lula

Watercolor on Saunders Waterford 350gsm 40" x 26".

this pose is from our session last spring. i asked for a simple standing pose.

the background started blue but turned into yellow green, struck through with magenta streaks marked with backruns. that was striped with a transparent yellow, producing a kind of vibration around the figure.

the figure is entirely in red, yellow and green, mostly siennas and browns, quinacridone gold and chromium oxide green. blue is the cutout (background) color and yellow is the color of the palest skin.

the extended rectangle behind the figure indicates how much her legs were stretched in photoshop to produce canonical figure proportions. this renders the figure idealization as a spatial dislocation.

i may do this one again with different pigments.

april's hands

Watercolor on Arches CP 300gsm, 10" x 14".

i've started work on the series of april images, which she posed with her son.

april did several hand poses, and this is the first i have painted.

one of the poses has her hands overlapped, fingers interlaced and radiating. i tried to draw the image several times and failed, and i tried painting it on a very large format and failed. the image has a kind of intensity that is hard for me to realize.

siena

watercolor on Arches CP 300gsm, 14" x 10".

another siena pose from the sessions earlier this year; she is crouching on the studio bed and looking into winter sunlight.

the main color problem was rendering her pale skin in shadow.

everything here is several layers, the painting has a "worked" quality and pigment granularity somewhat like nolde.

the aim was not to render her back with anatomical accuracy but to give it a kind of dark shimmer or translucency.