Costa, Market Street, York

My 23rd painting is a self-portrait, another in my UK Series. A few people have liked this one. One of them applauded my courage in tackling a self-portrait, saying that those aren't easy. Oddly enough, part of why I tackled it was because I expected it to be not too hard. I can't think offhand of an artist who never did a self-portrait, so I figured that these were simply The Done Thing® and it was more or less expected that everyone can do it. Glad I didn't know going in that it wasn't easy, or that might have scared me away!

Bliss

I decided to share my seventeenth painting here because it has a bit of an interesting story to it.

This is based on a photo of author-slash-polymath blissmorgan, a friend for a good few years now. How her picture came to be a painting happened like this:

I was looking at my acrylic paints, and I was struck by the way that all my cadmium paints -- Cadmium Red Medium, Cadmium Orange, and Cadmium Yellow Light -- look like nothing found in nature. It's even a challenge to blend them with other paints and mix a colour that doesn't still have a whiff of that plastic artificial feel to it. Suddenly I thought that it might be fun to try using those colours, full blast, to depict something that absolutely is natural and organic -- I felt that the tension might give the painting an interesting energy.

Didn't know what to paint, though.

So I spent a while browsing through photos, looking for inspiration... and when I came across this, it struck me that the tones in the face would lend themselves to my cadmium colours very easily. So I went for it, and ended up pretty satisfied with the result, more abstracted than what I usually do. Hoping to find an avenue for more adventurous colour again, sometime in future....