Oil on linen, 22" x 17 1/2". [As with my other post here, done from life.]
This is an important piece for me in that it was a kind of "breakthrough" in my figurative work. In this case, "breakthrough" is a nice euphemism for "I made a whole lot of mistakes doing this!"
This actually started out as an alla prima but it quickly went south. I loved the pose and setup, though, and I felt I had at least captured the gestural quality of Rachel. She is a great model: she's very comfortable posing; she has a lovely and limber figure, enhanced by her devotion to yoga; and her features are distinctly unique with her aquiline nose and bow lips. I decided to "save" the painting because of these factors.
Little did I know how long this would take. My shadows got too opaque, for one (this is something I have striven to change as the years pass). Also, I had the figure and head rendered when I realized that I had altered the position of her head as it related to her shoulders. Try as I might, no amount of fancy painting could fix this. I wasted a 3-hour session in total denial. Rachel went home and I sat there looking at the thing, knowing it was wrong. What to do.
I remembered Sargent's painting,
Mr. and Mrs. John Phelps Stokes. He painted Mrs. Stokes' head something like 12 times, scraping it out with each unsuccessful try. At that moment I thought myself arrrogant and stupid to think that I couldn't or wouldn't do the same at least
once! I let her head dry, and I sanded it off. I'm glad I did.
Rachel models for a few painters here in Maine, as well as various drawing groups, and is a painter herself. As I'd said - her features are unique, so capturing her character took a lot of careful study. Towards the end of what I thought may be our last session, Rachel looked at it and told me that out of all the paintings and drawings people have done of her, this painting looked the most like her. So I stopped, because that's what I was going for.
Threaded Mode
