Arches CP 300 gsm, 14" x 10".another image (and my last for the year) from the siena sessions. i was posing siena on a wooden bench near the end of our time, when she simply broke the rhythm and slumped down to something more comfortable.
all the image colors are some flavor of red and green mixture. the only blue in the image is in her eyes, and in the window puncturing the dark background.
this painting will probably be my contribution to the 2008 invitational show at the graton gallery in graton (sonoma county) california.
on the theme of painting design ... there are several planes of lines wedged into one another, with the figure as the only fluid form in the image. most of this is happenstance ... the ladder was used to shoot her from above on the brown couch, then pushed aside for other tasks ... the shadows result from the late hour on a fall day ... the intruding white door was incidental to framing the figure ... the floor material was chosen because it is durable and impervious to wet. the planes are shards of my life and the moment.
however, once i've chosen a support format (here, 14" x 10"), i try to crop or position the image to correspond to the format proportions -- the lines produced by halving and/or squaring the width or height dimensions, as shown in the second image at right. thus, her eyes and back correspond to one of the horizontal divisions and her knuckles to another, while her left forearm is aligned with a vertical division and her back leg with another.
this division of labor works for me: trust the viewfinder and the chemistry of the moment to capture a complexly composed image, then use the format proportions to give it stability and strength.
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