Life painting

                               Below are a few recent paintings of mine that I have worked on at the New Britain Art League on Saturday mornings. Check out the New Britain Art Leagues web site of you are interested in joining our group.    http://www.alnb.org/

 Portraiture is an area of art that I have always enjoyed looking at and partaking in. From early on in my life I have been interested in the portraits of Rembrandt, Ribbera, Goya, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Velasquez, and Rubens. Currently I try and continue to pay attention to portraiture and figurative painting. As one of my life painting teachers , Joe Funaro expressed,  that if you could master painting and drawing the figure you can master anything as the figure is one of the most complex forms imaginable. 

  Some of the figurative painters I have been looking at lately are the works of the many great Russain painters such as  Ilya Repin, Ivan Kramskoy, Valentin Serov, Konstantin Korovin , and Geli Korzhev to name a few. All of these artists were on display a few years back at the show titled"Russia" at the Guggenheim. A few other contemporary American painters that I have always enjoyed the work of are Phil Hale, and  Kent Willimas.

   Due to a number of different reasons it has been 6 weeks since I last painted with the New Britain art league.  It is a Saturday morning painting group that I started painting with this past summer.

They are a great bunch of people and  hire some really great models. I plan to make it tomorrow morning so we'll see how that goes after the long break. I hope to post more of what I am up to with the art league as well as some of the other members work here on my blog.

The paintings I am showing here were all done with the New Britain group except for the one nude. Most were done in one 3 hour sitting except for Courtney the girl in the yellow sweater. Personally when it comes to life painting I feel my best paintings are the ones that are completed in the shortest time. There is something fresher and much more alive with them . I find when I work for 2 or 3 days on a portrait they become tired and overworked, losing some of the initial spontaneity .