Mary

Today Trish taught a portrait class. I attended. There were only three of us which made it very intimate and gave each person lots of personal attention. We had a live model to paint. Trish started by talking about portraits and then having us study the model. Mary was dressed as the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland. We each talked about how we felt when we looked at her and what we wanted to express with our portraits. We also thought about whether we wanted our painting to be predominately light or dark, warm or cool, bright or dull and what passages we wanted in the painting. We did a quick drawing of Mary to work out some of our ideas. Then we painted for the rest of the day. She assumed a pose and always returned to the same pose after breaks. This is my unfinished painting. My idea was to show her as goofy but a bit shy. I wanted a generally happy and welcoming feeling to the painting. I will complete the painting in the coming weeks.

Trish surprised the three of us by offering an opportunity to do two more portraits of live models in the next couple of months for not much additional charge. One will be of her husband Tom who is a musician. She wants us to think outside the box as we do the portraits. She plans to have a show during the March first Friday Art Walk of our paintings. She is also doing portraits so there will be twelve paintings to show when we are finished. I was thrilled to have this be the result of my signing up for the workshop. This will be fun and a great opportunity to create and show new work.