Pietro
 

This guy has already appeared in this forum as a cherub, and here he is in his more devilish usual self.
I am still making experiments with greys in backgrounds.

I am really proud of having painted this entirely from life.
When Pietro sits, that's the only thing he is actually doing for me: every other part of the body which is not resting on the chair is moving. I can tell you it was quite a challenge !

I still have to make a slight correction on the mouth and the eyebrows to alter his expression which by the end of the sittings became a little desperate. Incidentally this cost me a brand new Nintendo game !

Ilaria

PS A fitting quote from Cezanne complaining to Vollard:
Stop fidgeting! You must sit still as an apple, apples don't fidget !

Ilaria,

This looks like it went successfully inspite of the challenge. It looks very fresh as well -- as if everything was achieved a la primera, like when on a good day that the brush just flows. By the way, I think he looks like you (at least from your previous file foto).

I think my daughter is also going to start charging. She wants to save euros for a new mobile.

Congratulations!

Spectacular, Ilaria!

This is a fine example of how pure aand fundamental your portraits are: The simple three-color composition, elegant , delicious, and satisfying! I love the simple red, gray, and flesh combination. I also love the abstraction of finish, form, and depth, with the gray overlapping the red shirt. You're really good to capture all this from fidgety life! Bravo!

Garth

laria,

Wow! He is amazingly alive and present. I love the ambiguity of figure and ground that exists somewhat in the shoulder, as if he is still being painted and still emerging from the flatness of the canvas. Also, I see a strong resemblance to you. I think you got the better end of the deal because he will get tired of the Nintendo game pretty quickly, but no one will get tired of looking at the portrait.

Alas he does look like me... I can see it more in the portrait that looking at him in real life!
Thanks to all of you for looking and commenting.

The blue in the shirt has two reasons, breaking the outline so that there are not three different areas of local colour, like a jigsaw puzzle, and shattering the illusion of reality to make the picture again look just like a flat surface with paint on top.

I really hope I will be able to paint more from life, it helps enormously for the "presence"!
I also realised tthat in many of my portraits the sitter looks away, and I intend to paint more people staring at me. Keeping a private practice to try out things and learn about your own work is always important.

Ilaria

Beautiful, Ilaria!
I really like the direction that your work is taking.
He looks totally angelic on this one too, but I can imagine the challenge to paint him. So I give you a double Bravo!!

llaria
 

really like the lost and found edges in this one, beautiful work.

Ilaria, I like the way you have developed your skin tones painterly, clean mixtures and with a excellent representation of natural skin texture. Grate job!

Very nicely modelled, Ilaria. Lovely head and lovely expression. And, again, a very good integration of the figure and the background. Your colours here, like in your other new post, are very well considered and work very well together. Lovely work!

Oh Ilaria - I really love this, such presence and freshness and direct response here. I am coming back to study this carefully - what Garth said has really got me thinking about the wisdom of limiting your palette when working from life. (I love the spot of red in your son's hair, I just noticed that.)

Next time you do this I personally would love to see photos of your work in progress, hint hint.*

I wonder if everybody seeing this painting really understands how very difficult this painting must have been to execute. Your accuracy is very impressive. When painting children from life you are really painting the memory of children and you must give them edge space - lots of it - before you nail them down to a boundary in space. (They are even worse than the gardenias I've been trying to paint.) You have succeeded so well here!

*Edit: it just occurred to me how hard this could be, to take a photo every time you take a break while you paint a child... ! Maybe you could pay another child to take the photos. This must be another reason why God has blessed many of us with multiple offspring. :)