Ruth

The last framed painting that I will be taking to Illuxcon, this is a portrait of the lovely Ruth Schechner in my "gold" style as suggested by Pat Wilshire, co-organiser of the event. Due to the use of gold paint and the limitations of my camera in terms of handling colour this is the best I can do as an image to post on the blog and Facebook. I wanted the figure to be set against an intense red background which I managed to get by roughly painting layers of transparent red oil over a dark burgundy acrylic wash, managing to get a bit of texture to it which is what I wanted - I didn't want a flat red background. 
I was originally going to drop bronze powders onto wet paint to get the metallic surface designs but opted instead to mix the powders into thinned oil paint or Liquin, a fair amount of control to produce different levels of shine was afforded by varying the amount of paint to powder. An early decision was made to have a flowing black shape running through the dress and somehow continuing onto the hair above as I wanted a link from the dress to the figure; all other shapes (I had opted to have all curves for the patterning) were added spontaneously around it as I went along. I would have liked an extra day on this but due to the fast approaching deadlines for framing and packing I have to leave it as it is, I have put an oil radiator next to it to make sure that it is dry for tomorrow so that I can get it scanned/photographed asap. Oil and bronze powders on canvas 11 3/4" x 31 1/2". There is a step-by-step progress through this painting in earlier posts on this blog.