Grand mother

[Chris Saper]

Dear Luca,

I think you have many positive things going here, although I can't underscore strongly enough Michele's comment - flash photos, like the source in this portrait, obliterate nearly all of the essential visual information you need to do your best.

The lights in your image seem to be pretty compressed, so that the shirt collar appears to be uniformly white, as do the whites of the eyes. Modeling with value and color will help make both more three-dimensional in appearance. The wrinkles in the front of your Grandmother's throat are so strongly painted that it's hard to overlook them - this is another temptation with a front-on flash, that you will paint everything that the photo shows you, just because you can see it in the photo. The highlights in the eyes are another example.

I think that your photo is giving you false information about skin color as well, as the different skin tones look more like varying shades of the same brown, rather than incorporating the subtle change sin color and temperature that you would see in life.

I very much like the attitude of your Grandmother, and the placement on the canvas. I think that the best thing you can do for your next portrait is to work on getting your resource material under your control so that you have the opportunity to do your best work - it's hard enough to paint what you see, and impossible when you can't see things at all. By spending as much time as possible working from life, I think you will gain much skill in interpreting your photographs.

Good luck, look forward to seeing your next work!