Violet 4 February 2018

It is Sunday 4 February 2018. It is a beautiful morning, and I am sitting on the luxury intercity service train from Almere to Amsterdam. Today I will be painting Violet. I hope she will be sitting because last time she was half lying and it would be great with a sitting posture this time. We will see.

Last week there was no life painting session. Instead, I went to my favorite museum Singer in Laren, and I blogged about it as well. Last Thursday I held a workshop about drawing a portrait with likeliness at the aquarelle club. It was well received, but I had no time to draw or paint anything for myself.

All in all, I have been busy with other things than painting, so it is about time to hold a brush today.

When I introduced the subject of drawing with likeliness at the aquarelle club, I started by talking about why we are doing this. I reasoned that if we look at our paintings year after year, we perhaps ask ourselves about our choice of motive. In the aquarelle club, you find that we make landscapes, still-lives, animals but not so much of humans. Why is that? Perhaps because it is difficult with portrait and the human figure? Since we are humans and social animals we, and anyone looking at our pictures, likes to see images of also humans. Human motives have a place in the paintings of an artist.

This reasoning answers a question why to do something. Many times we are not busy with the "why" and that is fine as such at some point we need to reconnect with the reasoning of why we do things.

Today there was a new artist, Denise, that had not been painting for many years, perhaps five years. She remembered me though. Today the artists were Ron, Tom, Frank, Denise, Saskia, Irene, and me.

The model was Violet. I remembered that violet was beautiful but not exactly how she looked. So it was a surprise when she came! It was the model with a sister being a mermaid. Even when sitting relaxed she kind of had a little smile on her face.

Violet came to sit almost exactly as she did one year earlier. She had her legs towards me, and I opted for painting her chest and up.

I painted her, and I did my best. I made one mistake in that she had her head tilted slightly but I painted her horizontally. I had to invent how she looked like if she had had her head straight. That was difficult.

Frank, Tom and I talked about my blog about my visit at Singer in Laren. They were a little teasing about that I pointed out "mistakes" on the Auguste Renoir painting. They found it a bit amusing in their opinion. So then they went to my painting to pretend that now I would be given a lecture about how to really paint. Funny.

Next week she will be in the studio again. Then I will make a new painting. Now I arrive in Almere with my train.