38th Painting

Mrs K was in terrible debt to a loan shark who took advantage of her plight. A muslim, and with a fear of her community finding out, she suffered in silence watching her debt go from £1,000 to £10,000 even though she only borrowed once. The loan shark was a 70 year old man in a wheelchair who was eventually convicted.
I've been looking at this image for a few weeks before I finally painted it. There was something uncomfortable about not seeing her face, but her sadness seemed to move towards me through her hands. I had a stronger essence of her because she had hidden her face. This has helped me to have a clearer focus of what type of images I want to work with. This woman's struggle was part of the inspiration for the painting as well as the colours and composition, but primarily it was her struggle. So I've decided to make the theme of 'struggle' a focus for these quick paintings, and this can be interpreted in many ways as most humans struggle daily in one way or another. Health, money, relationships, disasters...the list goes on, but of course a positive outcome can be the result of a struggle so hopefully this will be a feature of the work too.

37th Painting

Very strange painting of Hilary Clinton which took me far too long to do. I found the image in Saturday's Guardian where she was talking about Afghanistan and its potential to look after itself against the Taliban. She's quite a hard looking lady but my painting portrays her like some aging blow-up doll. Scarey.

36th Painting

Face of a boxer, Nottingham born super-middleweight champion Carl Froch was featured in Saturday's Guardian. The article was accompanied by a close-up of the boxer's face and I was drawn to paint it. Cropping a face as close as this gives the edge of the work interesting lines. His chin creates a lovely 'U' shape against the edges and his eyes go right to the fringes of the painting. There's nothing else to look at, you have to connect with the message the face is telling you, and that can be a different message for each viewer.

35th Painting

This painting is of Charlotte, a lovely student in my year. Another student Tom very kindly gave me this image of Charlotte as he has been painting her too. It's actually given me an idea about painting some of the other students, it makes sense, ready-made models. I've been looking at the work of a Chinese contemporary painter called Liu Xiaodong who uses his friends all the time as the models for his work.

34th Painting

This is a very unfortunate painting of Raj Patel, he of the 'chosen one' fame. I say unfortunate because he's actually very handsome in real life and my painting definitely doesn't do him justice. I painted this one upside down and obviously got all the measurements wrong.
He was my first 'male' painting on the blog so I'm really sorry I didn't do him justice.

33rd Painting

Got this image from a film website for the film 'Happy Go Lucky', a Mike Leigh comedy starring Sally Hawkins. This is her in the painting. Again painted it upside down but had lots of problems with the hands so finished it off the right way up. Spent about 30 minutes on it. I've begun a bigger painting, 90cms x 120cms, which is the face of a beautiful woman captured photographically in the style of Vemeer. The whole painting is the face and I've begun it upside down without any pre-drawing of it!! Good advice from a tutor was to do the whole of the first layer just as blocks of colour.

32nd Painting

Two weeks from the election and the political wives are being aired, in more ways than one. I painted 38 year old tory wife Samantha Cameron, of aristocratic heritage and descendent of Nell Gwyn, upside down. I was beginning to take far too long painting these 'quick' pieces and had forgotten the reason why I'd started the activity in the first place which was to 'abstract' a notion of a portrait rather than paint one.
Painting upside down meant I could stop looking at it from the standpoint of trying to make it perfect (as if !?). This one took 15 minutes, still too long but better than the 45 minutes I had gotten into.

31st Painting

This is the other part of the image with the 2 women sitting on the bus.
In some respects the painting is unfinished and yet the 'space' places it in a more interesting environment.
The faceless blur behind her is another passenger.
I need to start painting men!

30th Painting

I found this image while rifling through a few websites, can't even remember which ones now.
The woman was sitting on a bus with another woman who I've painted in the next painting.
The work is definitely 'taking' longer. Of course I'm allowing it to take longer and I'm still thinking about whether this matters or not. I'm inclined to think that the main criteria is that it's a quick painting and not one that I go back to.

29th Painting

Painting of Roopi Farooki (great name) the Pakistan-born author who has lived in England since a baby and writes about "what's under the skin" rather than the colour of it.
I was quite pleased with how this painting turned out hope it caught some of the energy I saw in the face of the photographic image.

28th Painting

Painting is of the mother of 5 year old Sahil Saheed from Oldham who was kidnapped in Pakistan.
The photographic image shows her holding Sahil in her arms with an ecstatic smile on her face.
My painting shows her with an expression which could be read as a mixture of her pain and her happiness.

27th Painting

Found this image on a photographic website I happened upon. There's obviously a huge resource of images for me to trawl through. The paintings are definitely taking longer than 10 minutes though and I'm not too sure how much I want to worry about that. Today's work took me about 30 minutes as I often get interruptions while working. Have bought new paints and changed from zinc white (which wasn't covering very well) to titanium white, which I much prefer. Have decided to do some technical research on pigments and oils (only in dribs and drabs!) in order to build my technical knowledge which is abysmally poor.

26th Painting

Mother and child wait for news of her husband trapped in a flooded mine in Shanxi province in China.
This image reminds me of the The Tempi Madonna by Raphael as the 2 mothers are obviously getting great comfort from their child. The positioning of the figures and background information act as parallels too.
In both images the young child looks out away from the mother as if onto another world.

25th Painting

Image is a posed model for a mental health article in The Observer. Mental health patients particularly children can face long waits for therapy and mental health problems affect one in three families in Britain and are a great cause of misery.
Although the image is posed it has a lot of sensitivity about it. A student I share my studio with made a comment about the way I am portraying the women in these quick paintings, she didn't exactly say but I'm hoping she felt it too was with a bit of sensitivity.

24th Painting

The face of money. German heiress Katrin Radmacher trying to hold onto her £100 million pounds inheritance after divorcing her husband.
A tense face, far from happy. The beautiful white collar on her dress made me think about white paint and how it used to be made from poisonous lead compound.

23rd Painting

Image of a young 18 year old girl stabbed to death in London on the way to a party.
Difficult to follow that sentence with other information. The incident is too shocking to then add relatively unimportant info about the painting. All I will say however is that the painting looks doll-like and helps to focus on the fact that she was only a child.

22nd Painting

Image of Heather Mills' former nanny at a tribunal where she is suing Mills for constructive dismissal.
Struggling at the moment to find time to do the paintings for this blog. Jusy about seven weeks left to get 2 large paintings of 'Crowd Scenes' done and lots of little ones continuing my theme of authenticity. Haven't even begun those yet. Can't contemplate the amount of work needed to get my essays finished. Easter Bank holiday this weekend so got to work on my second essay which is about aesthetic violence. Just read a really good essay by Jonathan Friday called 'Demonic Curiosity', contemplating emailing him.