Having finished the portrait of my wife, Lira Kay, I thought I would write about the second part of the portrait process, the creation of the painted portrait.

We started out in Part I: the drawings.  And here are the various stages of this portrait.  In total, it was 6 sittings, 5 of which are shown.

State 1

I find it disturbing to see portraits that are started and stopped in one session.  The idea of getting it absolutely right so quickly seems to show two things: that there is an ‘absolutely right’ and that it would be so easy to find.  I think the portrait process is a journey, and my journeys involve all sorts of turns and fumbles and questions.

State 1 here is an example of that.  The skin tone has little to do with the hair tone here, which in turn has little to do with the background.  The heaviness of the skin tone sheds light on the importance I place on the face.

State 2

This is about making the tones even and trying to find my darling’s face!  The tones now give the impression of a head rather than a face, and the colors of the light and shadows are being worked out.

Besides this, the ‘drawing’ is made concrete, so in future changes I will be able to modify the drawing with established colors for her features. This is an important part of the process of painting.  The continual switch between abstract and concrete to take advantage of each.  In this case, the abstract use of colors for light and shade lead to a concrete decision about which colors to use to establish the drawing.

State 4

We skipped one.  When I finished it, I didn’t want it recorded.  In a word it was soupy.  But state 4 is interesting in that it overcompensates.   I was elated with this state, until I let it sink in over the course of a couple of weeks, at which point I realized I had it completely wrong.  It was a great portrait of somebody else. Which leads us to…

State 5

Well that’s not her either, but the important thing was that I could destroy state 4, the previous state, which I was attached to but knew was wrong.  Remember that between these attacks there was anything from a few days to a few weeks.  And so the final state was an attempt to take all that I had from the other states and perform the miracle of the portrait.

The final portrait

And there it is: a portrait of my wife, and one which I will always treasure, even though i can see there are a few flaws here and there (I am writing several months since completion).  On the whole it is my best portrait to date.

Going back to Part I of this essay, what I love about the process of portrait painting is that it is a synthetic process.  The drawings from Part I are all in this final state.  In fact, the painting was a way of capturing all the drawings in one work.  Looking back over Part I, you’ll see which parts of the drawings I like: the character, the composition, the feeling.  These are all incorporated into the final painting, but the painting has an additional something lent to it by the colors.  This atmosphere is difficult to capture without color and it is for this reason paintings exist.

More in Portraits, Work.