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Old 06-09-2007, 09:05 PM   #2
Steven Sweeney Steven Sweeney is offline
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If there was an earlier thread on this, my apologies, I haven't been around very reliably. It sounds like you're about to wrap this up.

If there is still time to adjust, my comment would be that there are -- because of value contrast -- six focal points. The face, the white shirt, the two photos and the two objects on the mantle. I would significantly reduce the values of all of those but the face, which is "the" reason for the painting.

My "method" here was to squint at the image, and those six value features all show up as being "equal," though of course they're not all equal in significance in this portrait. Some must be subsidiary.

This may have occurred almost subconsciously, to compensate for the overall dark-valued key of the piece. Could you compensate instead by perhaps lightening, say, the blue area around the fireplace opening -- even possibly introducing some red or ochre tones into it? There's an great deal of monochrome blue and green here that is kind of flattening out the visual effect.

Any chance of a bit of red-yellow glowing coals in the fireplace, perhaps with a whisper of reflected color on the back of the fire well? That flat black rectangle seems to want some accent. And the compositional center seems to need a slight nudge toward the right. Once we get to the photos on the table, there's not much "reason" for the eye to look at the right side of the piece.
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