Goddess Series

Brenda as Siren

Vauhini Vara as Venus

Mistress of Beasts

Select women friends and my daughter agreed to model for a new series with the working title “My Goddesses”. This marked the beginning of my period of painting others besides myself, as I attempted to adapt my working method to incorporate elements from life, including working from a mannequin set, landscape, and figure, while utilizing photo references for the elements that I could not obtain in the studio.

I resist painting from photographs (finding so much more interesting the act of translating the three-dimensional perceived world to a flat canvas over “copying” another flat image seen by the camera’s solo “eye”). To make the photographs more interesting, I incorporated dramatic and unrealistic lighting. I illuminated my willing models with somewhat garish and surprising light, hitting opposite sides of their faces with contrasting green and pink beams of light. This served to accent the theatricality, the artifice, and the unreality of the scene. It also made my photo references more interesting to adapt to paint, where light itself is a defining narrative and descriptive element. I used the same light sources on the mannequin/still life sets and painted these objects from observation.

For “Vauhini Vara as Venus”, I manipulated the light further by augmenting color saturation in the landscape source photos I took on a trip to Australia, using these for the setting of the figure.

I uncover the narrative and identify the figures, slowly, as I paint and build the set in a back-and-forth process.