Marie, alla prima... mostly

[Rob Sullivan]

Seems as if my art has been constrained to teaching demos these days. Well, the semester ended last week, so I'm hunkering down for a month of serious painting... whatever "serious" means.

Marie is 16" x 12", oil on (yuck!) canvas paper. Yes, I know - why canvas paper?!?! Well, like I said, it was a demo. Why waste a good panel? Anyway, I challenged my portrait students to move away from the anchor of the underpainting and launch into an alla prima. I showed them the approach, which is very Sanden-like; big doses of chroma initially, then wet-into wet building light and knocking it back to specific flesh tones.

I wanted to challenge myself, too, as I'm not a big practicioner of direct painting - and I stepped up the challenge further by moving off to one side for a flatly-lit profile. Fortunately, Marie has some wonderful Roman features and Mediterranean skin tones to work with. I requested the peach sweater and she brought a similarly- colored silk scarf to match. It compressed the palette, which was a further challenge. I think my students wanted my head for that choice. They did all right, though.

This was about three hours, all told, with some minor tinkering at home to shift the hues more subtly and consolidate the background tone.