You better Belize it

[Mike McCarty]

Doreen,

I think it all depends on where you are positioned along the experience path. Before committing to portraits, I painted a fair amount of landscapes. There is a great deal to learn by doing that. For me, it gave me an understanding of how paint goes from the tube to the canvas. It taught color harmony and composition. I learned all these things and more from landscapes, still lifes and just slopping paint on the canvas and watching how it sticks there. I probably discount those lessons a little too much.

Although valuable information, I don't think it prepare me completely for painting aunt Edna's hair, Amber's teeth, or getting convincing skin tones. These are the things I need. Perhaps it prepared me to begin.

The "trap" that kept me from those goals was allowing those features to become too small at the expense of an interesting tree, bridge, flower or lapping water. I don't mean that these things aren't valuable. Life would be pretty boring without them. What I'm saying is that my beautiful lapping waters will never carry the day for my mediocre portrait. But, if I create a beautiful painted image of a person, you can bet that I will come up to speed on that lapping water after a couple of weeks. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that learning to paint portraits well is difficult. Especially without instruction.

A few years ago, being frustrated in regards to these very issues, I decided to teach myself to create artful portrait photo images. I still believe that the camera can teach so much in the area of composition. I know some think that using photos is just wrong. I'm not going to argue that point here. It seemed clear to me that I could not make artful paintings from common snapshots. For me in my space and in my time this was my answer.

Just an aside, I think the girl in the swimsuit is a beautiful image. The image of the beautiful girl in a swimsuit is so common. We get bombarded with this image it seems (maybe it's just the places I'm hanging out). It's almost too pass