then being very limited with available scheduling, somewhat dictated a different, more comprehensive approach to finishing this portrait.

Initially I painted much of this painting directly from live sittings, however I found it challenging to maintain Jane's (not to mention Iona's) focus and attention. We did have some wonderful conversations though, after we discovered we hailed from the same neighborhood. This did immensely influence the outcome of this painting, but ultimately I relied mostly on the reference photograph to finish it. In the last hours, I found myself mainly adhering to an alla-prima handling of the paint, melding every transition together wet into wet, until it looked resolved (or resolved enough). Had there been more time alloted, I would have striven for perfection, but I am pretty happy with the finish as it turned out, last Thursday.

Jane gets all the credit for the color scheme, as she selected her own outfit. I was thrilled with this composition from the beginning. I shot several hundred reference photo variations, and out of them all this one really stood out for Jane's family and I. In the color development of this painting, I did not put any thought into rules about arranging warm against cool, or anything else, because I wanted to see this image objectively. The color development simply evolved naturally from observation.

Actually I am not sure what else to add here. I probably have rambled on too long already. I really appreciate the strong support and response from all of you. It feels great!

Thanks again,

Garth