Kimbal and Elisa 29 May 2016

It is Saturday 29 May and I am on my way to the final live model painting session of this season. This week my bike decided to break. That bike has got plenty of repairs over the year so I was hesitant for how to proceed. Should I repair or should I buy a new? The repair was going to be 135 euro and a new bike 800 euro. The repairmen in the shop said I could make up my mind during the day because he would order new things the day after and then start the repair. I went ahead for repair but later I changed my mind. So I went back to the bike repair shop to the same afternoon to “cancel” the repair. They were fine with that but not like the man had promised they had already started working on the bike. They had already cut the chain and started the disassemble. So I had to walk my bike home. During that walk I came to conclusion that sometimes I make good decisions with bad implications. The need to fix things can actually break them first. That same evening, I ordered a new bike on the Internet. It will arrive in a couple of days.

So now I am bike less. Because of this I had to take bus to the train station today. So because I don’t know exactly how the bus rides on Sundays I decided to come a bit early to have some buffer in my traveling. That worked out too well because I managed to catch one train earlier. Everything is the same but slightly different.

Since it is the final session I had the idea I would give Saskia a present. Specifically, a TL tube for her broken artist lamp. Since I already got one I thought I just bring it to her. I have searched everywhere in my house for my spare lamp. It is not to be found. It is as if my house is a black hole. Things just disappear. Really disturbing. Perhaps I can use my “spare time” in my travel scheme to buy her flowers or some delicious things for her kids. Perhaps that is a better idea. Yes, let’s do that.

Last year when the final session came I think I was a bit frustrated that there would be no more painting on Sundays. This year I feel the same but I also have the feeling it is going to be good to have a break from the model painting sessions. A result of the feeling last year was that I started on porting my blog to a new platform. That work has taken a lot o my spare time. I am almost done with the porting project. It is going well. The blog porting project is so big it feels it will be nice to be finished with that too.

Now I arrived in Amsterdam.

Today there were two models. It was a nice couple Kimbal and Elisa. Kimbals origin in was Dutch/Irish and Elisa was north Italian. Their plan was to do modeling sessions together.

The artists today were Saskia, Françoise and me. Because it was the final I bought a box of chocolate for Saskia and her husband Niels. Francoise had brought delicious cakes with orange and coco’s. When the session had ended we celebrated the finale with snacks and a glass of wine. There will be no more regular model sessions until half October. That is a really long time! Perhaps there will be something in September but I will hear more about that later.

Today I arrived unprepared to the model session. I had not figured out that it was going to be two models. Well I heard Saskia say that but I had not made a plan based on it. Then ten minutes before the session I am reading an email from Saskia where the word portrait is used but that was not entirely the case. It was a regular model session but it was with two models. That was nice indeed but I was not prepared. That did not matter much that I had not prepared myself. There is not so much preparations needed. The models took their position and I was confronted with what they had decided to do.

The models had already decided how they would pose. I made the joke that these models also were choreographs. That was nice too. There is a kind of dilemma in telling how the model is going to pose for long poses like these. For a short pose it does not matter so much. For a long pose it is good if the model chooses the pose themselves. It is a bit of challenge. Some models know very well what they can do and others make a pose giving a bit of a challenge. At this studio we are fine with short stretching breaks and every 30 minutes there is a longer break. In general, we are nice to our models.

Well with two models it is the best if the models themselves knows what they can do. These two got into a rather complex intertwined pose. We had not been able to ask them to do such a complex pose but now they came up with this themselves so that was totally fine.

I decided to make the drawing really quick. I made the drawing more for the feeling of composition than to figure out if I got all the lengths correct relative to each other. I measured very little. Later on I made the conclusion that many parts of the painting are good within themselves but the part under the arms should probably be higher and some legs below should be longer. Well that is the result of not taking the time to properly measure all limbs on beforehand.

In this respect todays painting because an exercise of colors and style rather than details. That is okay. Especially with two models. A painting with two models is more than double the work. Now I made a painting in one 3-hour session with breaks so that is a painting done at double speed. That is only possible if one skips the thorough decision making and go for execution. So that is what I did.

That’s it. Todays painting session was the last painting during the 2015 - 2016 season at studio de Stoker in Amsterdam. Great!