Portraits

Even though my preference is for landscape painting, I have occasionally dabbled in still life and portraiture. The skills needed for a good painting are applicable to these two subjects. It is really just a matter of good drawing skills.

Most portraits are done in oil or pastel because of their plastic natures. Very few watercolor painters feel confident enough to attempt a portrait, which demands more exactness in the matter of getting a likeness. Furthermore, the nature of watercolor lends itself to a looser, more spontaneous kind of brushwork.

When painting a portrait, I usually begin, not with an outline of the head, but with the dominant eye. Then I measure the distance to the nose or the eyebrow. Then from the nose to the mouth, etc.

In my profile, I mentioned that I used to teach high school literature. Ernest Hemingway is one of my favorite novelists. Every year when I began the unit on a Hemingway novel, I would bring in this portrait of "Papa". I also painted characters or scenes from the novels: bullfighting in Spain, trout fishing along the Irati River, or the young soldiers in several of his novels.

In this way I could combine my two great loves: painting and reading.