Portrait of a Young Girl, Pastel,19"/24"

[Garth Herrick]

Originally Posted by Patricia Joyce

Sergio,
I am only a student so all I can say is...

WOW!!!!!

excuse me while I page up and gawk some more!!!

I'm gawking too. This is stunning Sergio! Carlos is right. It is a rare treat to see such sensitive attention to detail realised in such a credible manner. Do you work under a magnifying glass? How razor sharp do you keep those pastel pencils? Your fine motor skills seem super-human. Welcome back, and thanks for sharing this.

Garth

[Marvin Mattelson]

Sergio, you're on fire. Hot stuff!

[John Reidy]

Truly beautiful. What a thrill to just sit and look at. Marvin's right, you're on fire. No pun intended.

[Sergio Ostroverhy]

Thank You John,
Very touched by Your comment
in fact it is hard to do something else when we realize something so precise... So kind of am in lack of inspiration since...

[Sergio Ostroverhy]

Very honored Marvin by your notice.

In fact this pastel was a preparation for a bigger oil portrait...
which still need to be done...

Hope one day be able to learn a little bit more from your technique!

[Sergio Ostroverhy]

Dear Garth,

To answer to your very technical questions:

Magnifying glass
I do not work under magnifying glass, because I'll loose the general perception of the painting.

Pencil sharping
Indeed I sharp extremely well my Faber Castell pastel pencils and especially keep them in a dry place. The sharping of the pencils took me around 50% of the time I've spent on this work... Meanwhile I sharp them, I glaze at the drawing and think about it.

Hand trembling
Shall never start the work before my hands are trembling so the process of the sharpening helps. To finish the eyes had to fix my hands in such a way that only my fingers could move and like in shooting from guns, draw only from Expiration.

Concentration
But to tell the truth, to succeed the eyes like that I had to be in an extreme concentration. I was about to finish a huge 77"/99" group portrait so it was easy to get to a smaller scale. However in order to finish, for 3months...

3 months of total isolation
I had to close myself in Seattle in a basement with just a branch of Cherry tree coming to my window and receive food from a hole outside... Our house is surrounded by (what I call) tropical rain Forest so that monumental American nature and energy from the source (Vulcan's and Indians spirits) helped me to take the shock...

And of course the little squirrels, blue birds and my two little always laughing boys...

[Sergio Ostroverhy]

Hello Carlos,
the Flemish side is too much may be...
I would rather associate this drawing with the Persian Miniature Tradition.

Hello Patricia,
Unfortunately I must consider myself also as a Student yet in Art so comments from other Students are just welcome.

[Linda Brandon]

Originally Posted by Sergio Ostroverhy

[3 months of total isolation
I had to close myself in Seattle in a basement with just a branch of Cherry tree coming to my window and receive food from a hole outside...

Oh Sergio, I sure hope you're joking about this! I think that Michele Rushworth should come around with some doughnuts to push through the hole.

If you lived in Arizona you would only need to leave your pencils out in the sun for 15 minutes to dry them out.

I'm happy to see this thread come up again to see this painting one more time, it's so beautiful.

[Enzie Shahmiri]

Sergio, I have to look that particular Shah's portrait up, the next time I am in Paris. I don't remember seeing it on previous trips, but there is so much to look at at the Louvre that I get visual overload.

I am always amazed at the amount of detail in the miniatures, especially of the post Safavid period and love to someday fuse their intricate application of detail into my own work.

Thanks for the compliment on the web site and Bachi-Bazouk. I have to admit, I was under the spell of 100 different excuses, to avoid working on him. I am at the final stages of cleaning up the painting and that seemes more work than the initial phases. Once I saw your work though, I chided myself for being lazy and went right back to work.
The drive to perfection is an insane love affair. For the longest time you can't stand any sort of seperation and then all of a sudden you can't get away far enough, because you feel you are going to suffocate if you hang around one more second.

[Sergio Ostroverhy]

Hello Lisa,

To become rich and famous is the dream of businessmen and actors.
My dream is however to realize THE PORTRAIT which will shine through ages as Mona Lisa!