Self-portrait

[Marina Dieul]

Originally Posted by Thomasin Dewhurst

Sadly, no, I wasn't one of the finalists. I am just having two of my works published in the book they are doing. Congratulations on your being one of the top 75, though. I am very envious.

Thomasin,
I'm really sorry, I read too quickly after a too long day...
Anyway, it's a good news that they chose 2 of your works for the book ! Your work deserves to be known.

[Alexandra Tyng]

I agree that your work deserves to be known--it WILL be known!

[Grethe Angen]

Thomasin, this is so captivating. I have been studying it in depth with great admiration. It looks to me as the whole face is covered by a rubber- mask that can be pulled off by picking up the edge by her ear., and reveal her underlying soft skin. Most remarkable.

[Thomasin Dewhurst]

Marina, thank-you for your encouragement, and also to Alex. You are much too kind! It's very good to be appreciated by such intelligent artists as yourselves. Being here has gone a long way to keeping me going when nothing seems to ever go as I want it to.

Grethe, thank-you very much for your compliments. I am very flattered.

[Margaret Ferguson]

Hi, can I just add my congratulations to the comments already made. The new works on your website and just beautiful. How do you attain this luminosity of skin??
I'd love to know, the last time I saw skin portrayed like this it was on a Klimt painting in Vienna. I was taken aback by the difference from seeing it in life compared to books. The pearlescence was gorgeous, don't know if it was done through glazes

I would love to see your own work in an exhibition.

[Thomasin Dewhurst]

Margaret, thank-you very much. With the skin, I don't often use glazes because I don't really have the patience, but I do have a number of layers of paint from all the workings-out i do before I am finally satisfied. So that creates a kind of depth which is sometimes like polished precious stone i.e it looks as if you are seeing the colours and lines under a glass-like surface. You see the ghosts of earlier painted, partially destroyed, figures and that brings a mystery to the work, as if it were telling its own story and dictating my actions. I love it when I achieve that because I feel I am much freer from my clumsy self-conscious ideas - as though the painting itself has taken over the responsibility of its existence.

[Jan Verhulst]

WOW! This is so strong. Great composition in a personal paintingstyle!

[Thomasin Dewhurst]

Thanks for the encouragement, Jan, Much appreciated.

[Sharon Knettell]

So beautiful Thomasin, sigh!

I can really appreciate this after scraping the paint off yet another still-born head.

[Thomasin Dewhurst]

You're very kind, Sharon. I, too, have been scraping of heads for the
past week and, you know what, I came to the conclusion that I wasn't
dissatisfied with the painted head so much as with being excited about
what was going on in the scraped off head. So I left it in it's scraped
off stage, with just a few marks here and there, and it became an
impression of light of a figure more than an actual solid figure; a sort of
after-image on the retina, but in the normal positive colours. I am
so excited. It opens up a lot of possibilities and since it is all
about light (and not about a solid, rounded object), when an area of paint
just works as paint, even though it may not be describing the body's
contours correctly, I have a very convincing excuse to leave things as
they are. I'll post it when I've done the hand (I am so bad at hands!).

I have looked at your work a number of times when my painting's going
wrong thinking that I'll never get to your level of competency.



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