Rediscovering Matilda

I invent nothing; I rediscover.

AUGUST RODIN

Matilda work-in-progress • oil on 12x16" deep cradled GessobordTM

Well, I didn’t quite finish, but it was a good work day anyway, I think. I spent a good bit of today’s painting time refining her face and ears. Refining, but being careful not to overwork.

Except that at one point I had to do a complete wipe of her nose down to the underpainting. I wish I had thought to take a photo at the point where I had made a complete DISASTER of her nose, but I had wiped it off before I even thought about it. Trust me. It was pretty bad.

It started with my noticing that her nostril was not quite right, and so I started in with trying to fix it, but the more I “fixed,” the worse it got until it was just a mess! So I carefully wiped her whole nose off by brushing on some Gamsol and quickly dabbing with the corner of a clean paper towel, took a deep breath, and started over. I just sat studying her nose in the photo for a full minute or two before painting, and then I went ONE stroke at a time, which is very hard, but I forced myself to evaluate each stroke before going to the next. It was almost like that Carol Marine exercise I did one time where you try to make a whole 6x6 painting using just fifteen brushstrokes, so you have to make each stroke really count. I just now counted the strokes in her nose and I think there are about twenty. This is one time when I mixed each stroke of color on the palette before brushing it on, with very little blending on the painting. Kind of like a mini-mosaic. After this I felt much better about the whole painting. Funny how one little thing can throw the entire thing out of whack!