4 PM: i've been wanting to paint my grand daughter, manio since i completed my grandson, philip. "when will he paint me?" she asked her dad recently. so i'm painting over gaze 21, which i conider a failed painting, and this is day one of the new gaze 21, which will be a portrait of manio, my beautiful grand daughter.
1:31 PM: sometimes a one day break is beneficial, as it is proving to be with gaze 23. after one day away from my studio, i came in this morning & got right to work on changes i needed to make that were not at all obvious 2 days ago. i think it helped not having it hanging in the house & not looking at it at all.
i discovered that the black & white 19th c. photo i have been using didn't have enough information, or some of the information it does have, the shadows in particular, are simply too sketchy and not enough. so i began referring to a couple of fayum portraits in euphrosyne doxiadi's book, which helped enormously with subtleties of flesh tones and transitions.
in addition, i introduced a yellow tone into her previously blue/white scarf, which i think creates a good balance to the browns of her hair. that said, without the mysteriously suggestive elements of the under-paintings and collaged elements peeking through, this painting could not exist. take for example the hint of green in the collaged map to our left of her head. in person, it introduces a note without which the entire picture surface would be far less resonant.