For my art show in May, 2021, I’ve been returning to ideas that I did years and years ago. In the next couple weeks, I’ll probably post about my London traing portraits and how they connect with what I’m doing now.

This week, I want to highlight some of the elements of what’s going on with this painting. Last time, I had Jonathan lit from his right side, where I put the most texture and all of the glass. I used glass as mostly representative of light shapes, even though the shapes didn’t correspond to the color of the thing lit. Brown skin doesn’t turn yellow in the sun- but, it does change shade. Representing shade as color is part of the goal of this series.

Unfortunately for any of the goals I started out with, I’ve been cheating to make the paintings work. In this painting, some of the glass is light, but then again some of it is color. Especially the orange glass- it’s there to fill in spots that just seem to need glass. I think I’ve reverted to what I usually do, which is to create a progression by a sense of feel.

I’m going to try to take pictures of the next portrait people. This is going really well, I think, so I might double down and start a second portrait. In the meantime, I’m trying to do a weirder painting about a giant monster face eating a chess set I’ve been hacking apart. I have a lot of chess set ideas that never all the way surface, so this is an attemp to make at least one of them happen.

Below is the entire progression of this painting: