I am happy to have this portrait completed. I love painting portraits but they’re challenging. They do get easier though, so that’s good. Before each portrait, I go through some kind of ‘stage fright’ and I have to give myself a little pep talk that I can do this, then I start painting.
I have a book about the different periods of portraiture. My favorite period is from the 1880’s to about 1910, what the book calls the “The Belle Epoque: Portraiture at it’s Zenith”. Specifically I love the work of John Singer Sargent. Philip de Laszlo, a Hungarian portrait painter, was also very much in demand during this period. I read in my book where he painted over three thousand portraits! I thought it was a typo, I had to read that twice. Anyway, that sort of put things in perspective for me and I realized I need to paint more than five or six portraits a year. Duh.