[amarilliart.com]

I don’t know if it’s because in autumn and winter I have to wake up earlier than in the summer, and it’s such a long process to get used to it, or if it’s because it’s harder to get out of bed anyway because of the cold, but in this season I am particularly attached to my little morning vice, a good cup of deliciously smelling espresso coffee. Or perhaps it is because of my low blood pressure ? (coffee is a bunch of toxines but it has one thing, it puts life into a zombie, like the one I am in the morning).

Anyhow, that morning I was also feeling discouraged by all the half-finished pieces that stare at me in a reproaching way, reminding me how little time I am dedicating to them, and I wasn’t feeling like working on a killed hare at all. So that’s how I decided to create a little happy encouraging piece that would get the spark back in me! I hadn’t any plans to start with, just a little technical experiment in mind, and that is how my mood took its shape on the wood panel I found around!

Well, this is only the work-in-progress, since it’s not totally finished yet (and that’s why I show it without colours for now ^_^).

In the last years I’ve had the occasion to work a lot on faces and portraits. I have always enjoyed making portraits, but lately I have discovered that it’s one of the things I like to do best ! I am very lucky because more and more persons are asking me to paint their portrait. On one hand this is slowing me down in my own projects, on the other hand it makes me really happy. Of course having just had a baby I don’t work so fast, but this is not a problem since I work with oils, and with this technique it is ok to give some time to the colors to dry before I apply another layer.

Speaking about layers and technique, I have developed my own way to paint what we in italian call “incarnato” (the skin colour) with different layers (if I find the time, I will document this in a future post for the last painting I made for Bodil & Rune, coming soon on the website), but this time as I mentionned before I will try a new technique for the painting I’m beginning now, Mara’s portrait commissionned by Fabrizio, where I will use both oil paints and white egg tempera. For now I’m only at the sketch !

Now that I have finished my pet portrait for the swap show, and other things I was working on, I have started with a commissionned portrait. This time it is not for a child but for a grown-up woman, the sister of a very dear friend of mine.

The process is very stimulating and funny : she sent me some pictures of her, then she gave me some interesting inputs about what she’d like me to integrate in the portrait to reveal parts of her personnality. Between those elements are a poem, and things she likes and which she identifies with.
Some of those elements can even be seen in her life choices.

At this point I made a “synthesis” of the elements and let intuition guide me to produce a sketch. In this case, she is convinced that she will like my style, so she would prefer the final painting to be a surprise.

That’s why I just showed her the pose “I put her on”, and asked her a photo in that pose, but I didn’t show her the whole of the sketch (which I cannot publish, not to spoil the surprise!).

I must say that like to do strictly realistic portraits, as sometimes I am asked to, but I find this kind of portraits funnier and so much more stimulating!

This because there is a personal interaction with the subject to be portayed, and with its interiority (not only with the physical part of the person). Besides, it allows more room for my personal creativity and interpretation.

I call those “fantasy portraits”, not necessarily because they are in Fantasy STYLE, but because they involve the use of my own intuition and fantasy.

Perhaps I could find a better and more accurate definition for them…maybe I should call them “intuitive portraits”? or “portraits with a soul”? or maybe they’re simply “my own style portraits”

Click to enlarge photos.

A collaboration (size is very large, over 2 meters long) in typical Senese/tuscan style:

To be continued…..