Sunday, October 17, 2010

Week 6 -Fall-Self Portrait

This is my self portrait for the student show which will open along side or in conjunction with the Narcissus in the Studio: Artist Portraits and Self-Portraits exhibition. I painted this very rapidly over the last two days while splitting time between home and my regular commercial work. Now it just has to dry by Monday! I did use a good amount of Liquin Fine Detail in the mix so i think i should be all set.

It was fun last night as most of my Dirty Palette buddies were also in the studio painting their self portraits for the show as well. It's great painting with other painters as I feel you get a lot of energy flowing back and forth--you share and feed off of what everyone else is doing at the same time.

This is the first self portrait I have done since the small one I did over a year ago in my summer portrait painting class with Al Gury. I've learned and grown a lot as a painter since then, I also think taking the portrait class at Incamminati with Kerry Dunn has helped too.I also looked at a lot of work by Velasquez, Sargent and Zorn to study edges, paint applicaation, etc., I didn't want to get too tight and kill the energy, yet I did want to get in good details.

We have reached the halfway point in the semester already- it's cooking off fast--which is really fine by me, I really think I just want to be done with any more classes and just do my own thing. We are going to be picking our Spring classes in the next week and the spring will be easier schedule wise for me since I won't have as much teaching. All-in-all a very good week!

2 comments:

Kaz Mayeda said...

Outstanding structure. I especially like your goal of: "..I didn't want to get too tight and kill the energy, yet I did want to get in good details.." And you couldn't do much better than Zorn for edges. I hope it dries in time for your show.

william wray said...

nice MikE - crazy work on the shirt -- I've never been able to finish a self-- myself --don't me?