Quick Sketch

Quick Little Kayti, oil on linen on wood, 7 x 5 inches, 2010

From my portrait class last night. Unfortunately I'd left at home the big painting of this model that I have been working on, as well as all my brushes...argh! Ever have one of those days? I did have my paints and luckily a small linen panel...so I raided the supply cupboard and found some old brushes used in the kid's classes (some very bristling bristle brushes used for tempera painting). Despite these handicaps, I think this little dashed-off sketch has a certain something. The model is much prettier than this, of course, but I caught a certain intensity in her expression.

Brave

BRAVE is the theme this week at Illustration Friday. I think this portrait demo I did for a class I'm teaching fits the bill. In several ways:

1) It is brave of me to show an unfinished piece. In fact, a barely started piece. I was demonstrating how to start a portrait and then was kept busy individually assisting my students for the rest of the session.
2) Teachers have to be brave to do demos in general. There is nothing like standing there in front of a class for a little performance pressure! You need to talk, explain what you are doing and answer questions, while at the same time produce something the students will find worth emulating: yikes!
3) This model, whom I have hire frequently, strikes me as a brave soul. Also an artist, she is piecing together a living with modeling and art sales and other part-time jobs: living on the edge.

We artists have to be brave, and also a little strange, to do what we do.

Lily stepped back to get her canvas - so - into perspective. It was an odd road to be walking, this of painting. Out and out one went, further and further, until at last one seemed to be on a narrow plank, perfectly alone, over the sea.

~Virginia Woolf, from To the Lighthouse