Summer posthumous commission

[Tom Edgerton]

I painted several commissions this summer, and this is the one I feel best about, mostly because it was the most difficult to pull off.

The composition was built from a head taken from a family vacation photo, a model posed on my front porch here in North Carolina, and an environment culled from hundreds of views I shot of the family home in Alabama. Everything was chosen for consistency in the direction of light.

There are the usual compromises. I looked at probably fifty years of photos of my subject, and his expression never varied. I also originally sketched him holding a coffee cup, but the family raised camellias on the side (they have a variety named after them), and the blossom figured into a family narrative that was too compelling to ignore.

All in all though, I'm fairly satisfied with the result.