Sargent Student in Paris - James Coutts Michie

As I mentioned previously, this painting was created by James Coutts Michie, a fellow art student with John Singer Sargent of Carolus-Duran's Paris studio.

Unfortunately, this used to be a much larger painting. Someone in the family, at some point, decided to cut it down to better suit their modern decor, so now it measures 24 x 18.

I will post a close-up of the features soon.

Perette - Profile in Oil

Perette was a very interesting model who is also a writer and techie - my son was very impressed to read that she developed UNIX kernel components as he is an avid user of Linux.

Photo Credit: Loree Harpole

Marisa - Painting in Progress

This lovely young model is an artist who designs the most delightful brass jewellery!

Keely

Beautiful Keely, wearing a fur stole belonging to Joanette Egeli.

I still need to finish the earrings and add the necklace, and a few more subtle changes here and there.

Liz

Liz, a very attractive woman, and mother to Lauren, was a pleasure to paint.

Lauren

Lovely Lauren - a gorgeous young woman! I still have a few changes to make, but this is almost finished.

I was also privileged to do a portrait of her very good looking mother, Liz, seen in the next post. They both like to wear black!

Elena

It was a pleasure painting this lovely young woman mainly from life sittings. She is an artist herself, a dancer and has a sweet, sunny disposition. As a senior in high school, she is looking forward to a bright future, whatever path she chooses to take.

Frank J. Reilly wash-in method

I prefer to call this method a "wipeout" because it better describes how you do it and because it sounds more fun!

I plan to keep this as an example of this method of starting a painting and use the color study I also did from life (which I really don't want to share as it is pretty wonky, being done in an hour or so) to create a full color painting.

Portrait Society of America - Cecilia Beaux Forum Mentoring Program

Recently I received some great news - I have been chosen to participate in a mentoring program, which is a project of the Cecilia Beaux Forum, a subgroup of The Portrait Society of America.

The program was developed to support the aesthetic and technical growth of female figurative artists. The program starts on October 1 and will last 9 months.

I am very excited about this opportunity!

Painting from Life - Portrait Society of Canada open studio session

This young man, Anton, is an opera singer.

He has quite a distinguished air, even at his young age and it was fun painting his portrait!

Allison

I had to repaint much of this today after looking at it for a long time and finally realizing where I had gone wrong. Sometimes it takes a lot of looking to really see where the problem lies!

I neutralized the background and lowered the shoulders a bit to give a more elegant appearance to the portrait.

Adding the necklace was fun! You can really go wrong with jewellery if you try to paint it with a lot of detail, just a few fine strokes and a couple of highlights and you are done. Examining some of Sargent's work in this regard is always illuminating.

Yet another work in progress . . .

All of these paintings were started from sittings.

I am making a few adjustments to the likeness after the fact but trying to maintain the freshness from the initial painting session.

Linda

This is looking much more like my subject, but I can still see lots of changes I need to make!

Sunny

24x36 inches
Oil on Linen