The last time we talked about painting, I was exploring landscapes and still lives. Let’s see what’s been happening since then.

Well, I decided to try my hand at portraits. First, let me say that while I love portraiture, I have always struggled with it. I can draw a basic cartoon face well enough, but realistic portraits are challenging. Even so, I have been saving inspiration pictures on my phone for a while; I am drawn to interesting faces, not necessarily conventionally pretty ones. Strong features, memorable angles and lines. One of the portraits I’ve been wanting to do for a while was Grace Coddington. Initially, I wanted to make an embroidered portrait, but that never came to pass. Instead, I decided to try a painting.

Here was the photo I chose for inspiration:

I started this picture on a whim, and put brush to canvas without doing a sketch beforehand. I have never attempted to paint without a guiding sketch before, much less a portrait at that. It was kind of terrifying but also compulsive. I did the rough “draft” of the face in about 30 minutes and … it wasn’t as bad as I feared it might be.

The painting ended up taking about a week to complete, in small spurts, and while it’s by no means very good, I felt it was a decent first effort.

Rather than jump into another portrait right away, I took a detour and tried a new approach to landscapes. A more abstract, colour-focused approach. I liked the results a lot.

Then I ran into a creative rut. I tried a few pieces that didn’t work no matter what I did. I felt stuck and very frustrated. It was my first experience of self-perceived failure since I started painting, and it was very demoralizing. Eventually, I decided that the only way to move forward was to chuck the pieces that weren’t working (they were too heavy on the texture to try to paint over) and start fresh. An article on Edith Sitwell caught my eye, and I decided to make her my next portrait subject.

I love how this one turned out, even though my mom did ask if I was painting Morticia Addams. To be honest, I don’t care if it looks more like Anjelica Houston than Edith Sitwell. I want my portraits to have atmosphere, and I think this one has it. I found it a spot in my library, and I love how it looks there:

Then I went back to the drawing board again and decided to do a still life again … but in my own way. A contributing factor in my earlier creative rut was the fact that I was looking online at how other people were painting the kinds of things I wanted to paint, but was having trouble making that work for me. For this painting, I found inspiration in my own work – namely, the floral embroidery work I did a while back. Remember this blazer:

I did a semi-abstract still life based on those flowers and using a colour scheme that just spoke to me.

I was pretty pleased with how this turned out; so much so, that I decided to find it a spot in the house too. I took a couple of my paintings (plus an original acrylic I recently thrifted at Value Village) and updated the gallery wall in the master bedroom.

I love the splashes of colour, and I am thinking that there are a few more prints that I want to replace with original art.