Prudence at the Firehouse

I asked Prudence to wear what she would choose to wear to be painted. She loves color and we were not disappointed.  I like the richness of this painting. It is an 20 by 20 acrylic on canvas.  Karen

The Whole Room

For my last regular session with this group, I chose a 16 x 20" canvas and oils. I distorted our model to make him fit, then found the figures of Georgianna and Meredith interesting as well. Thanks to Karen, I have ventured into the realm of multi-figure compositions.

Vicki's Paintings

Vicki Salzman has been coming to the group for a long time and will start blogging and posting her work soon. In the meantime I am posting these images of her oil paintings for her. She has been working for many years on her portraiture skills and will describe that process below. I really like the way she uses the picture plane in this group of paintings.

Vicki says, " The figure painting group helped me narrow my selection of paintings to these 4 for our upcoming show in September at the Firehouse Gallery North. These paintings are the result of 6 years of studies with the master San Francisco portraitist, Bob Gerbracht. Bob's method includes learning to do a precise rendering of the model's face, before once can begin to add color. Color is then applied in a relational way. Each painted area is influenced and affected by the color next to it: background to hair, hair to shadow-side of face, shadow-side to lit area of face. Highlights come last. It is a very methodical way of painting, but one can get remarkably good results."

Deborah's Drawings

Deborah has been coming to the figure group for many months and drawing with pencil. She is going to start blogging soon but for now she gave me these four drawing to post for her. They are all fairly recent.  They  all show a good likeness of the models she drew.  And I think they also project a lot of feeling.

Prudence

For many weeks now, I've been trying to break out of my typical

portrait style. I wanted to do something less literal, more expressive, abstract, daring. Most

of my efforts in that direction have disappointed me, but this painting of Prudence is finally a step in the right direction.