Proud, in Color

I scored a few points in the contemporary portrait class Thursday, by painting from my own charcoal drawing titled “Proud”, which I featured in last week’s blog.  Keeping it loose, in the spirit of Caroline Anderson, was what I was after here.   I don’t know whether to call it a “work in progress” or an experiment.  I suppose if I go back to it to correct my mistakes, it was a WIP.  If I let it be and move on to another, it was an experiment.  Overall, I am not unhappy with my progress in losing my edges.  It takes a bit of acclimatizing.  I will get to a point that I think looks pretty good, but then I think I can make it a little better, and in the course of trying to make it better, I make it worse.  I’ll bet that sounds familiar to the artists reading this blog.  And that’s how I ended up ruining the head.  Sigh!

From Saturday Life Group, I could not decide which of two drawings I preferred to share with you, so I will share both.

Layabout

Layabout is a conventional, yet disturbing pose, which was hard to compose on the page.  My favorite part is her head.

Twist of Limbs

In Twist of Limbs, I got more aggressive with my charcoal, and I was enjoying the result.  However, you probably can’t see that her legs are crossed.  There must be a word for a section of an image that contains all the action compacted into one small area.  An area of concentrated complexity.  I took it on as a challenge, which is probably why I attacked the image more aggressively than usual.

You may or may not care to know that I finally attacked my big Mount Washington Bike Race painting.   I finished sketching in the major figures, leaving additional figures to the end where the composition may call for them, and I applied some paint, thinly.

Work in Progress

After finishing this sort of underpainting, my plan is to use this painting to experiment with some new techniques,  lost edges and palette knife.  Palette knife should be particularly useful in building the rocky surface of Mt. Washington.

Aline Lotter is currently exhibiting:

at the Gallery at 100 Market Street in Portsmouth; at the Sage Gallery in Manchester; at the Hatfield Gallery in Manchester; at the Bartlett Inn in Bartlett; at the Red Jacket Inn in North Conway; at the McGowan Fine Art Gallery in Concord; and at her studio by appointment.

Link to website: www.paintingsbyaline.com